Becoming Doctor Jones

Finding the Right Routine

February 5, 2010 · Leave a Comment

Joan Bolker talks about finding good routines to maximize productivity. “Write first” is one of Bolker’s most highly recommended routines.  But some people will get more done at night, and there are probably even weirdos whose energy peaks in the afternoon.

Bolker advises dissertators to continue refining the routine, letting your process evolve so that you’re doing what works, not merely what seems logical.

Recently, I started working on weekends, because I really want to graduate in May. I have resisted working weekends since the Future Mister Doctor moved to Austin, because he does not generally work then and I wanted our free time to align. However, I thought I could handle working weekends for a few months, especially if I made the weekends a little different than the weekdays.

I told myself I would work every day, but on the weekends, I could stop as soon as I didn’t feel like writing anymore, no matter how long it had been. Then I would read dissertation-related books until I was sick of that, too. By pressuring myself less on the weekends, I hoped to preserve some sense of relaxation.

It turns out that I can be insanely productive on the weekends. I should have figured it out sooner. Unlike the Future Mister Doctor, I don’t sleep in that well. Usually, I try not to wait to wake him up until he’s slept more than 12 hours (Sorry, parents. I know how much that last sentence hurt you to read.) Anyway, a lot of the time, what would happen is that I would do something productive (pay bills, catch up on personal e-mail) and then feel kind of tired because I’d popped out of bed so darn early.  I’d go back to sleep for awhile. (I’m not good at sleeping in but I excel at napping.) Turns out that weekend mornings are great dissertating times for me.

It’s possible that I should have been working weekends all along, and taking off Mondays instead, when I feel like lazing around (and have no problem sleeping in).

→ Leave a CommentCategories: Uncategorized

Job Talks

February 2, 2010 · Leave a Comment

I recently attended a mock job talk. One of the hardest things about this particular talk was that it was supposed to be given to a mixed audience of undergraduates and professors. Here’s some thoughts I have about how to give a good talk in this situation:

1) Ask your audience easy questions at the beginning. Getting even a small amount of feedback (Let’s have a show of hands on who has seen Avatar!) will calm your nerves. Plus, the audience will be engaged. I say ask easy questions because you don’t know these people–you don’t want to put them on the spot if they are shy or insecure.

2) Repeat key terms a couple of different ways. Even the main concepts are not difficult to grasp, giving a quick definition or simple example will force you to introduce your main ideas slowly and keep your audience with you.

3) Rather than trying to cram all the different issues in your dissertation into one talk, pick one thread and stick to it.  As one professor put it, the hiring committee has read your abstract. They don’t need it rehashed, and a summary of all your big thoughts will just confuse a listening audience.

4) Don’t try to sound smart. Don’t name drop scholars. And if someone asks you a question that you don’t have a good answer to, it’s okay to ask them to elaborate or say that it’s an interesting problem (and explain why) without answering the question definitively. This approach has the added bonus of making your audience feel smart (they thought of something that you, the expert, didn’t!) and also making you look humble. Everyone would rather work with the humble guy than the guy who pretends to know what he’s talking about but is obviously full of it.

If you’ve got a job talk coming up, good luck!

→ Leave a CommentCategories: Uncategorized

Interview Tips from FSP

January 27, 2010 · Leave a Comment

Female Science Professor strikes again! Her calm, practical advice for interviewing is definitely beneficial to any future doctor. There’s a whole series, but this post particularly addresses issues that are worried over often, including wardrobe and family issues.

→ Leave a CommentCategories: Uncategorized

Doing What You’re Not Good At

January 21, 2010 · Leave a Comment

My friend and mentor, Dr. Susan Somers-Willett, once told me that most academic writers are much better at close reading than theoretical framing, or vice versa. She described herself as more naturally inclined toward bigger-picture scholarly questions. I am more of a detail-oriented, pick-apart-the-text-one-syllable-at-a-time kind of woman.

Back then, I thought there might be something wrong with me because I was having such a hard time thinking about my project in terms of literary theory or contemporary scholarship. The idea that I might be better at something that Susan was–whether true or not–was pretty exciting.

