I am not a fast runner. But I can—if forced, and it’s not raining, and there’s promise of a hot dog and a beer at the end—run great lengths. That may be why, in our era of immediacy and disposability, I chose one of the few career paths that tends to reward distance runners as much as it does sprinters.
That academe is a kind of marathon should be clear to anyone who has completed, or is now trying to complete, a dissertation. There is simply no way to do the thing quickly. A huge body of knowledge must first be absorbed. Then there are the years of research, to be distilled into clear yet complex (and ideally groundbreaking) arguments. Long stretches of thinking without writing, occasional wanders down blind alleys, exhausting amounts of revising—these are not aberrations but fundamental parts of the process. Travel and language training add time and expense.
Dissertation work also can, and should, be great fun. Given that we undertake it largely (though hopefully not exclusively) to gain entry into an increasingly tenuous job market, the sense of being actively engaged in this long-term task can also offer a potentially dangerous kind of comfort. Unsurprising, then, that we hear of dissertations taking the better part of a decade to complete.
Humanities departments have settled on five to seven years as the ideal time to completion. (I’ve never met anyone who actually did it in five, but they must be out there somewhere.) I finished in six—with working relationships, marriage, health, finances, and sanity all still in good shape at the end. I offer the following tips, gleaned from my own experience, from that of my peers, and from the advice and examples set by my mentors. While there are many practical guides concerning the nuts and bolts of writing and editing a dissertation, this is instead offered as a primer on how to actually finish one.
Tip No. 1: Hit the ground running. Most graduate programs will state in their handbooks that writing the dissertation begins in the third or even fourth year, after coursework and qualifying exams have been completed. Untrue: It starts on your first day.
You were admitted into your program because someone saw value not only in you, but in the research you proposed. This does not mean you must deliver exactly what you outlined in your application. But you should keep those original research questions in mind from Day 1, and let everything you do in your first few years inform your thinking about those questions, as much as possible. You might find your original questions usurped by others that are far more gripping. The next few tips are variations on that theme.
Tip No. 2: Make coursework work for you. All of your coursework readings—no matter how distant the subjects might seem from your own—hold value for your dissertation. Much of graduate work involves reading monographs that began life as dissertations. While reading for content, consider the mechanics of the research and writing. Study the acknowledgments and the list of archives, and try to deduce the kinds of training, networking, and explorations that went into the production of this knowledge. Every monograph you read potentially offers some kind of model for your own work. To that end, “bad” books can as useful as the good ones. (One professor told me that she intentionally assigned one “bad” monograph per seminar, and that this often led to the most insightful session of the semester.)
Tip No. 3: Explore the archives (any archive) as soon as possible. If at all financially possible, try to start conducting some kind of research as early as your first summer. Not everyone will agree with the logic of doing archival work before a rigorous dissertation proposal has been vetted and accepted, as that could mean a waste of time, should your project change drastically as you progress. Some might also suggest that you lack sufficient grounding to fully engage with the archives so early in your career. I would counter that you learn by doing, and that even if you end up not using a single shred of your early research, the experience itself—locating archives, meeting with archivists, turning sources into notes and then prose—will all be in some way useful later on. If it yields nothing tangible in the short term, the knowledge produced from this research might, years from now, directly or indirectly shape an article or second project.
Tip No. 4: Don’t think of teaching as something keeping you from your “real” work. All of your teaching duties hold the potential to influence your dissertation in a positive way. Any time you have a roomful of students engaging with some kind of source material, there will be questions and insights that could have some bearing on your dissertation. That extends to grading as well. I recall at one point writing some variation of “if this is your thesis, then why does it take us two pages to get there?” on a student’s paper, then returning to my own swollen chapter and realizing the same critique should be applied.
