Notes from the Dissertation Desk #3

If you haven’t read the first two parts of this series, check out Part 1 here and Part 2 here.

Living for Autumn in London!

So it’s been awhile since I’ve had a PhD update on this blog. I know. I’m sorry. But I’ve been a bit busy. Here’s a quick update…My last PhD post was in mid-October, a piece on preparing for academic conferences. The following week I was on an airplane headed to London for a conference. The conference went great, I got to meet a lot of amazing fashion scholars, including one of the curators for the Historic Royal Palaces, who invited me to Kensington Palace the following week to see the Princess Diana exhibition. That was incredible, I still need to post the pictures. The rest of the trip was amazing, I thoroughly enjoyed every moment in London, my happy place. I stayed in a lovely hotel near the Barbican and got to meet a couple of my YouTube friends. I vlogged the whole trip, so if you haven’t seen them already, check out vlogs, they’re in a playlist on my YouTube channel.

Inside the conference venue in London.

After I got home, I had 3 days of jet lag, two days of feeling slightly back to normal, and then got hit with a massive chest cold that knocked me flat for two weeks straight. It was miserable. I was still sick but slightly recovering by Thanksgiving, and fully recovered by the beginning of December and the start of Vlogmas. The holiday season was fantastic but busy. New Years was quiet, which is how I prefer it, and then it was back to work.

January was insane, but also felt like time went miraculously slowly, it’s was like a late Christmas present. The start of the spring semester has put a lot of pressure on me. This is my last semester, I have to graduate this May, which meant I really needed to finish drafting my dissertation so I could start editing it. Yikes! I still had 3 chapters left to draft after the holidays. I had finished 4 chapters by Christmas, but that had taken me months to work on all of them. I was not working very quickly. That had to change. I was down to my final case study, my conclusion chapter and my introduction chapter (I’d been told to write the first chapter last). Thankfully, my final case study was my favorite, and I had a lot of ideas for the conclusion and introduction. I finally finished drafting it at the end of January and on the 24^th met with my advisor to discuss next steps, the revision process, and got the green light to apply for graduation (cue internal screams of both joy and terror).

February went by quickly. It’s a short month, and also my birthday month. I only got a few chapters revised, but no one was emailing me wondering where the rest were so I think I’m still on track lol. Now it’s March (how the heck did that happen?) and I’ve got 4 more chapters to revise. I start teaching again in a week and I’m feeling the panic rising. I had wanted to have the whole diss revised at least once before I started teaching, but 4 chapters in one week is pushing it. *Deep breath Andrea* I’ll do my best, as always, and take it from there. Thankfully it’s just one class I’m teaching, and only two days a week.

I also had a great meeting with one of my committee members last week and she gave me some amazing feedback on the two chapters she’d read so far and helped me really articulate my argument and the importance of my research. I have a better understanding of how to adjust my framework and it will (hopefully) fix some of the problems I’ve been having and that I’ve been getting comments on from my other committee member and my advisor. So now we’re one week down in March and I need to be finishing the second draft of my diss as quickly as possible and then scheduling my defense. The last day to schedule is March 30^th and the last day to defend is April 13^th, with the final submission due April 20^th. Say some prayers for me. I need them.

So that’s the rough update, but I wanted to also share some more tips, carrying on from the previous two installments of this series. These are just some things I’ve noticed that have helped me and might help you as well if you’re starting or in the middle of your dissertation journey (or any other long form writing project).

Tip #7 - Pace yourself and take lots of breaks.

Getting back to basics and working out a problem
with pen and paper.

A lot of people will say it’s a marathon, not a sprint. But I hate running lol. I’m more of a hiker. So awhile back I came up with an analogy comparing a PhD to climbing a major peak like Everest or K2. (I love watching documentaries on that sort of thing). Everything happens in stages. First there's the flight to Nepal, the the trek to the smaller towns at the edge of the Himalayas, then the hike to base camp. Then actually climbing the mountain happens in stages. Base camp to Camp 1, then Camp 2, then Camp 3, then Camp 4, and then finally the summit. And they tend to climb from Base camp to Camp 1, then back down, then to Camp 2 then back down, and do on. Slowly adjusting to the altitude and learning the terrain. Once they finally make it up to Camp 4 and have acclimated, they can spend days at Camp 4 waiting for the weather to be right to make a summit attempt. And usually when they're making the summit attempt they're bodies are so pushed to the limit that they've entered what they call the "death zone". I feel like the last several months of a PhD is like being in the "death zone". We're here. We're so close to the end, like, it's actually in sight, but it's still so far. Your legs are tired, your lungs are burning, but you've come all this way, paid all this money, spent all this time, you don't want to turn around and abandon it all. It's also something that only a select few understand, many attempt a PhD, but a lot drop out along the way. So getting this close to the end is an accomplishment in itself but you can't take your eye of the path and lose your focus. The summit is where the most catastrophic mistakes can be made and I feel like the final stages of the PhD are the same. So yeah, that's my crazy analogy lol. :) 

Sometimes it's necessary to go back to your research and
reread the scholars you're leaning on.

