By Dr. Noelle Sterne

Q: I just graduated and feel a ridiculous void! What should I do?

— Destitute Without Dissertation

A: A well-known motivational truism proclaims that the most dangerous time is when you’ve reached a goal. This maxim may explain why many doctoral candidates experience Post-Parting Depression (PPD). You’ve been pushing so hard for so long. You’ve been preoccupied with the intensity and innumerable details of the work itself. And now, after graduation, you suddenly realize that you no longer have to spend every moment (other than eating and just a little sleep) on the dissertation. You feel an inexplicable void.

Most clients I’ve helped in my dissertation editing and coaching practice experience such feelings. For a year or usually more, they say, they’ve wished for nothing but to finish the durn thing. Now that they’re done, somehow, and to their shock, they miss it—and get depressed.

If this sounds familiar and you want to avoid PPD, try one of the strategies below. They can help you make the transition to what may approximate a normal life again and even resume your career.

Celebrate

Whether you decide on a big bash or a quiet dinner with some special people, take the time to celebrate. You deserve it! Others close to you, who may have lived through the ordeal, will want to celebrate with you. Let them. And enjoy it.

Take a Break

You deserve this too! Your break can be a day, a few days, a week, a few weeks. Some new doctors go on long-postponed vacations with their families. Others catch up on the (excusably) neglected essentials: cleaning the house, the refrigerator, the car, your desk. Liberating the dining room table and floor from all the books, articles, note cards, and old takeout cartons. Visiting relatives. Loading up on paper goods at the local discount warehouse. Lounging in the backyard hammock with a trashy novel.

Set a Date and Revisit Your Dream

Decide on the day or date you’ll resume serious business. Don’t take too long or you’ll lose your momentum. The secret now is to remind yourself why you chased the doctorate in the first place: perfect academic position, perfect new business, perfect office, perfect clients, perfect colleagues, perfect compensation . . . .

Even do a paragraph or two on what your perfect position will look like: type of institution or business, colleagues, clients (if applicable), schedule, activities you love, how you’ll apply what you learned from the dissertation. Such journaling helps you discover new facets to your dream, refine it, and even bring it about.

Make a List: Many Academic Avenues

Next, so you don’t loll in the hammock for too many months, make a master list of what you need to do now to reach that dream. Granted, this is another project, but now (I assume) the dissertation gave you practice in dissecting the parts and mowing them down.

For example, many of us get doctorates to go into or stay and advance in academia. A helpful and still timely book is Kelsky’s (2015) The Professor Is In.

So now, instead of mining the literature reviews, mine the Internet for universities and colleges you’re interested in, both on-campus and virtual. Spruce up your vita. Draft introductory letters to prospective department chairs or administrators.

Subscribe also to the newsletters of associations in your field—they often have listings of job openings. Plan to attend several professional conferences; most have employment prospects sections and informal gatherings. These are great places to meet ‘n greet—and get leads.

Ask your chair and committee members (don’t forget former professors) for leads too. Make appointments and interviews to impress them with your knowledge and passion, and how much you’ve really learned from the dissertation. Request letters of recommendation. (After all, they owe you for your Acknowledgments.)

Talk to current faculty members or employees at your desired institutions. Notify everyone else you know and tell them you’re interested. Talk to colleagues who are teaching. As a start, consider part-time campus or online adjuncting.

Make a List: Consulting

Or, if this is your dream, take steps to start your own business. Look at the websites of others in the field and contact them. If you approach them right and offer cross-referrals, they won’t see you as competition. (I maintain contact with several other editors. We each specialize in different aspects of editing and send each other potential clients.) Create your own website or hire an expert (they can save you a lot of time and grief). Draft a letter or flyer describing your services and even ask a colleague or two for feedback. Look at all your contacts and send them this letter.

Make a List: The Article

And of course, start thinking about that article (or multiples) that’s loitering in your dissertation. Publication is still a major road to academic advancement and can enhance your standing in your business too. Besides, you deserve recognition as well as additional benefits from all you’ve invested.

Your chair or a committee member may have already suggested publication, so make a little plan for working on your article. Sometimes joining a writing group is beneficial. See Harris’s (2017) reasons for joining an academic writing group and a good (and often entertaining) introductory book by Silvia (2014). Also see the highly recommended book by Belcher (2019), Write Your Journal Article in 12 Weeks. Gee (2024) has an excellent newer book on article writing, complete with essays by journal editors. And browse in the Textbook and Academic Authors Association blog Abstract for seminars and pieces on article writing.

Sanity

With all these suggestions, it may sound like you’ve never really stopped. So pace yourself. Choose a few actions that make the most sense, depending on your career goals. If one of them is promotion in your present company or institution, you won’t need much time for job-hunting or resume sprucing. But you may want to concentrate on your article. If your postdoc goal is establishing an online business, you’ll want to devote more of your time to the steps that get it off the virtual ground.

Look At Your “Later List”

When, as my doctoral candidates begin their dissertations, they come to the bald realization that the work will consume them for a year or more, I advise them to make a “Later List.” We’ve been talking about yours too, whether it’s in a file or in your head. The list initially assuages your guilt about all the projects and events and chores you’ve wanted to do (or should) and people you’ve been avoiding and know you won’t get to for many months.

Now your Later List has another function. Right after your dissertation is safely bedded in ProQuest, you may have the relative “leisure” and psychological space to peek at it, or write it down. You’ll easily see whether your priorities and desires have changed. Maybe you already gave away your old bread maker and don’t want to start a sourdough business or no longer feel the need to write your memoir about your first traumatic summer camp. Maybe new priorities have surfaced.

When Lucas, a client of mine who had just graduated, looked up from his literature review article files, he realized his three kids were suddenly teenagers. At the top of his Later List, he wrote, “Now—spend more time with them!” Other clients, in addition to their new career-enhancing moves, have resumed weekly dates with their families, poetry writing, crocheting, volunteering, camping, aesthetic welding.

But guard against feeling you must conquer the whole Later List in a frenzy of doing. As you may already know, the sun always rises and to-do lists never end. We’re also supposed to enjoy our activities (at least some of them). If you haven’t already, add some purely fun things you’ve deprived yourself of for so long to your Later List—a fancy lunch with a friend, poking around the new fake-quaint mall, cheering at drag races or drag contests, binging on four successive first-run movies at the multiplex and munching nonstop from one of those huge horrible popcorn buckets.

Reflecting

Award of your doctorate is a huge achievement. Especially to avoid PPD, take the time to celebrate yourself and rejuvenate. Then reacquaint yourself with your post- doctoral dreams and most meaningful and fun activities. Make choices that feel good. And bask in your doctorhood and look forward to your new title and life without Post-Parting Depression.

References

Belcher, W. L. (2019). Write your journal article in 12 weeks: A guide to academic publishing success (2nd ed.). University of Chicago Press.

Gee, G. C. (2024). You can publish your journal article: advice from editors to help you succeed. Sage.

Harris, M. (2017, June 19). Five advantages to write more with a writing group. http://higheredprofessor.com/2017/06/19/five-advantages-write-writing-group/

Kelsky, K. (2015). The professor is in: The essential guide to turning your Ph.D. into a job. Three Rivers Press.

Silvia, P. J. (2014). Write it up: Practical strategies for writing and publishing journal articles. APA LifeTools.

Textbook and Academic Authors Association. http://www.taaonline.net/

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Dissertation coach, nurturer, bolsterer, handholder, and editor; scholarly and mainstream writing consultant; author of 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. Noelle’s ninth story for Chicken Soup for the Soul appears in June 2025 in the volume Self-Care Isn’t Selfish. 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