DISSERTATION DIVA.COM

Rebuild Mentor Relationships

Dear Dissertation Diva:
How do I repair a relationship with a former mentor? Nothing bad really happened, I simply moved away from the university area and dropped the ball on staying in touch.
Thanks,
Rebuilding Bridges

Dear Rebuilding Bridges:

Congratulations on wanting to make a positive change by repairing a a mentor relationship. The Dissertation Diva believes that fostering professional relationships with mentors is definitely part of what you should be doing in graduate school.

The good news is that repairing a relationship with a mentor is possible, with time and strategy. Broken bridges can be repaired. Burned bridges can be rebuilt. Or, if there is really no bridge for miles, you can get creative and swim across the river!

I suggest these Action Steps:

Action Step #1: Research your mentor's current projects. What classes is she teaching this semester? (Look over the syllabi online.) Has he just published a book? (Read it.) Is she giving a paper at the next national conference. (Attend, if you can.)  Has he returned from a research trip to Asia? (Formulate questions about it.)

Action Step #2: Write to your mentor. Email may be best, or a written note may be appropriate. Let them know what you're doing. Tell them how their mentorship and work has inspired you. Say thank you for past support. Then -- and this is important -- ask to set up a phone meeting to update them on your current projects.

Action Step #3: Ask about and respect your mentor's availability for working with you from this point forward. For example, you might ask: "Would you be available to talk with me on the phone regularly while you're on sabbatical? Your guidance would be important for me that semester because I'll be on the job market."

Action Step #4: Maintain contact in the future. YOU are responsible for initiating and maintaining positive relationships with your mentors. It's not their job to hunt you down. It is part of YOUR PhD process to connect with mentors, follow their work, request meetings, send them emails, send them drafts if appropriate, ask them information about funding, etc. 

Caveat: Don't despair if your actions don't seem to be working immediately. Professional relationships are built over years. Be patient, and keep working on your dissertation. Don't let stalled mentor relationships stall YOUR progress towards your goal. 

Good luck!

Dissertation Diva

Start a Reading Group

What to do when you have 300 pages of reading per week but need community, accountability, and -- let's face it -- human interaction?

Start a reading group!

A graduate student at University of California - Berkeley and a small group of her fellow students, all in the coursework phase in a demanding interdisciplinary social sciences program, meet at a coffee shop every Wednesday morning. The rules: 1. Everyone must  be reading. 2. No talking. "If two of us have something to discuss or need a break, we go outside to talk," she tells me. "It works great."

Wake Up Call

Who needs caffeine to finish their chapter when you have..

Staying Connected to Your Dissertation During Times of Emotional Upheaval

Dear Dissertation Diva,
I have just suffered a major setback: the sudden death of my brother. I thought I'd finally have time to finish the dissertation now that I sent my daughter off to college. But I can barely think. Instead of writing up my lit review, I am dealing with my brother's disarray of unpaid bills, looking for insurance papers, and negotiating my own grief. How do I stay connected to my dissertation during this time of emotional upheaval?
Thanks,
Swamped & Sad

Dear Swamped & Sad:
My condolences. This is a challenging time. You may feel like the you who was writing your dissertation last week is a million miles away. Here are 4 strategies to stay connected to your dissertation process:

1. Take time off to grieve. It's OK to do nothing. Don't pressure yourself by saying "I should be working on my dissertation." In time, you will return to it. It's normal to take time off from other jobs for family emergencies; take time off from your academic work right now.
2. Stay connected to your dissertation though visualization. Sit at your desk and make a visual inventory of what you see: The notes for your lit review. The stacks of articles and books. Look at everything that you have already created for yourself en route to reaching your goal. Then, when you are in a stressful situation of, say, doing your brother's paperwork, take a moment to close your eyes and visualize your workspace. See the notes you wrote waiting for you on your desk. The article on research methods you printed out. Know that the work you've done is waiting for you to return. Connect to that part of you that's not taking care of someone else, but is being true to your OWN intellectual goals.
3. Transition back to working on your dissertation by spending time in your workspace. It may feel like all you can do is go and sit in your office. Good. Do that. It's a start. Keep remembering your big picture goals.
4. Use the dissertation work as a refuge from grief. Some see the dissertation as a source of stress, but when a family loss happens, you can use the dissertation writing process in quite the opposite way: as a sanctuary. An island in the stream. Try working for short bits at a time -- like 30 minutes. Read a paragraph of an article, and let your mind rest from the other kinds of tasks and from emotional upheaval. You may find that your brain is actually HAPPY to think about your dissertation topic, and not about the stressful tasks around a death in the family. Your dissertation process will gain new life and new meaning for you in the larger context of your life. 

