Category Archives: Strategy

Secret Goals

Posted on October 18, 2007 | 1 comment

Unrealistic expectations are public enemy #1 for dissertators. What brilliant mind can withstand 6-10 years of daily failure?

In my experience, setting realistic goals cannot happen in a vacuum. The advice of a dissertation support group, adviser, or friend can help the deflated graduate student pat her herself on the back and take a well-deserved bubble bath.

Receiving precious help does no good, however, if you develop secret goals. Last week, I told my Dissertation Support Group member The Future Doctor Gale that I wanted to read one book and write a draft of a grant application, in addition to preparing for a translation exam. She said that I had ambitious goals, and warned me that they might be too much for a single week. I ignored her advice and made extra, secret goals. I planned to type up a towering pile of notes, organize my desk, and clean out my in-box.

Not too surprisingly, I didn’t accomplish my secret goals or my stated goals. Plus, I felt panicked and miserable. I’m all for dreams and imagination and positive thinking. But indulging in secret fantasies about turning out a perfect chapter in one draft that wins a major award and results in universities offering you jobs before you even apply is going to turn you into the sad, miserable failure that you never had to be.

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Posted in Guilt, Strategy

The Joy of the Irrelevant

Posted on October 11, 2007 | Leave a comment

One of the best things I did this week was stop reading a book that had been on my to-do list for years.

Normally I have a hard time reading a book any way except from start to finish, but this book was just not interesting. I had trouble concentrating on it, and I kept rolling my eyes at the jargon the author was using. It finally dawned on me that it wasn’t interesting to me because it was irrelevant to my project.

My friend The Future Doctor Gale asked me this afternoon as we left a meeting, “Should I go to the talk by the very famous man in my department that everyone else will be going to?” Her gut was telling her that she wouldn’t get much from the talk, but the imagined presence of so many of her colleagues, and the prestige of the speaker, made her doubt herself.

So often in our careers, which run on self-discipline, we get caught up in shoulds and oughts and plans made so long ago they are no longer useful. Today, shove a “should” off your to-do list. Not just for now—this is something that you are never going to do. It feels awesome.

Keys to Victory

Posted on September 7, 2007 | Leave a comment

In honor of football season, which fills the Future Doctor Jones family with glee, I present, in tribute to the corny wordplay of sportscasters everywhere, one of my personal keys to diploma-tic victory:

*The Monthly Plan*

Like a good offense, this plan must be built for flexibility. While it would be wildly unrealistic to expect the plan to go perfectly in actual game-time, it should still get you further down the field.

I was feeling a little hopeless earlier today at the thought of doing a lot of secondary research for my dissertation—reading that will be useful in an important, but indirect way. Last time this kind of reading was on my agenda, I didn’t work on my dissertation for nearly four months.

This time, I have a plan:
Step 1: find precisely twelve books / articles that are most crucial
Step 2: read those books and write brief responses
Step 3: finish reading those books and / or begin revising Chapter 1 in four weeks

The plan has to be specific—the vague “doing more reading” fails to achieve even a backyard touchdown. The plan has to be ambitious. Winners expect greatness. (Winners read three books a week.) And there has to be a second option. Even if I completely mess up the reading part, I will still lengthen my dissertation in four weeks. The line-men of insecurity seem to grow smaller before my very eyes. I’m thinking like a champion. I’m moving down the field.

The Importance of Naming

Posted on August 17, 2007 | Leave a comment

I used to make a draft, have someone edit it, re-write it, and call it done—a word I don’t believe I’ve heard in the three years since I got my master’s degree.

The forty-five pages I just wrote don’t contain a thesis. Their structure is skeletal. I quote huge blocks of text every other page with a vague sense of urgency that’s never fully explained. If one of my students turned in a four-page version of what I’ve written, I would give them a “No grade. We need to talk.”

My hero of dissertation writing, Joan Bolker, author of Writing Your Dissertation in 15 Minutes a Day, says to call what I just wrote a “zero draft.” That two months of work equals zero makes me want to smash a calculator. My friend The Future Doctor Anderson calls it “seeds.” That name is downright scary to me—is this monster just a tiny piece of potential about to grow exponentially into a Godzilla-size disaster?

My mother says that before you decide what to name your baby, you’re supposed to yell its potential name out the back door. If you’ve found a good name, it won’t sound stupid. When writing to my advisers, I called these pages my “description of research” draft. It fails my mother’s test—but the awkwardness of the title befits the inelegant thing I produced.

I wish I could’ve written something that seemed to me like a “first draft,” which was my goal for the summer. Still, when I consider my pages in light of their new name, they look a lot less like failure. They are chock-full of descriptions that couldn’t have been written without copious research. It’s true that I can’t imagine the number of pages between me and that beautiful mythical done. But “Description of Research” is still a long way from not-yet-begun.