Fellowship at the Overlook Hotel

Wanted:

Winter caretaker for the Overlook Hotel.  Duties include upkeep and minor repairs.  Perks include large amounts of free time.  Perfect for ABDs.

I’ve previously noted some of the ways that works of fiction (such as Candide, The Lord of the Rings, and The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn) are related to graduate school and the job market.  Settling down to watch a scary movie on Halloween night, however, I found what may be the best dramatization I’ve seen about working on one’s dissertation (especially when on fellowship): The Shining.  For example:

As a graduate student there were many times when my wife would come home from work and ask me how my work went during her time away.  Typically, I would respond to this with some vague statement intended to disguise the fact that I had gotten up at 10, read things on the internet, taken a shower at 12:30, eaten lunch, opened a document to work on, read other things on the internet, taken a nap, and then read some things on the internet until she got home.  If she ever called during the day and needed me to bring something to her, the disruption to my “work” had the potential to frustrate me to no end.  It wasn’t so much that I was working but that I had the potential to work and may actually start doing so at any moment.  Any interruption was thus an interruption of my potential to actually accomplish something.  All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy.

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The long arm of the dissertation netherworld

I am no longer ABF.  In fact, I haven’t been ABF for nearly three months.  I’ve moved, arranged my office, attended orientation, and started teaching.  Despite these things, there has never been a moment when I started feeling different.  Participating in graduation didn’t do it because I wasn’t even done with my dissertation yet.  My defense didn’t do it because I still had revisions to make, and the act of filing may have been the most anticlimactic, since the person who received my paperwork did not seem to care that I had just completed seven years of intense study at her institution.

Maybe it is the lack of some kind of symbolic passage into my career as an assistant professor or maybe it is the fact that I’ve been busy preparing for the beginning of the semester, but I still feel like a graduate student teaching a few more classes.  Maybe the realization will come with my first-ever adult-sized paycheck, but I suspect that it will actually come at some moment that isn’t particularly special.  I remember walking down the hallway of my college dorm room and being struck by the realization that I was a college student.  Maybe someday I’ll be struck by a similar realization about my new role.  Either way, it will sure be nice to get those adult-sized paychecks.

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A blessing and a curse

As an elementary and high school student I developed a bad habit of waiting until the last minute to complete assignments.  At various times I considered starting earlier, but I decided against the extra effort since I was able to get As and A-minuses when starting things at the last minute.  In college I had to work harder to maintain good grades but I still left paper writing until the last minute, typically making an outline two days before a deadline and writing the paper the evening before the deadline, priding myself on the fact that I never had to stay up all night working.

These tactics worked.  My high school and undergraduate GPAs were the same and I got into grad school, where I ran into problems.  As you probably know, writing a course paper in graduate school takes a lot more work than writing a five-page undergraduate paper.  Obviously, I couldn’t start the day before a deadline, but despite my good intentions to start working on papers early in the semester, I ended up waiting until a few weeks remained.  A few times I even stayed up all night.

Then came the dissertation, which was obviously unlike anything I’d previously written.  After setting deadlines for each chapter with my advisor, I found myself using my grad school paper-writing tactics with each one.  This time, I missed a few deadlines.  Thankfully, my advisor understood how to motivate me and the chapters eventually got done, then revised, and then submitted to my committee members.  When I originally set the “complete draft” deadline I was sure that I would be able to meet it.  In retrospect, however, the fact that I met this deadline without substantially changing my poor writing habits is surprising.  Until now, my ability to do “okay” writing in a short period of time has been both a blessing and a curse.  As I’ve gotten older, though, the “blessing” aspect has been largely supplanted by the “curse” aspect.  Sine I’ll soon be working toward tenure it seems that a change in work habits may be in order.

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I’ve got a hood but I’m not a doctor*

I recently participated in my third graduation ceremony, for my fourth graduation (no, the schools I attended did not have graduation ceremonies for preschool, kindergarten, elementary, or middle school).  For the first time in my life, however, I have not completed the requirements necessary to obtain the degree announced at the ceremony.  This will happen soon enough, but I have to wonder if being hooded by my dissertation advisor would have been a more emotional experience if it had actually marked the end of my time here.  Instead, I had the privilege of telling all of my family members that I’m almost a doctor.  Of course, none of them will be here to celebrate when I actually defend or file my dissertation.  I guess this is fitting since many of the big moments in an academic career are unobserved by others.

*Clearly, this title makes more sense than the song that inspired it.

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How to write a dissertation

It is comforting to know that while Cecilia and I may have no idea how to write a dissertation, there are always others who believe they have the answers we seek.  From Inside Higher Ed:

Large projects, such as an M.A. thesis, dissertation, book or just a long paper, can be daunting. For some of us, myself included, project management can be a challenge for any article written from scratch. This memo can help you break down your writing project into smaller, less intimidating parts. I will focus on the writing of a thesis or dissertation, but the same basic logic applies to even smaller writing tasks.

Unfortunately, like Lao-Tze, Gastil doesn’t say which keystroke to start with.

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I blame the dissertation

I would guess that every graduate student knows at least one professor who is socially awkward.  In sociology, socially awkward professors must also deal with the irony of a life spent studying human behavior and social interaction.  While I have long been aware of the potential for awkwardness, I have considered myself fairly competent in social interactions relative to other graduate students.