Take care!
Dissertation Diva

Strategies for Identifying and Filling Research Gaps

Dear Dissertation Diva,
I have conducted preliminary research for one of my chapters and have started to write in order to digest this material. I'm finding as I write that I still have gaps that need to be filled in by additional research.  How should I appropriately annotate my draft to reflect this?
Thanks for your advice.
Sincerely,
Mind the Gap

Dear Mind the Gap:
The first chapter you write is the most difficult, for you are in the process of figuring out HOW to write a dissertation chapter. You are moving from months of research to your first draft of writing. Your question about how to annotate "gaps" in your research as you write is pertinent at this stage. Here are my suggestions...

Strategies for Identifying and Filling Research Gaps

1. Identify the gap – mark with brackets or parentheses and CAPS
2. Keep writing
3. After the draft is finished or at a separate time, go through and find all of the gaps
4. Pick one
5. Evaluate and take action. If filling that gap is essential, proceed to free writing or library research, or add to list of items to find at archive. If it isn’t, delete it or put in a footnote e.g. "more research needs to be done on this topic and would make good fodder for future study."
6. Repeat with next gap.

Thus, you annotate your rough draft with what I term "placeholders" -- notes to yourself to mark the place where additional research is needed. You simply type yourself a note, changing the format to make it stand out from your text, for example, by using all caps and bolding.

Examples:

Your sentence in a rough draft of a chapter might look like this:

"Charpentier's political ambitions to were thwarted, once in 1327 (CHECK DATE - SEE CHARPENTIER FILE AT THE BN) and again with the assasination attempt in 1329, only to be fulfilled with his appointment as _________ (LOOK IN JS ARTICLE - FOLLOW UP FOOTNOTE 23), adding to what I argue is the tumulous intrigue which led to..."

Here's another example:

"I suspect that X's involvement in the Resistance during WWII was a key factor contributing to the nationalist tendencies in her post-war poetry. (I NEED TO DO MORE RESEARCH ON X'S RESISTANCE ACTIVITIES - WHERE TO FIND MATERIAL?)"

In the above two examples, the text in caps is what you write to yourself to mark the places where more research is needed. Using placeholders will allow to you identify the gaps, yet still continue writing.

I totally understand how the temptation is there to rush off to look up footnote 23, right then and there, leading perhaps to distraction or frustration. Better to keep ideas flowing in this generative stage of writing. You want to get your thoughts down on paper without stopping at this stage.

At a later work session, when you are done with the generative kind of writing for your draft, you put on your gap-filling research's hat and go and fill those gaps! 

Thanks for your question.
Dissertation Diva

"There is no perfect time to write. There is only now."

This past week, the Dissertation Diva helped two people to the finish line. (Congratulations to them!) October 1 -- this year, Monday October 2 -- marks an official deadline at some graduate schools for submission of the dissertation for a December PhD degree. Experiencing the final week of the process always strengthens my belief that regular, consistent, focused writing over a long period of time is what leads to a finished book-length project. Procrastination never pays. Eventually, the sand falls through the hourglass and the real due date is upon you.  Dissertation writers who have written regularly, consistently, who fought procrastination tooth and claw on a daily basis, get to that last week with only minor edits to do. Proofreading. Pagination. Formatting. But no writing that needs to be done the week before the entire dissertation is due.

I wanted to impress upon those of you in the writing stage the importance of consistent, regular writing sessions (versus the 11th hour kind of writing). I know that writers come up with all sorts of excuses why NOW is not the best time to write.  Perhaps you think you need to have more research done. Or you want more direction from your advisor. Or you're not inspired. The chair isn't comfortable. The weather is too gloomy. Too sunny. It's too loud. Too quiet. Too much data. Too little. Boring. Stalled. Tired. Overwhelmed. Overdue. All those reasons for not writing something today, right now, may be true. These reasons pull on you and convince you to wait for some future moment, when the weather is ideal, your ideas magically align in your brain into preformed complete paragraphs, and your advisor provides you with perfect, timely feedback. You are living in the future imaginary, instead of the real, difficult present.

