Writing the Dissertation

If the dissertation proposal is clear and specific, writing the dissertation should be driven by simply following the plan. Like any other research project, you need to develop the theory, articulate your expectations, develop the research design, gather and analyze the data, and write up your results. Some dissertations unfold this easy, but many others require making adjustments along the way.

Sometimes students discover something new in the literature that provokes a new idea or impinges on their plans. Sometimes new data becomes available, or sometimes anticipated data cannot be found. Sometimes preliminary analyses reveal patterns or findings that were not anticipated. Sometimes the student’s in- terests change dramatically. Sometimes the dissertation proposal itself was vague. The point is, it is fairly common for the final dissertation to differ from the disser- tation proposal. You should make these adjustments in complete consultation with your advisor, and the rest of your committee should be informed if any dramatic changes are made.

Chapter 3 provides more information about selecting research topics, Chapter 8 provides a great deal of detail on writing, and Chapter 14 discusses the role of your dissertation in applying for academic jobs. Here I will simply say again that managing your time and working closely with your advisor are important.

I generally establish weekly or biweekly meetings with the students I advise in order to keep tabs on their progress. Students can give me a draft of one chapter to review. While I am reviewing it, they can work on another chapter. You do not need to work on chapters in any particular order. Early in the process students

can push all of their chapters along. Eventually, however, it becomes important to focus on finishing a particular chapter before moving on to finish another one. In fact, I often encourage students to try to publish one or more of their chapters prior to the defense of their dissertation, primarily because of the advantage this provides on the job market.

Regular meetings also push students to make regular progress every week or two. A student does not want to come to a meeting with their advisor only to report that they got nothing accomplished in the previous week or two. Regu- larly scheduled meetings provide structure to a process that is otherwise largely unstructured. Regular meetings also make sure that the student does not drift too far away from what the advisor deems reasonable.

What If Something Goes Wrong?

Of course, even the best of plans can go wrong. It does happen, but together with your advisor, any problem can be overcome. Let’s consider a few of the more common fears graduate students have while writing their dissertation.

1. What if my data explodes?Sometimes the data you collect or the analysis you conduct just does not work as expected. Sometimes your results are the opposite of what you predicted, sometimes your results contradict each other, and sometimes there are just no results or patterns of any kind to be found. My own dissertation depended heavily on whether a particular interactive/conditional effect emerged as expected. Computers were slow at that time, and I remember waiting for an agonizing minute or two for the results to appear on the screen. That might have been my most anxious moment in graduate school, but fortunately, everything worked.

I have had students who have not been so fortunate. I have seen students conduct original survey experiments only to find that their experimental treatment had no effect. One student, in particular, had two different dis- sertation topics fail when the analyses did not work out. I have had students plan projects that required funding which they had to adjust dramatically when that funding did not appear. In every case, however, these students went on to successfully defend their dissertations.

To navigate these sorts of problems requires adaptability and communica- tion with your advisor. Rest assured that your advisor has had projects of his/her own which blew up. Oftentimes another chapter can be expanded and divided into two chapters. Students generally have more ideas than will fit in a dissertation at the outset, so you can revisit those ideas. Finally, as noted elsewhere, one of the reasons a typical dissertation includes at least three empirical/substantive chapters or papers is because of the real chance that at least one of them will not pan out.

A colleague of mine often advises students to have at least one chapter in the dissertation that would be interesting almost regardless of the outcome. Finding a circumstance where party identification does not shape people’s attitudes or behaviors might be more informative than finding yet another circumstance where it does. I often tell students who want to study the be- havior of political elites not to worry about finding a pattern. Such students should theorize about what they expect the pattern to be, but there will al- most certainly be one, even if it is not what they expect. Political elites act with intention, and intentional behavior will not be random.

