Doctoral Dissertation Help

Dear Frustrated, I understand how difficult it can be to want your graduate students to succeed but not know how to support their productivity.Having just spent the past 12 weeks working with 150 dissertation writers, I know one thing for sure: there’s often a large, unspoken disconnect between faculty advisers and graduate students when it comes to writing a dissertation. Because of that disconnect, advisers’ efforts don’t meet students where they are stuck, and the students’ impostor syndrome can be so intense (and the power differential so great) that it keeps them from asking for the type of help they need.

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The most effective form of direct guidance is a dissertation rubric.

If you or your department don’t have something that specific, try sharing your favorite book on dissertation writing. It’s well documented that the most productive academics write every day -- Monday through Friday -- in short periods of time.

I want them to finish their dissertations, but now another semester has gone by with missed deadlines and no concrete progress.

And that means that May graduations look increasingly unrealistic.

A dissertation is one of the most stress-inducing and difficult assignments to complete in all of academia.

That’s because the rewards for getting one are substantial.

There’s one more reason why it’s important to ask what support graduate students need: they often are not aware of, or taking advantage of, existing support services on the campus.

Colleges and universities are increasingly offering writing space for dissertation writers, writing retreats, dissertation coaching and writing workshops.

Many graduate students I’ve worked with have made a common error.

They have prioritized all of the work that had built-in accountability -- teaching, service, research tasks for their adviser and job applications -- to the exclusion of the one activity that will lead to their completion of the dissertation: writing.