I continue to struggle to fit these two types of thinking into a single piece of academic writing. Today, starting a chapter revision, I decided to completely ignore all my evidence and examples, and focus on getting the big-picture, scholarly conversation stuff in place.

It was scary but so worth it! I already have a wealth of examples to draw from previous drafts. But rather than try to build an argument around those pieces of evidence, I focused on writing all my ideas on a rather daunting topic–nothing less than the history of poetry as a genre. I came away from my work this morning knowing that my advisor will not find the same old weaknesses in this version of the chapter.

I don’t know if I could have used this technique in earlier drafts or not. Without realizing I was doing it, I started writing my dissertation by putting down a wealth of detail that had no real point. It would have been awesome to figure out my theoretical questions before writing, but I don’t know if I was capable of doing that then.

Nevertheless, wherever you are in your writing project, I encourage you to try on an alter-ego for a day. Be the person whose strengths are your greatest weaknesses. It might be easier than you expect.

→ Leave a CommentCategories: Process

Marketplace of Ideas

January 19, 2010 · Leave a Comment

Here’s a book review by Gideon Lewis-Kraus: “The Opening of the Academic Mind: How to Rescue the Professoriate from Professionalization.” It’s about the book The Marketplace of Ideas by Louis Menand, but it is interesting on its own.

Louis Menand’s The Marketplace of Ideas

→ Leave a CommentCategories: College / University News

Life Well-Lived

January 12, 2010 · 2 Comments

I just read another Litemind post, which I quoted last time in my post about expertise and problem solving. I hate to post negative comments about other people’s ideas, but this most recent Litemind post really made me mad. The post, by Mark Foo,  starts off completely wrong, suggesting that you “keep in mind the following 50 tips” to streamline your life.

Um. . . 50?

Worse, Foo’s 50 tips consist of things we all know we should do–schedule preventative doctor’s appointments, throw out old clothes, drink lots of water, organize our photos. But is a list of 50 things that we should do (and that there’s almost no way we actually doing) the way to a happier, healthier life?

Maybe the post made me mad because I have worked so hard to get myself out of this kind of mindset–I am trying to truly understand and believe that happiness does not equal checking every single item off of my to-do list.

Au contraire. The only person I know who tracks the amount of water she drinks per day is my 85 year-old grandmother. I’m not trying to imply that her life is empty–she has a very busy social and volunteering schedule. However, I sincerely doubt she kept track of glasses per day when she was in the thick of raising 11 children.

Is organizing your photos a key to an enjoyable life? Well, for some people, yes. I know people who derive a great deal of pleasure from scrapbooking. And for some, showing people photographs is a frequent part of their social activity. I enjoy a well-curated photo album myself. But for a lot of other people, unorganized photos make them feel vaguely guilty–and if they chucked the guilt, the chaotic photos would have no negative effect on their lives whatsoever. After all, would I have a picture from the 1970s of the Future Mister Doctor’s parents dressed in ridiculous outfits on my refrigerator right now if the Dilworths kept their photos organized? No, I would not. I would have looked at the photo once and forgotten about it, instead of discovering it in a messy pile on the coffee table one day and deciding to put it on display.

My uncle once gave me a Chicken Soup for the Writer’s Soul anthology, and it was mostly cr–well, it was mostly not useful for the doctor or the future doctor. However, one piece of advice in it stuck with me . . . ha! I just found it on Amazon.com . . .the quoted advice is actually from Reader’s Digest. I’m really digging into the non-academic stuff today!

Anyway, this advice was from someone named Nardi Reeder Campion’s Auntie Grace, who developed a short checklist of six things to do every day:

  1. something for someone else
  2. something for herself
  3. something she didn’t want to do but needed doing
  4. a physical exercise
  5. a mental exercise
  6. an original prayer that always included counting her blessings

Now, this advice, I still think, is quite excellent. First of all, it’s manageable . . . only six, and some of them, you could probably combine. (You could cultivate gratitude in yoga class, for example. Or you could talk on the phone while washing dishes. Maybe the thing that needs doing is the dissertation, which surely counts as mental exercise.)