2. What if someone else publishes my idea? I remember every time a new issue of a journal was published while I was working on my dissertation that I nervously flipped through it looking to see if someone had just published a paper that undercut all or part of my dissertation. I have seen this happen only once or twice. There will almost certainly be new papers published that are related to your dissertation, but rarely do such publications derail a dissertation. You might need to make some modifications, but there is room for multiple papers on a similar topic. Even if the topic is the same, the data, methods, and/or theoretical approach of your dissertation will likely differ. Still, it can happen. This means you want to stay on top of new publications in your area just in case. If a problem emerges, the sooner you identify it, the easier it will be to address. Talk with your advisor and others about the situation and brainstorm ideas for how to adapt/respond.

3. What if I want to change topics? Sometimes students think they have a better idea part way through their dissertation. Sometimes students decide they hate or are bored with their dissertation. For these or other reasons, sometimes students want to scrap what they are doing and start over. If you are early enough in the process, this might be a good strategy. I have repeatedly stressed the importance of being excited about your own

work. However, if you have already made substantial progress, changing your mind might be a mistake because of the time and effort you have al- ready expended.

Maybe you can replace a chapter you had planned with something new. You could also write about your new ideas as part of your future research plans when applying for jobs. Maybe you could co-author a paper with a fellow graduate student on one of these ideas as a side project to keep you from burning out on your dissertation. In all of these circumstances, my basic advice is that if you have sunk considerable time and energy into a research project, you should not abandon it unless it really has no potential of producing publishable work.

4. What if my advisor won’t communicate or the relationship is not work- ing? Much of my advice relies on communication with your advisor. That is why it is important to select an advisor that will work with you. Un- fortunately, the relationship between an advisor and student sometimes just doesn’t work out. The fault might lie with the advisor, the student, both, or neither.

If your advisor simply won’t communicate, read drafts of your chapters, or respond to email, you will need to take action. Start by meeting in person with your advisor. If they won’t answer an email, go to their posted office hours. Stop by their office 20 minutes before or 10 minutes after they are scheduled to teach. If they can’t meet with you then, schedule an appoint- ment. You need to at least try to find out the nature of the problem.

If such a meeting does not resolve the issue, you can either seek advice from other members of your committee or switch advisors. If you are concerned that your advisor might hold a grudge, you could also consider adding some- one as a co-chair. You need to do something to make sure that at least someone on your committee supports what you are doing and provides the guidance you need.

The worst thing you could do is nothing. You should not write a dissertation without some direction and support. You do not want to enter the defense of your dissertation without knowing that at least someone on your committee agrees it is time to defend and supports your work.

Communication can also break down when the student stops communicat- ing with their advisor. It is your dissertation and your career, so you should

take responsibility for communicating with your chair and your committee. When I was in graduate school, we were told a story about a previous stu- dent whose dissertation was rejected by his committee primarily because he failed to communicate. As I understand it, the project was supposed to examine the impact of local government institutions on local policy. The question was whether different institutional arrangements produced differ- ences in policies. The student purportedly randomly selected a handful of local governments to study. Unfortunately, all the local governments in the random sample ended up having the same basic institutional arrangements. In other words, the data the student studied had no variance on the key inde- pendent variable. As a result, it could not be correlated with any differences in policy outcomes across these local governments. This error could have easily been avoided if the student had been in touch with his committee chair from the beginning. He wasn’t, so he showed up with a dissertation that, by design, could not address the question at the core of the project. Sometimes the problem is not a lack of communication, but a lack of agree- ment. The student may want to go in one direction while the advisor rec- ommends something different. Step one is trying to understand each other’s perspective. This might involve doing a little bit of work in both directions to see if you can add evidence rather than just speculation to the discussion. If you are still struggling to agree, you can reach out to another member of your committee. You should let that committee member know about the disagreement between you and your chair. You want that committee mem- ber to hear both sides so they can be an honest broker. Ultimately, if you cannot resolve the problem, you may need to make a change.

It is difficult to describe the relationship between an advisor and student in the abstract. Individual personalities differ, as do students’ needs. Some- times what a student needs and what a student wants are not the same. This can be hard for a student to accept. At the same time, if the student simply waits for the advisor to tell them what to do, and then just does it without thinking, they are not becoming the independent scholar they need to be. A good relationship should be open with both people contributing.