Stressed-out students turn to gurus and boot camps for support and discipline
Technically, A.B.D. stands for “all but dissertation.”
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But for anyone who has languished in that purgatory, it might as well stand for “all but dead.”
A.B.D. is the uneasy period in between finishing your course work and finally being handed your doctoral degree. For many, it looms like an extended judgment day -- one that can last for years -- before the hoped-for ascension to Ph.D.
Writing the dissertation has always been hard. Some observers think that in recent years, the limbo has become harder yet.
That’s partly because of the academic job market in the humanities and the social sciences: Too many Ph.D.'s and too few tenure-track posts has meant that departments are far less likely to consider someone who doesn’t have the degree.
At the same time, getting the degree has gotten more complicated. With more women and more academic couples in the Ph.D. pool, family matters often distract students from dissertation matters.
Ph.D. candidates say they are more stressed out than ever. Universities and foundations are reacting by pumping in lots more money to help students finish their dissertations. And students are taking matters into their own hands. Products of their culture, they do what many anxious Americans do: turn to the self-help industry. For doctoral candidates, help has come in the form of books, personal coaches, even boot camps.
“Two things are hanging over your head when you’re A.B.D. -- the dissertation and the job market,” says one newly minted Ph.D. in the humanities. “Both are brutal institutions.”
The truth is, most who make it to the A.B.D. stage do, in fact, finish. In their 1992 book, In Pursuit of the Ph.D. (Princeton University Press), William G. Bowen, president of the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, and Neil L. Rudenstine, president of Harvard University, reported that in many doctoral programs, only half of the entering students finished. But those who made it to A.B.D. status had an 80-percent chance of finishing.
Other graduate-education researchers, like Ellen Benkin, of the University of California at Los Angeles, and Maresi Nerad, of the University of California at Berkeley, have done more recent research and separately found the same thing: Despite the “folklore,” Ms. Nerad says, graduate students who drop out usually do so before they ever hit A.B.D. status.
But researchers don’t know what proportion of doctoral students are A.B.D., how long they’ve been in that category, and how those figures would compare with the previous years’. Researchers haven’t studied A.B.D.'s as a distinct group, in part because the descriptions of who they are vary so widely.
Ask a student in the hard sciences how long he has been A.B.D., and he’s likely to ask you to define the term. Science students operate on a short tether, working in their advisers’ labs on topics closely related to those of their mentors. They collaborate on their projects, are supported financially by their advisers, and finish more quickly than do students in the humanities and social sciences.
“You don’t think of it as All But. This is the main focus,” says Mary Kate Crawford, who in December earned her Ph.D. in engineering from the University of Rochester.
But for most students in the humanities and social sciences, A.B.D. status is a predictable stretch on the road to the degree. And more academics are paying attention to the needs of those students, if for no other reason than the job market.
Although the job outlook has improved somewhat in recent years, it remains tight in many fields. For generations, A.B.D. status didn’t impede job searches, and lots of professors finished their dissertations while already employed and en route to tenure. Now, only superstars get tenure-track jobs when they’re A.B.D. Some departments won’t even look at a candidate whose dissertation is still in the works.
The University of Iowa’s political-science department hired Charles Shipan when he was A.B.D. eight years ago, but wouldn’t do the same today. Mr. Shipan, now an associate professor, led a search for a junior faculty member last year, and was told that candidates had to have the Ph.D. in hand by the time of appointment.
Even having the degree in hand, however, isn’t enough to secure a tenure-track post. The dissertation better sing, it better be in a hot field, and it better be publishable -- pronto.
“The word that all A.B.D.'s are getting is that you can go on the job market without the dissertation finished, but you’re going to be competing against someone with a book,” says Melanie S. Gustafson, an assistant professor of history at the University of Vermont. At a recent meeting of the American Historical Association, she participated in a panel discussion on surviving the A.B.D. phase. “You have to hit the ground running and wear the right clothes and be gracious and courteous and show you’re going to be a good citizen.”
That might not be so daunting if graduate students could focus only on their professional demands. But life happens when you’re A.B.D. -- students start relationships, end them, perhaps have children -- all of which takes attention away from the task at hand: writing the damn thing.
It took Barbara L. Pittman eight years to earn her Ph.D. in English from the University of Arkansas at Fayetteville. It took her husband, a biologist, just four years. Her dissertation was delayed, she says, partly because the family moved out of state when he landed a temporary post, at Sam Houston State University, and then a tenure-track job, at Valdosta State University. “As soon as we moved, I started taking adjunct jobs, and that’s what really ate into my time,” says Ms. Pittman, who earned her degree in December 1998 and is now an adjunct at Mercyhurst College.