Anyway, I like this advice for dissertators because it focuses on balance–it asks you to do a little bit for your happiness, mental acuity, and physical health every day. And it asks you to be social! You and your book are not the center of the universe, and that’s why something for someone else tops the list. And yet, this list doesn’t ask you to be a selfless saint.  And that thing that “needs doing” could be organizing photos–but it’s only one reprehensible task, which is then offset by that thing you do for no other purpose that your own pleasure.

Auntie Grace’s checklist is still a pretty tall order–I haven’t done half of these things yet today. But I like how unquantified it is, those activities don’t have to be monumental in scale.  If I do some sit-ups and make dinner for the Future Mister Doctor, and take one moment to be happy with what I’ve accomplished instead of worrying about making preventative doctor’s appointments, I’ll consider the day a success.

→ 2 CommentsCategories: Health · Organization · Strategy

Forget the Experts

January 8, 2010 · 1 Comment

“We should stop looking for experts and start looking for analogues. It’s a big world: chances are someone has solved your problem already. And she might be an anteater.”

So say Dan & Chip Heath in the November issue of Fast Company. The Heaths accuse Ph.D.s of becoming “domain experts” who lack perspective on the major problems of their field . Yet “problems that are difficult in one domain may be trivial to solve from the perspective of a different domain.”

Luciano Passuello at the Litemind blog recently posted about the same thing, quoting pyschologist Abraham Maslow as saying “To the man who only has a hammer, everything he encounters begins to look like a nail.”

Passuello takes a different tack to solving the problem of narrow-minded expertise; he suggests talking to “regular people” who don’t know the rules of your domain. They don’t see the boundaries of your field.

I know that I sometimes dislike talking with non-experts about my dissertation–I assume that the conversation will be boring for them. That might sound self-effacing, but actually, there’s a fair bit of snobbery in that assumption. I’m deciding in advance that the other person will not have anything of value to contribute to the conversation. In fact, when people ask me about my work, I see my answer as an (unwelcome) opportunity to deliver a mini-lecture, instead of imagining any kind of exchange.

Here’s a little experiment for all of us experts to try: genuinely explaining a challenge we are facing in our research to a non-expert. Or maybe to an anteater.

→ 1 CommentCategories: Strategy

The How and When of Advisor Communication

January 6, 2010 · 1 Comment

When you’re giving the advisor something new, give yourself some good P.R! I constantly edit out of my e-mails questions like, “do you think the organization is okay?” I want my advisor to notice problems on his or her own, I don’t want them to be looking for the bad stuff I pointed out. I mean, as a teacher, how could you not find something wrong with a student’s organization if they said, “I keep trying and trying to make the organization work, but I’m still not happy with it.” Of course you would think of ways the student could improve, even if you followed the paper’s argument easily.Try to say something positive, even if it’s just “I’m looking forward to talking with you about this draft.” Give them a good feeling going in, not a feeling of trepidation.

Now, it IS important to explain where you’re at with your draft. Be clear: “this is a first draft,” or, “this is Chapter 4, minus the concluding two sections.” Even better, tell them what you want to focus on: “I don’t want you to copy edit yet, I’m still working on the big picture.”

It seems to me that the time for expressing doubts–saying, “I think the chapter might suck in this way, but I don’t know what to do,” or, “I really wanted to say that Godzilla was the postmodern equivalent of Zeus, but I’m worried that my point is not clear”–is just after your advisor has given you comments on something. You can respond to the comments they’ve given in a “yes and” kind of way. I see what you’re saying about the thesis not being clear, and I’m wondering if I should delete section three altogether, or if it should just be connected better to the concerns of section 2. The “yes and” concept is great because by agreeing with your advisor, you tell them you value their opinion and want to take their advice. You’re relating your own concerns to theirs, and that helps them feel understood by you (always a nice feeling when trying to help someone). At the same time, your self-criticism has a context for them–you’re not just badmouthing your work before they’ve seen it. Rather, seeing your doubts and their criticism as two approaches to the same problem might help both of you to articulate the potential solutions more precisely.

