DISSERTATION ADVISORS

Your dissertation advisor is an important person in your life. You want to work with someone who is knowledgeable and experienced but who is also supportive. You want someone who will help you to write the best dissertation you are capable of doing but who will also understand the roadblocks you face. When you have scheduled a meeting with your advisor, for example, and the clinical depression you are experiencing keeps you from writing, you want an advisor who understands your situa-tion. You want a sympathetic advisor when you send a memo like the following:

Greetings.

How are you?

I’m overdue to check in and give you an update on my news. Unfortunately, the lapse is due to having been ill the last 4 months. I wasn’t sure what the illness was until a few weeks ago, when I was finally diagnosed with Epstein-Barr virus, other-wise known as chronic fatigue. Since then, I have been consumed with pursuing various forms of treatments, all the while keeping my classes going.

It is the rare advisor who does not understand such a significant crisis. At the same time, you do not want an advisor who demands too little from you and who will let you schedule a defense when you are not ready and might be in danger of facing too many revisions or of not passing.

It is important to write a strong dissertation that has rich data, serious analysis, and makes a sound argument. You want to have a relationship with your advisor such that you can truthfully explain the complications you may face in the data or in your personal life. This means that you need to have a trusting relationship with your advisor; the best one is where you feel that your advisor is most concerned about your best interests. This situation is a little more complicated than it may appear at first glance. The advisor also has interests at stake in the relationship. If it is the advisor’s first time chairing a committee, then he or she may feel pressure to per-form well, to be as knowledgeable as possible, and to have a student who has “done well.” If the advisor is invested in your performance, then when you write a good dissertation the advisor will glean some of the benefits.

So, even when it works well, this relationship is a complicated one. It is for this reason that we underscore the importance of building trust in the re-lationship and of working to communicate well. We discuss these concerns more fully later in the chapter.

Choosing an Advisor

People—students and faculty—have many different styles of interacting and of working. This idea is nothing new, but it is something to think about when you choose an advisor and organize your dissertation committee.

These styles can include formal, organized, casual, interactive, rule obey-ing, warm, and distant. When the students, advisors, and committee work together, they have to negotiate these styles in multiple combinations.

Additionally, because professors hold more power than students, power relations always enter into the relationship—not always in straightforward ways, but always. Hopefully, when you ask a professor to chair your dis-sertation committee, you have already developed a relationship through working together on a project, having had the professor in several classes, or working with him or her as a teaching or research assistant. If you al-ready have a relationship, then you know a little about the professor’s style.

Whatever you know about the faculty member before starting, you will learn more as the dissertation advances. One author, for example, has an informal style. Students sometimes think that informality signals an easy touch and are surprised when they find that her expectations are high.

We are writing as if you have numerous choices for a dissertation advisor. We have constructed this process as if there are multiple faculty you would like to have for a chair and all you must do is simply consider their different styles and choose the person with whom you feel most com-fortable or who you think will help you to write the best dissertation. Of course, this is often not the case: There may only be two or three faculty in your department for you to choose between, or there may be only one per-son who knows something about your topic. Even if this is the case, the more knowledgeable you are about how relationships between disserta-tion advisors and their students work, the more influence you can have on how the process works.

Working with Your Advisor

You want your advisor to think that your project is interesting and im-portant, and to expect you to do good work. If your advisor is new to the dissertation process, both of you will be learning simultaneously about working together. If your advisor has experience working with doctoral students, he or she will have expectations about how the process should go. The flexible advisor understands the process, has clear expectations and goals for you, and also is sensitive to your style of working, ways of think-ing, and needs. When your advisor sees you as a person from whom he or

she can learn, you will have a different relationship than if your efforts are seen as a way to promote the advisor’s own work. You want your advisor to conceptualize the relationship between doctoral student and advisor as a kind of collaboration. The advisor has knowledge and particular under-standings to offer, and you can increase your advisor’s awareness of cer-tain matters, ways of understanding problems, and new fields. You may also challenge your advisor in ways that are intellectually or politically interesting. In this kind of relationship, you may feel able to ask for help without worrying that doing so will make you look foolish. One student requested advice: “My problem is trying to summarize the arguments of the chapter without just repeating what I said in the chapter. Help!” She did not worry that she would appear unequal to the task.

We have said that you and your advisor know different things. Yet you are not equal to faculty members in the status hierarchy. This power differential is always important. Knowing different things sometimes leads to conflict with your advisor. Part of your task is to analyze the source of the conflict and try to verbally address it. Advisors bring to their relation-ships with students a long history of interaction with other students, so when they analyze each situation, they are placing it within this history.

You, however, are advocating for your own work. One source of conflict, for example, may come from the differences in the literature you read. Not to stereotype, but the advisor might be familiar with the traditional litera-ture in sociology, psychology, history of education, reading education, or social work, and the student might be interested in and familiar with more current or interdisciplinary work that addresses the topic in new ways (or the reverse can be true as well).

As advisors, we have frequently experienced situations with doctoral students where we have deeply admired the potential that the work prom-ises and have insisted that the student rewrite chapters, add more data, or expand a conclusion. If you have a trusting relationship with your advi-sor, you may agree to the revisions even if, from your perspective, they do not seem necessary. Most frequently, in our experience, when the defense goes well, students will say something like, “My advisor insisted that I redo this, and at the time I was snarling under my breath, but now I’m so glad that I did.” Producing a dissertation is a process of negotiation, just as doing fieldwork is a process of negotiating the focus with your informants. In this example, the advisor built on experience to insist on changes. If you feel that your advisor is too picky, you should discuss your perspectives and your interests. What you negotiate will probably lead to a better disserta-tion because you will have to articulate more clearly what you are doing, even if your advisor agrees that you have made good points.