Dear Dr. Noelle: Sensitive Request

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.

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Dear Dr. Noelle: Reciprocal Relationships of Advisors With Students

By Dr. Noelle Sterne

Q: How much about yourself should you divulge to create a reciprocal relationship?

–Approachable Advisor

A: The benchmark is boundaries. For your poor suffering student, you want to be approachable, supportive, encouraging, and all the other wonderful adjectives of a sterling advisor. BUT—you don’t want to be over-open or fall into a sinkhole of too much sharing.

What’s appropriate for you to share:

How you struggled in graduate school, the nightmare of your defense.

What’s not appropriate for you to share:

Your latest root canal agony, your septic system failure.

!–more–>

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Welcome to TAA’s Newest Column: Dear Dr. Noelle

By Noelle Sterne, PhD

Welcome to Dear Dr. Noelle!

Unashamedly, I have modeled this column on the popular “Dear Abby” advice column but aimed at us more evolved intellectuals. The column is for you graduate students, new academic doctors, and professors who have questions that burn in your minds even when you’re binging on a Netflix series.

Fair game: anything pertaining to a dissertation, article, monograph, or book: intellectual, expressional, procedural, psychological, emotional, relational, maddening.

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2025 TAA Conference Bookstore Featured Book: ‘Challenges in Writing Your Dissertation’

For doctoral candidates struggling with their dissertations, Challenges in Writing Your Dissertation, by Noelle Sterne, is different from other how-to-write-your-dissertation books: they deal with the structure and contents. Challenges, with lively examples, humor, and provocative questions, addresses the surrounding, often overlooked or ignored but crucial aspects that can seriously delay dissertation completion: emotional, interpersonal, and even spiritual issues.

Purchase in the 2025 TAA Conference Bookstore

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Writing a Dissertation: Don’t Fall Down the ‘Rabbit Hole’ of Theory Shopping

Often, when someone begins seeking a theoretical framework for their dissertation, they take for granted the one they are already implicitly using, said writing coach and editor Dr. Dave Harris, with Thought Clearing.

“To be at the point where you’re writing your dissertation, you’ve already been a scholar in a graduate program for multiple years and have learned a lot,” he said. “A lot of people at this point go shopping for theories, thinking ‘oh, I need this person’s theory and that person’s theory,’ and they don’t sit down and say to themselves, ‘well, how do I think the world works and where did these ideas come from?’

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12 Articles on Writing Your Dissertation: A Curated Collection From Noelle Sterne, PhD

Dissertation coach Noelle Sterne, the author of Writing Your Dissertation: Coping with the Emotional, Interpersonal, and Spiritual Struggles, has contributed more than 30 articles to the TAA Blog over the past 10 years. We’ve curated all of these articles into a new TAA Blog category, Noelle Sterne’s Dissertation Posts, and have included 12 of them here. Enjoy!

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