Until I started writing my dissertation.

These days, social interactions with professors and other graduate students are rare.  When they occur, I find myself struggling to form complete, grammatically correct sentences.  In the event that I am able to speak a coherent sentence, it is typically unrelated to the sentence that follows.  The recognition of my increasing awkwardness does little to ease the transition.  I can see the return of Phaedrus but I am helpless to stop it.

To be fair to my dissertation, I have neither been on fellowship nor attempted to write a dissertation until this year.  Thus, the possibility remains that my decreasing social skills are the result of the decreased social contact that spending eight hours a day alone in a room allows.  On the other hand, during my failed interactions I have sometimes found myself thinking coherently about my dissertation.

In four months I will be done with my dissertation and will once again have daily interactions with students and colleagues.  With luck, this will reverse the onset of social awkwardness.  Considering the lack of social skills exhibited by some sociology professors, however, I have to wonder whether the process is truly reversible.  Perhaps they too once considered themselves fairly competent in social interactions relative to other graduate students.

Until they started writing their dissertations.

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The dissertation netherworld

In graduate school, most of us learn by doing.  We learn to write 20 page papers by writing them for nearly every course we take.  We learn to present at conferences by presenting in front of small and, well, mostly small crowds at regional conferences, roundtable sessions, and occasionally, a regular session of the ASA.  We learn to publish by submitting our manuscripts to journals and awaiting the soul-crushing reviews before revising and submitting again, usually to different journals.  If we’re lucky, we coauthor conference presentations and journal submissions with faculty members who have done these things before and can give some context to the pitfalls we experience along the way.  But almost nobody coauthors a dissertation.  In this, we are on our own.

Writing a dissertation may be a sign that we have come full circle in our graduate program, since we were also on our own when writing 20 page papers in our first graduate semester after countless five page papers as undergrads (somewhere along the way we might lose sympathy for our own students as they struggle to complete five page papers in our own courses, since I’m pretty sure I could write a randomly assigned five page undergraduate paper in the next hour, including relevant references).  When we struggled with those initial 20 page papers it was okay, because we were new to graduate school and we were supposed to struggle.  The dissertation, on the other hand, is the crowning achievement of our graduate school years.  Why, after success in courses, success in presentations, success in publishing, and even success on the job market, does a dissertation have the power to revive old insecurities (Do I really know anything?  Will this make the world a better place?  Why is this important?  What if my conclusions are wrong?)?  For some, these questions make the dissertation difficult to begin.  Unfortunately, once we do begin we must face the same questions with each new chapter.

After the job market, when I began writing my dissertation in earnest, I was struck by the fact that I had entered uncharted waters.  I had followed the job market experiences of friends, but once they had jobs they disappeared into a dissertation netherworld, only to emerge victorious three to six months later.  Their process, their daily tactics, and even their products were a mystery to me.  In fact, the only written draft of an unfinished dissertation chapter I have ever seen is my own.  Even though those who go on the job market ABD are probably faced with a mad scramble to get things done, I think that graduate programs in general would benefit by bringing dissertators out of the netherworld and inviting a more open exchange of information about the writing and editing process.  This may even make it easier to figure out where to begin for future generations.

Well, I’m off to the netherworld.  Good luuuck!!

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Frodo, lord of the dissertation

It turns out that just as Candide is an allegory for the academic job market, Frodo’s journey in The Lord of the Rings mirrors dissertation writing:

Like many a dissertator, Frodo’s terrible and treacherous mission has a dual nature. He cannot, and does not, accomplish the goal without the help of others, but ultimately, he must bear the great load alone.

One question: if Frodo’s fellowship “includes family, friends, dissertation groups, fellow doctoral students, professors, undergraduates, and archival and administrative staff members,” why do these people keep trying to take his dissertation from him?

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The Origin of the Theses

As spring approaches, I am the missing link between the second and third phases.

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Floundering on fellowship

I have been on fellowship for the ’08-9 academic year.  Aside from various revisions and completing other projects, I have two major tasks during this time: getting a job and finishing my dissertation.

The completion of task number one leaves me with a single major task for the current semester.  Unfortunately, I have been clinically diagnosed as a procrastinator per the DSM-IV* definition of the term under the “Work Disorders” heading:

The problem, my doctor tells me, is that I don’t have enough work to do.  While this seems counter-intuitive, I have found that my most productive periods have been when I am extremely busy with other things.  I need to become a structured procrastinator, which is defined as “shaping the structure of the tasks one has to do in a way that exploits this fact.”  An illustration may be helpful:

The key idea is that procrastinating does not mean doing absolutely nothing. Procrastinators seldom do absolutely nothing; they do marginally useful things, like gardening or sharpening pencils or making a diagram of how they will reorganize their files when they get around to it. Why does the procrastinator do these things? Because they are a way of not doing something more important. If all the procrastinator had left to do was to sharpen some pencils, no force on earth could get him do it. However, the procrastinator can be motivated to do difficult, timely and important tasks, as long as these tasks are a way of not doing something more important.

Thus, while some may see starting a blog in the midst of dissertation writing to be counterproductive, I am actually trying to use my wasted time more wisely.  And if the blog becomes a chore, I may find myself working on my dissertation to avoid it!

*For those who cannot find this disorder in the DSM-IV, you probably checked the book when you should have checked your gut.

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