For Alice Kessler-Harris, a history professor at Columbia University, it helped as a Ph.D. candidate in the 1960’s to be married to a man with a good job. It helped especially when Rutgers University at New Brunswick took away her fellowship when she became pregnant. It was reinstated a year later, but only after administrators saw that she was making progress on her dissertation despite motherhood.
Female doctoral candidates may no longer be losing their fellowships if they become pregnant, but with so many more women in the graduate pool, and more academic couples as well, students are more likely to have to juggle family obligations with scholarly pursuits.
In a recent online discussion among graduate students who belong to the Modern Language Association, they groused that the current system fails to consider their family responsibilities. One student spoke of her adviser’s lack of sympathy about her inability to crank out a dissertation with a newborn at hand.
Recognizing those pressures, universities have started investing in new ways to keep students from dropping out.
In September, when Gail T. Houston took a job as director of graduate studies in English at the University of New Mexico, she learned that about 40 of the program’s 63 doctoral students were A.B.D. Some of them hadn’t talked to anyone at the institution in two years. Desperate times call for desperate measures, Ms. Houston says. So in January, New Mexico held a weeklong boot camp for a half-dozen Ph.D. candidates at an Albuquerque retreat.
For $1,000 -- the institution paid half -- participants got the services of a personal coach, Sonja K. Foss, head of the communications department at the University of Colorado at Denver. Since 1997, she has held “scholars’ retreats” for graduate students and faculty members alike. Participants also got structure: Between the wake-up call, at 6 a.m., and lights-out, at 10 p.m., they spent about 10 hours a day writing. During that time, Ms. Foss made the rounds to check on their progress. The students took breaks only for required exercise, communal meals, and an evening social hour -- with a one-drink maximum.
That regimen sounds over the top to some academics. But New Mexico officials are believers. “Ironically, this boot camp offered an intensive, nurturing situation in which graduate students got a lot of writing done,” says Ms. Houston.
William J.C. Waters, a Ph.D. candidate in American and 19th-century linguistics and languages at New Mexico, helped organize the Albuquerque session after participating on his own in a boot camp that Ms. Foss had run in Denver last year. That camp, he says, jump-started his own dissertation -- he had been A.B.D. for three years. He will defend it this week.
Part of what helped Mr. Waters was the “monk-like existence” of the retreat -- no e-mail, no television. He also attributes his sudden progress to the sense of community and shared intellectual purpose that he and his comrades felt. “When I left the camp,” he says, “I felt more like a scholar than I’d ever felt before.”
In reality, of course, scholarship is often solitary. “Dissertation writing is always difficult, book writing is always difficult,” says Janice Radway, a literature professor at Duke University. “One of the hardest parts of the job is that it’s isolating, and it takes a tremendous amount of discipline. And some are not as cut out for that part of the job.”
Ms. Radway encourages her students to form dissertation groups, informal gatherings where they nudge each other along. She suspects more-extreme versions, like the boot camps, have sprung up because professors have less time for advising. “Many of us have way too many students,” she says, noting that at one point she was trying to advise 10 Ph.D. students at once. She now limits herself to five.
Until December, Ted Friedman was one of those. He defended his dissertation on the cultural history of computers after being A.B.D. for more than two years. During that time, he turned to Ms. Radway for intellectual feedback, but felt he needed still more. And, after turning 29, he felt he needed to be done with it: “I got spooked that I was still in school doing things I’d been doing since I was a little kid.”
At first, Mr. Friedman bought self-help books, lots of them. Some gathered dust, but others he consulted repeatedly, such as Howard Becker’s Writing for Social Scientists: How to Start and Finish Your Thesis, Book, or Article and David Sternberg’s How to Complete and Survive a Doctoral Dissertation. He also used Anne Lamott’s Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life, a book for general writers that has wide appeal among the dissertation crowd. One chapter in particular resonates: “Shitty First Draft.”
“With a lot of these books, I’d read a little and then I’d stop,” Mr. Friedman says. “If you read too much, you can come up with fears you’d never thought about.”
Finally, he hired a personal coach. “It’s mostly a corporate thing, one of those habits-of-highly-effective-people things,” he says. He was skeptical, but “I felt I needed more help to create a sense of structure and support.”
It was Belinda R. Dowdy to the rescue. For $150 a month, Mr. Friedman got weekly phone conferences and unlimited e-mail messages.