To return you to the present, I want to share this quote by author Barbara Kingsolver:

"There is no perfect time to write. There is only now."   

Succint inspiration. There is only now. As in today, right after you finish reading this post for inspiration.  Write what you know about your topic, and what you don't know. Write about what you've read, and what you want to read. Write about how hard it is to write. Write your thoughts, questions, doubts, fears, and inklings about your topic. Seize the present. Write. Daily. Write. Now.

Make Back-ups, Not Excuses

"Too busy."
"Forgot."
"Need to figure out how my external drive works."
"I've never had problems with my computer before."
"I have back up CDs...from last month."
"I know I should."

Do these excuses for not backing up your hard-won research and writing files ring a bell?

Some of you have confessed that although you know you should, you don't actually, regularly, and faithfully back up your work!

If this describes you, you need to face the music. Figure out what's stopping you. Tackle this issue directly. Is it a technical glitch? Lack of knowledge? Lack of time? Overwork? Fatigue? A coctail of  stress/fear/anxiety/overwhelm? Are there any underlying issues -- however surreptitious -- that may be causing you to self-sabotage at a critical moment in the completion process?

Maybe you simply don't have a plan of action. Right now, take action. 1. Commit to backing up your work weekly. 2. Mark a specific day and time -- set an alarm if you need to -- and intentionally do a back-up of your computer files to two off-site locations (for example: a server and an external drive/CD's/DVD that you store in a separate building from your computer).

I recommend a full back-up every Friday. Say TGIF and kick back while your computer burns your book draft or dissertation journal to CD, then stash the CD somewhere safe. Get those once-in-a-lifetime media files of that ethnographic ritual onto a portable external drive -- and store it off-site, of course. (Worse Case Scenario Logic: If a thieft takes your computer, s/he will probably take the expensive external drive sitting next to your computer, too, right?)

An easy additional step that can be done daily: Email your dissertation chapters to your own email account. Instant back-up! 

You can also set up free email accounts specifically for storage (e.g. [email protected]).

Now, go back up your files. Your work is worth the effort.

Risk-Averse-ly yours,
Dissertation Diva

Chip Away at Writer's Block

Dear Dissertation Diva,
I have a peachy fellowship this year. No teaching. All I have to do is finish my dissertation. As you can probably guess since I am writing to you, I do everything except my dissertation. I think I have writer's block. It's not that I can't think of anything to say; it's just that I don't actually write it down... anyway, by the time I stroll into my home office after a leisurely morning procrastinating, it's almost noon and I feel like a slug, not to mention guilty. Soon email and internet surfing take their ugly toll. What's your advice for those us with too much time on our hands and an embarrassing case of writer's block?
Signed, Chip O'Dablock

Dear Chip:

My #1 advice? Set up a writing schedule.

Use a paper or electronic calendar to block out the times you will reserve specifically for this writing project. Treat each writing timeslot as an appointment with yourself.

Enforce strict start and stop times. That means you start on time.. and stop writing when the timer goes off. Use a timer to break down your allocated two hours. Say you choose to write for two hours a day. (And for your case, this small amount of time would be an excellent start.) Divide the two hours into three 40-minute writing sessions. Set a timer for 40 minutes, and make yourself write something, anything, for 40 minutes.

In this way, short intense bursts of writing be more effective than long unproductive days. You write more in less time because you have allocated less time to work and thus must prioritize tasks and distill information. Think standardized test essay – you have 40 minutes: write!

If you are stuck in a lava flow of writer's block, the problem could be trying to write at the wrong time for you -- in the afternoon, for instance, when the body's biorhythms make energy wane. Try an hour first thing in the morning. Yes, Chip, it means getting up early and getting yourself to your conveniently-located office before you think of alll the other things you could be doing. The operative strategy here is shorter writing times coupled with commitment to a regular writing schedule.

Over days and weeks, you will achieve momentum and a healthy addiction to the writing process.

Now stop procrastinating and go set your timer for 40 minutes!

Unblockingly yours,
Dissertation Diva

De-Stress Your Dissertation with Exercise

Tempted to skip that yoga class or morning run because of an upcoming deadline?

Don't.

Think you lack time for an inspiring, relaxing fall hike in the woods because you have to write your dissertation -- the whole thing, today -- which is making you stressed out in the first place?