Like with climbing, where they take breaks at the different camps and acclimate themselves over time, you have to pace yourself and build in breaks. You have to embrace that back and forth, up and down, from Camp 2 back to Base camp, Camp 3 back to Camp2, etc. You’ll write a chapter, then go back and reread some stuff, you’ll write another chapter, and then take another look at your outline and overall structure and reevaluate if it’s still what you need. Taking breaks, during the day and during the week, can help give you the mental and emotional space to see the terrain (your research) clearly and know what you’re next step needs to be. It can be tempting to just plow through and work every waking second. But you will burn out and when you get to the “death zone” of your final semester you won’t last. I have probably given myself more breaks and more days off in the last couple months than I have in any other previous two month period. I’ve just needed them that much more. So be kind to yourself. Go slowly but steadily, and take breaks when you need them. Listen to the signals your body gives you. If you feel like you need sleep. Go sleep. Don’t just make another pot of coffee. 

Tip #8 - Never stop asking for help and advice.

It’s so tempting to just keep your head down and try to fix all the problems yourself. I’ve spent my fair share of time beating myself up for feeling like I wasn’t doing something write or I wasn’t understanding a comment from my readers. But over the last few months I discovered the importance of writing with friends, asking for help, asking for advice, bouncing ideas off someone else, etc. It’s crucial if you want to get through your PhD without losing your mind. My writing buddy Jess is great for bouncing ideas off of. She doesn’t study fashion, but she’s in the rhetoric program with me, so she understands the broader ideas I’m trying to convey and manages to ask me really good questions that help me explain things more clearly. I tend to assume my audience will understand the importance of my fashion research, but I have to remind myself my audience (at least for the dissertation) are rhetoric scholars, with specialties in material culture, visual rhetoric, and feminist studies. So I have to make sure my arguments make sense to that audience.

I also have continued to reach out to my committee. I meet with my advisor every couple of months or every major milestone, whichever passes first. I ask her a million questions about what I need to know or should expect for the next stage and I know I can email her or visit her during office hours between our regular visits if anything comes up. I also meet with my readers or email when I have questions I think they will have helpful/useful perspectives on. I strategically chose my committee because they each bring something different to the table and can help me in different ways and I utilize their experience whenever possible. As I mentioned above I recently met with one of my readers and we spent nearly two hours with me spitting out thoughts, ideas, arguments about my research and her asking follow up questions that had me interrogating my ideas more deeply and then writing down all my responses. I now have 8 pages of notes to type up and organize and I think it’s going to be game changer with the rest of my revisions. Win! She also gave me a lot of reassurance that I’m doing well, my ideas are solid, and I’m on track/going at a good pace to graduate on time. Did I mention I have the best committee ever!?

Tip #9 - Stay in love with your project.

This is so important. When you’re in those last stages it can be so easy to start hating your project and wondering why on earth you chose the subject you did. I find myself having this problem from time to time, and I’m studying fashion and iconic women for goodness sake. I can only imagine the struggle if I had a topic like some of my friends. Not that my research is fluffy or superficial (I dare anyone to say to my face that they think it is!) but I freely put my hands up and say that in the field of rhetoric where my colleagues are studying deep and troubling feminist/societal issues or race relations, at least my research doesn’t leave me feeling like I need to watch Saved by the Bell or Full House reruns to think of happier things. So whether you’re researching a tough subject or your research involves a lot of stats, data, and charts that makes you want to bang your head against the wall on a daily basis, finding a way of staying in love with your project is important. 

How you do this will be different depending on your project. I used a program called Scapple (made by the team behind Scrivener) to make vision boards for each chapter and the outfits I was using for my case studies. I also watched YouTube videos related to my topic. One of the days I spent working on my chapter on Catherine, the Duchess of Cambridge I had a video of the royal wedding playing on my extra monitor. I also will frequently flip through my primary research of books and magazines featuring my women (yes, I feel very possessive and protective of them) just to remind myself of the women behind the clothing, because they’re every bit a part of this project as their clothing is (that’s kind of a big part of my argument). It was also amazing to get to see the Princess Diana exhibition. After touring that and talking with the curator who invited me to the exhibition that day, I felt so enthusiastic to get back to work. Especially after the amazing feedback I got on my conference paper that was related to the dissertation. I follow Instagram accounts related to my research subjects and seeing how Catherine and Michelle in particular are continuing to dress and approach fashion keeps things fresh. And don’t even get me started on how Meghan Markle is getting my brain turning in new directions. 

Me, in my happy place, the Bodelian Library
in Oxford, England.

So, look at your project and find ways, however big or small, to help you stay interested. Whether that’s taking a fresh look at source material, visiting a museum exhibition on your subject, collecting images that help you stay focused, listening to music, whatever it takes. Your brain will thank you for it.

That’s going to do it for now, but if you have any questions about the dissertation project that I still haven’t covered in this post or the previous two let me know in the comments. Also, if you’re a PhD student woking on your dissertation, or a Masters student working on your thesis, or working on any long form writing project, what are your tips? How are you getting through the writing process? I would love to hear from you. 

Finally, if you found this post helpful, or just generally interesting, I would love it if you would share it on any of your social media channels. Just click the “share” link at the bottom of this post. Thanks a million. :) 

Andrea xo

Read Part 4 of this series here.