By Dr. Noelle Sterne

Q: How do I tell my chair I don’t want his suggested topic for my dissertation?

— Scared of Retaliation

A: As an advanced graduate student, you face many hard situations: finally writing the dissertation, explaining to your family why you can’t spend any time with them, and breaking up fistfights between your chair and committee members. More students than you’d imagine encounter another high-anxiety-making scenario: when your chair suggests your dissertation topic.

Whose Topic?

Early in the dance, your professor’s “suggestion” could be a replication of the study he just had rejected, the study she’s just started, his secondary research interest, or her department head’s major obsession.

My client Ryan called one morning at 8:13 a.m. He wailed, “She wants me to take the issue she’s been working on for six years! I have no interest in the movie-snacking preferences of Millennials. Will she take it out on me if I don’t do what she wants? Will she stop me from getting my degree?”

I knew how Ryan felt from personal experience. In my own doctoral seminar, one gray Thursday afternoon the chair cheerily passed around a sheet with five neatly typed titles. He asked each of us to put our initials next to the one (s) we were interested in. As I scanned the list, I recognized the titles were all his research interests.

The other students nodded and smiled and initialed. I’d thought a lot about my dissertation and had just about decided what I wanted to do—within my eighteenth-century concentration, an analysis of a major author’s minor poems. This topic was nowhere near any of those on the chair’s sheet. My initials were the only ones that didn’t appear.

Generous soul that he was, my chair didn’t hold it against me (his kind-heartedness, and his passion for eighteenth-century literature, were what had first drawn me to him). In fact, he supported me throughout my dissertation. And before my degree was awarded, he helped me publish a very small article—on a discovery I made during my dissertation research—in a scholarly journal.

But the phenomenon of chair-dictating-topic is more widespread than you might think. Longtime professor and chair Leonard Cassuto doesn’t hesitate to nail it: “If you suspect that you’re being recruited to run on someone else’s hamster wheel, then run the other way.”

Maybe chairs who give subjects to their students sincerely desire to help them—making the choices easier, condensing the subject-fishing time, and knowing they may have a good shot at later publishing. Maybe some students are grateful to be steered to the professors’ ideas.

But whenever I hear stories like Ryan’s, I get angry. Chairs are supposed to be for their students’ scholarly interests and careers. Students are not slave labor for the professors’ egocentric ends.

You may fear, like Ryan, that if you don’t bow to one of your chair’s pointed suggestions, you’ll be punished. You’ll imagine the professor stalling with drafts, critiquing every comma, or responding graciously once a semester. I don’t believe such fears are warranted. The chair will likely respond with understanding and may even admire you. For all you know, your professor could have been bullied by his or her chair into taking that chair’s pet research project, and your chair hated it, despite devoting a career to it.

If, though, your chair does try to corner you into a subject you can’t stomach, remedies are possible:

• Gather your strength.
• Write a little script about the reasons for your choice: “I have always been interested in [your own topic].” “My master’s thesis was on [your own topic], and I want to study this in more depth.” “I believe I can make a real contribution to the field with [your own] research.”
• Feel strong in your passion, interests, and convictions.
• Rehearse.

Your Decision

If you don’t mind the professor’s preowned topic, or you feel it’s the only way you’ll make it through dissertation wasteland, swallow hard and dive in. If though, like Ryan, you dread spending the next three years living with a topic you can’t raise any passion for, much less interest in, muster your courage, rehearse your speech, and make an appointment with your chair.

You deserve your own choices—of dissertation topics and all other things. It’s your time, your persistence, your sweat, your money, and your academic career. And with a topic that’s really your own, you may not only enjoy it but make a ground-breaking contribution to your field.

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If you have a burning academic question you’d like Dr. Noelle Sterne to answer, go here to send it to us. This column relies on question submissions, and we would love to hear yours. Dr. Noelle will answer one question on the 15th of each month. You can read this article for more information.

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Dissertation coach, nurturer, bolsterer, handholder, and editor; scholarly and mainstream writing consultant; authorof writing craft, spiritual, and academic articles; and spiritual and motivational counselor, Noelle Sterne has published many pieces in print and online venues, including Author Magazine, Chicken Soup for the Soul, Children’s Book Insider, Graduate Schools Magazine, GradShare, InnerSelf, Inspire Me Today, Transformation Magazine, Unity Magazine, Women in Higher Education, Women on Writing, Writer’s Digest, and The Writer. With a Ph.D. from Columbia University, Noelle has for 30 years helped doctoral candidates wrestle their dissertations to completion (finally). Based on her practice, her Challenges in Writing Your Dissertation: Coping with the Emotional, Interpersonal, and Spiritual Struggles (Rowman & Littlefield Education, 2015) addresses students’ often overlooked or ignored but crucial nonacademic difficulties that can seriously prolong their agony. See the PowerPoint teaser here. In Noelle`s Trust Your Life: Forgive Yourself and Go After Your Dreams (Unity Books, 2011), she draws examples from her academic consulting and other aspects of life to help readers release regrets and reach lifelong yearnings. Following one of her own, she is currently working on her third novel. Visit Noelle at www.trustyourlifenow.com