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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Cultivate Your Dissertation Flow

By Noelle Sterne

In your dissertation writing, you’ve probably experienced the all-too-common range of emotions from initial elation to paralyzing fear to plunging despair, and between many starts, stops, and freezes. Here I suggest how to at least cut down on those maddening swings and invite, coax, and, toward more consistent and actually enjoyable writing, entice . . . the Flow.

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