Tip No. 5: Get thee to a conference. Again, many people will probably disagree with this advice, but there is great benefit in presenting work at conferences as early and as often as possible. Aside from bringing you into contact with peers and exposing you to the latest research in your field, committing to a conference forces you to come up with an argument and coherent piece of writing by a set deadline. You don’t want to embarrass yourself or waste the time of your peers with a half-baked paper. On the other hand, all conference presentations are works in progress, and the rewards of having your work critiqued by colleagues in your field during this crucial gestation period are great. Be on the lookout, especially in early years, for graduate-students-only conferences.
Tip No. 6: Be open to change. As proposed in my graduate application, my dissertation was going to be a history of 20th-century Paris traced entirely through its graffiti. In our first meeting, my adviser asked a simple question: Where was I planning to locate all this historical graffiti? I responded vaguely: photographs, diary entries, maybe novels? Six years later, I defended a dissertation that would seem to have little to do with Paris or graffiti, but is in many ways a logical continuation of the thinking drove that original idea. The point is: A lot can happen in six years; let it unfold as it will.
Tip No. 7: Draw on your adviser. That may sound obvious. But I know of graduate students who didn’t want to “bother” their advisers by seeking guidance on issues crucial to a project. Your adviser has a very full plate, and many stresses, but he or she has willingly taken on this role and genuinely wants to do it well. (If you get the opposite sense, it’s time to switch advisers). Advisers have completed dissertations, and turned them into books. They have mastered archives. Let them share their knowledge with you. It is natural to feel as though you are a bother. Indeed, whenever you meet, you are almost always asking them for something. But that is the nature of the arrangement. If you truly feel you have become a nuisance, you may want to think about whether you are making the most of your adviser’s time or asking questions you could figure out on your own.
Tip No. 8. Leave your adviser alone. This is not a repudiation of the previous advice but its ultimate realization. At some point you have to stand on your own. Your goal is not to become a carbon copy of your mentor. (From a practical view: Ask yourself why the market would choose the junior version of someone who does “A” when they could instead hire someone developing a whole new “B”.) Try writing for long stretches without thinking about how it will be judged by your adviser and your committee, or about how they might choose to approach the material. You will find your own voice, and your own academic identity. Recall that the main goal of producing your dissertation is not to please your mentor but to make you a scholar.
Tip No. 9: Set a firm end date for yourself. Then set one for your committee. Picture the exact day on which you would, in an ideal world, finish your dissertation. The date may coincide neatly with when your funding ends. Commit to this date and plan your schedule accordingly. Do not let anyone else convince you that some other time frame would be better. Then, in your final year of writing, set a firm date with your committee. The further in advance you set this the better, even if meeting that deadline seems impossible when you set it. If you hold firm, you will find a way to make your work adapt to that scheduling, and will probably recognize afterward that another six months would not, in fact, have made your project much stronger. The sooner your committee members have a firm date for your defense in mind, the more motivated they will be to read and comment on your chapters in a timely fashion.
Tip No. 10: When you’re stuck, take a walk or write your acknowledgments. As Socrates knew (and recent studies, as described in a great article in The New Yorker, have confirmed), there are few things more refreshing for the mind than a walk. You may return with fully formed sentences in your head.
A colleague offered another great piece of advice for getting over a block (though unfortunately it is a move that can only be deployed once): Write out your acknowledgments. First, you will feel good about taking care of one more task toward completion. Second, in making your list of people to thank, you might recall some forgotten thread of thought inspired by a conversation with a peer, archivist, or mentor. Most important, you will be reminded of all the help you have received along the way and of all the people pulling for you to succeed.
Tip No. 11: Make a friend. A dissertation reading group is a wonderful thing: a way to set deadlines and to get and give valuable critiques. But in the end, all you need is one friend with whom to go through this potentially very lonely process. If you find someone who can listen to you talk about the grammatical construction of your footnote covering the field of mobility studies as it pertains to the history of Monaco (I wish I were making that up) without rolling out of their chair, do not let them go.
Mark Braude is a postdoctoral research fellow at the Center for Spatial and Textual Analysis at Stanford University. His first book, Making Monte Carlo: The Glamour of Escape, will be published by Simon & Schuster in 2015. Follow him on Twitter: @MarkBraude.