→ 1 CommentCategories: Advisors · Dissertation Drafts

Bad Habits

January 4, 2010 · 1 Comment

In the months of November and December, I did more panicking about my dissertation than working. Witness the lack of insightful blog posts. Even after all this time, my bad writing habits still take over occasionally.

I will say that I did a better job working while traveling than I ever have, and I think this last bout of depression and anxiety was a) based partly on real-world worry & grieving, not just self-torturing for no reason, and b) still more short-lived than many other bouts of depression and anxiety that I have experienced over the past eight years. Also, c) I did do *some* work. In this dry spell, it at least drizzled once or twice a week.

I’m beginning the new decade in a spirit of self-forgiveness. I don’t have A+ or even A – writing habits yet, and I’m close enough to the end of this process to realize that I’m not going to attain–or, more accurately, I’m not going to maintain great habits in the time that’s left before graduating.Instead of saying, why haven’t I learned anything? Why do I still make the same mistakes? I will celebrate the fact that I can recognize my mistakes more quickly.

During the months of November and December, I knew I wasn’t writing because I was scared. And I had strategies to deal with it: I forced myself to go to the library, where there were no distractions, when visiting Chicago. I spent long periods of each work session reading over the parts of the diss that were finished–which made starting much less daunting, and continuing where I’d left off easier. When I was really paralyzed with the FEAR, I read from my reading list until I got a new idea for something to add to my dissertation, and, more importantly, remembered that I have ideas. A particular background photo on my laptop dissuaded me for opening computer games because it reminded me, in a very gut-punching way, that life is short. (That particular strategy didn’t stay powerful for very long, because that life-is-short sensation is fleeting. But I milked it while it lasted.) I worked from bed a couple of times because I was dreading my desk and somehow it seemed less taxing that working in an upright position.

I also knew, in light of the real-world worries, that I couldn’t demand of myself to be as productive and focused as I wanted to be. And I also knew, after two weeks of not exercising, that I needed to help myself get happier. And I also knew that I couldn’t just snap right back into my exercise-addict routines after such a big break, so I eased myself in with 15 minute walks every day to help my body and mind get excited about physical activity again. Along the same lines, during those first few days of being “back” in dissertation mode, I let myself work for short periods of time and then get huge rewards (watching movies in the middle of the day).

After all, if it was easy to do what we know is best, if humans could live in uncomplicated states of contentment and productivity–there wouldn’t be anything to write dissertations about in the first place.

→ 1 CommentCategories: Fear · Guilt · Health · Strategy

Research & Recommendations

November 7, 2009 · 1 Comment

My friend Louisa Edwards wrote an interesting guest post about researching as a novelist. Her post reminded me of my own, slowly-growing conviction that if you’re not interested in the book you are researching, it’s probably not relevant to your project.

Sometimes people get into a trap of trying to read everything important to their field. I have noticed, however, that no matter how important something is supposed to be, if it’s boring me while I’m trying to read it, I’m probably not going to end up using it for my project. I don’t mean boring because it’s badly written, I mean boring because the information is boring (to me).

For example, my committee strongly recommended that I read Aristotle’s Poetics, a reasonable suggestion since it is the most cited piece of poetry criticism of all time. It bored me (nearly) to tears, but I kept slogging through it because I was convinced the committee saw some amazing connection between Aristotle and my own work that I was missing.  This happened in June. Then last week, I went to a poetry discussion group about Poetics. We had an interesting conversation, but nothing anyone said made me believe that Aristotle was going to be important to my project or theirs. And, my chair was there–and when I mentioned the committee’s recommendation that I read Aristotle, he could not remember anyone telling me that, and he seemed surprised that anyone would give me that suggestion!

So I guess my second piece of advice today is not to take too much to heart any reading advice by faculty or colleagues. Chances are, they are just throwing an idea out there without having really thought through its relevance to your project. That doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t try their suggestions–you should. But if you’re bored, realize that you are bored for good reason and move on to something else.

→ 1 CommentCategories: Advisors · Strategy