Think again!

Stress reduction strategies should be a priority during times of intense mental work. And a proven method of natural stress reduction is exercise. Call it physical activity, call it movement, but just do it. Make it something you enjoy, like salsa dancing. Chills you out, like tai chi. Challenges you, like mountain biking. Or lets you read the NY Times or watch CNN, like the treadmill at the university gym. Whatever it is, plug it into your iCal or schedule, and go.

If you don’t exercise, what better time to start than six months before that 300 page beast is due? I started training in karate in the last semester of writing my dissertation at Yale, and it changed my life. Not to mention: helped me maintain laser sharp focus on my writing.  So, if you need motivation to exercise: sign up for a spin, yoga or tai chi class. Train for a 5K. Join a recreational sport team. At least get up from the computer and walk around the block.

Mind/body practices with an element of meditation are particularly helpful to writers. Exercise boosts oxygen flow to the brain, reduces stress, and increases alertness.

If you're not buying my line that exercise is good for your mind and body, then let me trying convincing you from a time management perspective: It is far more efficient to schedule exercise into your busy week than to lose entire days or weeks of work to stress or illness.

Exercise regularly when working on your dissertation, book, or article. It will help you write better, finish faster, and stay sane!

Try This: During your work sessions, take breaks to rest your eyes and stretch your hands, arms, shoulders, neck and back. If you can, take a brisk 15 minute walk outside, using your eyes to focus on items in the distance to counteract the stress of focusing on the computer screen or text on a page.

Healthfully yours,
Dissertation Diva

How to Focus and Actually Write

Dear Dissertation Diva,
I am supposed to be writing, but every time I try to set aside time, I get antsy. Instead of writing, I check my email 1,000 times or get up to make tea, or play with the cats. You get the idea. My friends tell me to just sit there and "write." But if I do that, it gets pretty unbearable, and no words emerge. Bottom line, how can I get focused enough to actually write something?!

Sincerely,
Hyper Girl with a touch of ADD

Hyper Girl:

The dictum that the way to write your dissertation is to "spread crazy glue on your chair and sit down until you have 300 pages" does not work for energetic, ADD-addled smart people like yourself. Your body wants to move. You want contact with your friends. You may have mixed feelings about finishing or not know what to write next. While I cannot diagnose or treat ADD or other disorders (my lawyer makes me say that), as a dissertation coach, I can identify challenges and craft personalized strategies to help your particular situation.

I see three problems going on:

1. working from home, as indicated by getting up to make tea and play with the cats;
2. unchecked Internet access; and
3. the antsy, energetic quality that makes sitting still unbearable.

May I offer you three interrelated solutions?

First of all, dissertate outside the home. Anywhere with less domestic distractions. Coffeeshop, university library, public library, rented office, or shared office space at your department.

Second, pull the plug on your internet. Disable your wireless connection, unplug your modem, and/or work from a place with no internet access whatsoever.

Third, exercise and socialize before and after dissertation work sessions.

Integrating these three strategies into your day might look something like this:

In the morning, bring your laptop and notes, ride your bike to your favorite gym/karate/yoga/swim class, and work out hard. Eat a healthy snack, then ride your bike to your chosen dissertation work place, which allows you NO INTERNET. If you're in city with free wireless connections bouncing off all the buildings, then literally disable your connection. (On Macs: "Turn Airport OFF.") Another idea is to work from a cafe that requires you to pay for wireless internet access (i.e. Starbucks, Caribou, or your favorite local coffee shop). Plant yourself there for 2 hours -- a short duration with a clear stop time. So now you are too tired to want to run around, glad to be sitting after all that biking and exercising, nowhere near your cats, and you can't even check your email! Darn! What are you going to do now?

Write!

(If you are still wondering "how do I start?" I will be talking more about writing strategies later on in the blog. )

Finally, you seem like a social person, Hyper Girl. Friends are important to you, as they should be. End your day with plans with friends! Invite them over, cook dinner together, play with your cats, and make endless cups of herbal tea. Fun with friends will give you human interaction, something to look forward to while you are in the coffee shop or library drafting dissertation notes. You can promise yourself that you can talk about everything else besides how your dissertation is going. Because deep inside, you'll know it's going FINE.

Attentively Yours,
Dissertation Diva