I’ve come to the conclusion that I need to write down some of the issues I’m butting my head up against, as I write my dissertation. I’m not going to use names because hurting people isn’t my goal. I just want to vent a bit — and, should any present or future students in my program read this, perhaps give them a bit of advance warning of possible issues… so they’re forewarned.<\/p>\n
~ * ~ * ~ * ~ * ~<\/p>\n
One of the first and biggest issues for me was the subject of the dissertation itself. I greatly enjoyed the research which went into my master’s thesis, and as I took classes for my PhD I’d been happily looking forward to doing more work on my thesis subject. Unfortunately, near the end of my second-to-last learning class (as opposed to classes specifically about dissertation stuff) I found out that the dissertation’s subject matter had to be at least\u2026 I think it was 80 or 85% ? -different from the subject of my thesis.<\/p>\n
This was a nasty shock, since what it pretty much meant was that I couldn’t continue working on my thesis subject. More disturbingly, I’d been angling my research and classes specifically towards that subject for the past two years! I asked, in some surprise, why that information wasn’t given right up front to every doctoral student beginning the program — and received an airy reply along the lines of: “Oh, it was! Weren’t you paying attention? You must’ve just missed it.”<\/p>\n
Um\u2026 no. I tend to be real<\/em> careful about persnickety scholastic shit like that. But I kept my temper and said no more — after all, perhaps I had<\/em> somehow missed this critically important information\u2026 somehow? So instead I checked with two sister scholars in the program who were friends of mine, and who were at different points in their scholastic endeavors than I: had they heard that their dissertation’s subject matter had to be at least 80ish % different from the subject of their thesis?<\/p>\n They both emailed me back almost immediately, and were both quite shocked. Was that true?! Surely not! I assured them it was indeed true as I’d heard it from one of the program’s core faculty members. I was bleakly amused that they both thanked me for letting them know, so they wouldn’t get caught in the same intellectual snare I had — of having no<\/em> idea what my dissertation would be about when I was but one semester away from having to start the work that led up to it.<\/p>\n Curiously enough I also mentioned this to another core faculty member, to see her reaction — was she aware students weren’t being given this critically important information? She too thought that surely I was wrong\u2026 and she was surprised when I told her about my two (carefully unnamed) friends.<\/p>\n So hopefully my dismay has made things a bit better for future students — be sure to ask about this if you’re a doctoral student anywhere! \u2026but it was still a real bite in the ass to discover so late — and then be told that somehow it was my<\/em> fault for not magically knowing.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" I’ve come to the conclusion that I need to write down some of the issues I’m butting my head up against, as I write my…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":12,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[43,32,5,1,16],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-5271","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-dissertation-blues","category-education","category-ethics-questions","category-uncategorized","category-writing"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.stormtiger.com\/collie\/bestiary\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5271","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.stormtiger.com\/collie\/bestiary\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.stormtiger.com\/collie\/bestiary\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.stormtiger.com\/collie\/bestiary\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/12"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.stormtiger.com\/collie\/bestiary\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=5271"}],"version-history":[{"count":9,"href":"https:\/\/www.stormtiger.com\/collie\/bestiary\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5271\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5280,"href":"https:\/\/www.stormtiger.com\/collie\/bestiary\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5271\/revisions\/5280"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.stormtiger.com\/collie\/bestiary\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5271"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.stormtiger.com\/collie\/bestiary\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5271"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.stormtiger.com\/collie\/bestiary\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5271"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}