Agood dissertation is a done dissertation
Academicssay a perfect dissertation is the one still in your drawer ten years on, as you plot how to make it . Mmschube @academicssay i published lit review too, but i am the only one i know who has done it. Try again or visit twitter status for more “a good dissertation, is a done dissertation” - and nothing else matters? February 2017, kathleen woodward, director of the simpson center for the humanities at the university of washington and professor in the department of english, offered the seminar “transforming doctoral education in good enough times – a microseminar with sidonie smith. Graduate students from the departments of english, french and italian studies, spanish and portuguese studies, and germanics discussed various readings, including the report of the mla task force on doctoral study in modern language and literature (2014), sidonie smith’s manifesto for the humanities: transforming doctoral education in good enough times (2015), kathleen woodward’s “the future of the humanities – in the present and in public” (2009) and bethany nowviskie’s “graduate training for a digital and public humanities” (2016). Because there is an assumption that everyone knows what a dissertation is: it’s a 200+ page word document that has four to five chapters with an introduction and perhaps a coda – isn’t it? Well, whatever a dissertation is, what i have heard most often from various sides is: “it’s what will get you the job.
But the rhetoric around graduate education and which parts of it are relevant seems to eliminate everything but the dissertation. Yet, despite its importance, the dissertation is built on questions that are never asked – in other words, on a culture of assumptions. Of course, as the report of the mla task force shows, there is a need to reimagine the dissertation. The task force lists various alternative models of the dissertation that are not chosen arbitrarily, but rather are a response to the changing modes of scholarly communication: “examples of an expanded repertoire are a suite of essays on a common theme; web-based projects that give evidence of extensive research; translations, with accompanying theoretical and critical reflection; public humanities projects that include collaboration with people in other cultural institutions and contain an explicit dimension of research; and the treatment of texts in terms of their pedagogical value in classrooms” (mla task force 14). If the dissertation model is updated according to these changes, i argue that also the requirements that lead up to the dissertation need to be re-evaluated: the number of credits for course work (for instance, reducing them by half) and the foreign language requirement that often seems to be just a list item that needs to be ticked off and does not relate to the student’s research and teaching. Graduate students would be required to take these seminars before their phd exams, which would give them a chance to include what they have learned in their dissertation prospectus. Maybe the dissertation will have a dh/public humanities component, but, more importantly, the student can make a more informed choice about what form her dissertation will take on.
Plus, through a series of interdisciplinary speakers from other departments, from the library and possibly form off-campus, the student would have a chance to find mentors for her dissertation project outside her brings me to my second proposition: while it is certainly great to rethink the dissertation, to offer different dissertation models and have them listed on a department’s webpage, it will not resolve the issue of a culture of assumptions that prevails in many departments. The assumption is that a monograph dissertation needs only a modest amount of revision to become a book. The assumption is that the monograph dissertation is the only predictor of future success as a humanities scholar. This quote by sidonie smith stood out to me when i was reading her book manifesto for the humanities: transforming doctoral education in good enough times. Even if each model of the dissertation is described in depth and includes a few examples, it remains necessary for each graduate student (and also for each graduate student advisor and faculty member) to still ask: “what is a dissertation, what is it for me? It would not be necessary anymore to play a guessing game with each chapter draft or relying on hearsay about what makes a good dissertation. While this is true, i would also like to also hear: “a good dissertation is built on communication, not assumptions.
Comments log in or register to post sity of umanities, arts & mediasub topicsliterature & languagedigital humanitiestagsgraduate rship in public: dialogues with kathleen woodward by rachel arteaga and ivette bayo ght series #2: mobile ing the genre of the l humanities dissertation defense talk. Blog from gradhacker and matrix: the center for humane arts, letters and social sciences it comes to dissertations, done is the old adage is still an abd student bent on finishing up this summer my personal mantra has become. Done is important to recognize as you near ing graduate school and the time that you take to do so is very much a risk vs. Don’t prolong graduate school by falling prey to the delusions surrounding the “best dissertation”. Myths that have you pursuing a perfect dissertation at your own peril:1: if i write a beautiful dissertation i’m guaranteed a good job. Don’t be naïve in assuming that the academic labor system will reward you financially or professionally for a beautiful dissertation. Do good work on your dissertation, but remember that in completing your dissertation you should be consistently publishing, presenting, and applying for funding for your work.
Remember to keep things in perspective here though: how many other dissertations have revolutionized their fields? The dissertation is simply a formal mark showing that you can do research and contribute to the field. So get over being a perfectionist, publish your research in to advance your field, slap that work into your dissertation, and move on. If you really want to revolutionize your field, you need to be working in it, not just completing a dissertation on the subject. Your committee should be pushing you to do good work (it’s why you have one after all), but once you’ve met your graduation requirements it’s time to dive in and finish your dissertation. Dissertations don’t count if they are not done and your committee wants you to finish on time much, much more than they want a “perfect” ’t get lost in the labor- and time-intensive process of preparing this “perfect dissertation” at the expense of getting on with your future career. This uncertainty about our futures makes it all too tempting to spend just a little more time, more effort on our dissertations to prolong having to enter the job ging the process won’t help; leaving academia is going to be a decision that most of us have to make at some point in our careers as tenure-track positions dwindle and research funding continues to remain scarce.
Careers where nobody will ever read your dissertation, or even care that much about your research topic. Know what the standards are and hit them, but don’t waste time going above past the idea of a perfect dissertation because it will never exist. Finish your dissertation and start building your life post-phd, whatever that may mean for you. Am the proud owner of a nearly finished first draft of a terrible, horrible, no good, very bad dissertation. I also have bits and pieces of my dissertation that i've been adding to in fits of insomnia and post-jogging moments of insight. And i've also taken a week off here and there, when i've done a bit of thinking, but no writing at learn pretty quickly that people go through graduate school at different rates, and for different reasons. I take tasks like grant writing and conference-going, and force them to be part of my dissertation, whether they like it or not.
Perhaps because i was a swimmer in college, and accustomed to thinking with my head underwater, i experience a lot of my big dissertation epiphanies when i'm in the shower or walking in the rain. When you keep your ideas in many places and then sit down and put them all into one document, you'll be surprised by how much you've said 't think of the dissertation as a whole. I found that the best way to get around the idea of the dissertation was to deliberately write it out of order. When i'm writing i keep a separate document open that i call "drafting board," and i'll periodically take a paragraph out of my dissertation and isolate it on my drafting board. Have drafting boards for each of my chapters and think of the boards as graveyards for abandoned paragraphs. I couldn't start my dissertation by writing the introduction—even the first page of it—because i would have never begun. Sometimes i spend too much time on a footnote, paragraph, page, or section that doesn't make it into the dissertation in the end.
Send your dissertation draft to your adviser, and send each chapter to one or two additional committee members who know a lot about the chapter 't wait to hear back from them; just start on the next chapter. Having multiple people respond to a piece can be helpful in really figuring out which ideas stick and which ones need to be downfall of any how-to advice on writing is that it won't necessarily help you write a brilliant dissertation. In fact, i suspect that following my own advice has helped me to write a very ugly dissertation. It's a whole first it's much easier to edit a terrible dissertation than it is to edit a nonexistent perfect herrmann is a ph.