An electrical engineer by training, Ms. Dowdy has been a personal and professional coach -- a motivator and organizer -- for three years.
Ms. Dowdy didn’t assess Mr. Friedman’s work -- he had his adviser for that -- but did help him find circumstances that would let him work. So, for example, he started writing his draft in longhand -- writing on his computer presented “too much temptation to edit” and was blocking him. He learned he was most productive if he worked in the morning and then got away from it by going out for lunch.
In the acknowledgments section of his dissertation, Mr. Friedman thanked Ms. Dowdy and Ms. Radway, as well as his physician, his chiropractor, and his therapist. This month, he accepted a tenure-track job at Georgia State University.
Graduate students who don’t want to pay for help often go to the Internet, where they can seek the advice of peers. Ph.D. candidates blow off steam on e-mail lists, and some form long-distance support groups. Vicky Smallman is dabbling at her dissertation again after avoiding it for nearly three years. She had moved away from McMaster University, in Hamilton, Ont., and started working full time. Now, she’s looking for online support from other English A.B.D.'s in her shoes. “I’m committed to picking it up again this year,” she says. “I want to finish, but I don’t want to think about that too much.”
Doctoral candidates also get advice from a free online newsletter, The ABD Survival Guide (http://www.ecoach.com). “There are a lot of A.B.D.'s procrastinating and online,” says Ben Dean, a therapist in Bethesda, Md., who writes the newsletter, which has about 3,500 subscribers.
Mr. Dean -- who himself “managed to avoid finishing my dissertation for a long time” -- also runs free telephone workshops related to the survival guide. For the price of a long-distance call, Ph.D. candidates can participate in six- or eight-week courses on subjects like, “How to Handle Dissertation Roadblocks” and “Remembering Romance: An Oasis in the Midst of Dissertation Concerns.” The services are free to students, but Mr. Dean charges aspiring coaches, who hold the workshops to fulfill their clinical requirements.
During a workshop last month, “Create an Action Plan: How to Get Unstuck and Get Moving,” about 10 people participated. Their goal was to “look at the dissertation process as a series of stages -- from denial or avoidance to sustained action.”
One participant, an anthropology student at the University of California at Davis found it particularly difficult to get moving without a definite deadline. She’s in her sixth year, and has been urged to speed up, but seems unable to make progress. “I’m determined to finish but scared that if I don’t get unstuck, the department will determine that for me,” she says.
She thinks that her plan to move 150 miles away and live with her boyfriend, who is not an academic, will help her finish -- although lots of researchers say moving a significant distance from the campus can doom the dissertation.
Her parents are supportive -- to a point. Her father jokes that he may die before she finishes. That hasn’t helped her get unstuck.
But tough love might, says Jim L. Turner, an assistant vice chancellor at U.C.L.A. “Some societies have rigid expectations of when children should be toilet trained and weaned and when they should be contributing to the overall welfare of the group,” he says, and similarly, “some disciplines are strict with their young.” He’s talking about the hard sciences, in which Ph.D. students who don’t advance in short order may get kicked out.
Other disciplines have failed to create clear expectations, he says, and as a result, many students waste time as A.B.D.'s. “I don’t see why any graduate degree should take longer than five years,” says Mr. Turner, a psychologist who finished his Ph.D. in 1971, after only three years.
To help push them through the program and out the door, U.C.L.A. offers fellowships to humanities and social-science Ph.D.'s who are in the dissertation stage. The university started with 25 of them 10 years ago. Now it provides 140. The fellowships, which include stipend, tuition, and fees, can add up to $20,000 a year for each student. U.C.L.A. also offers research mentoring fellowships, worth $12,500 to students before they become A.B.D.
When the program began, only about 20 percent of the recipients were finishing their dissertations within a year of getting the grants. Now U.C.L.A. gives money only to those who promise to adhere to a strict timeline -- and officials keep tabs on them.
“What we have are some students who are very bright who have wandered around being consumers of knowledge, and on the way they’ve picked up bad habits -- procrastinating and binging on reading,” says Mr. Turner. “By the time they get to their dissertation -- which is presented as a magnum opus -- we have significant numbers with writer’s block.”
Face it, you’re not writing a magnum opus, says Jennifer Brier, a Ph.D. student in American and gender history at Rutgers. She has been A.B.D. for two years.
“If your dissertation is the best thing you ever write, you’re in trouble,” she says. “It’s the first thing you’re writing. It should be thoughtful and interesting and well researched. It may not be profound.”
Her adviser’s advice? Just finish.
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