By Noelle Sterne, PhD

You’re ready to begin your dissertation, and you deserve congratulations! But realize, though, that your current lifestyle must change.

No Structure

Doctoral students beginning this coveted stage are often shocked at the lack of external structure. No prescheduled class meetings, specific assignments, or grades to goad you on. No classmates to remind you to tackle the next assignment. You’ve got to make your own schedule and follow through.

If you work away from home, you’ve already got some structure. You can easily figure out your dissertation time: evenings, weekends, and an occasional call-in-sick day.

It’s undeniable: writing your dissertation is hard. All that time you devote to research is a worthy endeavor but, no matter how many brilliant analyses you’ve collected, at some point you know you’re stalling. In my longtime dissertation coaching and editing practice, I have witnessed, cautioned, and counseled many dissertation writers on the difficulties of the actual writing. A new doctoral candidate who came from the corporate world confided, “I struggle daily with understanding the shift from business and occupational writing to writing as a researcher according to certain expectations and standards.”

You’ve reached the first dissertation milestone—approval of your prospectus. Great! You couldn’t wait to plunge into the next step, writing the proposal. But now that you’re here, somehow it’s not working. With all the best intentions and surrounded by all your scholarly materials, you’re spending long fruitless hours in your study or the library. The days are slipping away, your friends are out eating pizza, and your family wonders what you’re really doing for all those solitary hours. You feel paralyzed.

To cheer yourself up, remember that the proposal becomes the first three chapters of the real dissertation. But this fact probably offers little consolation. Your completed proposal seems like a sky-high wall with not even a step stool in sight. Where is that danged first step?

A motivational truism says that the most dangerous time is when you’ve reached a goal. This may be why many doctoral candidates experience Post-Parting Depression (PPD). Consciously and unconsciously, you’ve been pushing so hard for so long. Preoccupied with the intensity and innumerable details of the work itself, you may have lost sight of the larger purpose of the dissertation and degree. After graduation, you no longer have to spend every moment (after eating) on the dissertation.

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

As you reach the end of your doctoral work, you will probably need to “defend” your dissertation. Most universities in the United States require this, although the procedures and formats may differ among them and from those in other countries. In the U.S., the advisory committee you’ve had a love-hate relationship with throughout your dissertation writing constitutes your defense committee as well. In other countries, the defense may be conducted with a blind peer review process (Australia) or as a viva (U.K.). For most students, though, it’s still a one-to-three-hour torture, with much agonizing beforehand.