Notes from the Dissertation Desk #4 (the one where I submit my diss!)

As I sit at home writing this blog post, I have passed my defense and walked in graduation. I’m officially PhDone. Now that I’ve had some time and space from the defense and submitting my final dissertation I wanted to write a final post in the Dissertation Desk series. You can read Part 1 here, Part 2 here, and Part 3 here. This final post will focus on lessons I learned as I finished up my diss, prepared for the defense, defended it, and submitted the dissertation.

Once I had mostly finished my dissertation—Chapters 2-7 had been through two revisions, Chapter 1 through one—I met with my advisor (this was in mid March) to talk about scheduling my defense. She agreed I was ready and later that day I’d managed to get everyone to commit to April 4. I rushed to finish up revisions and get all my separate chapters combined into one document so that my committee could read through the whole dissertation, start to finish. Once that date was set things began to move very, very quickly. I was feeling the pressure to get everything done and it felt like the hours passed more like minutes. During the drafting and early editing process, days would pass slowly and I had plenty of time to think about my research, but now, I felt like I had no time at all. 

Throughout this series I’ve included a few tips in each post to get you through the dissertation process. These tips have all come from my own dissertation process, mistakes made and lessons learned. So now that my dissertation is done, it’s time to wrap of the series with my last few tips.

Tip #10 - Pay CLOSE attention to deadlines

As you near the end of your final semester/defending your dissertation make sure you are aware of the deadlines set by both your department and your graduate college. In the dissertation process there will be some deadlines that might be flexible—such as those set between you and your advisor—but there will be some deadlines that are considerably less flexible—such as those set by the graduate college. I nearly got myself into a bunch of trouble because of this. Thankfully my program manager was able to save me. At my uni, we have to apply to defend 10 working days before our defense. It’s not just a matter of scheduling it with your committee, you have to schedule it with the grad college too. Oops. I was one day off. I sent a panicked email to my program manager and she was able to schedule it for me. But because she did it, I missed the bit where we have to submit a formatted draft of the dissertation…at the same time, 10 working days before the defense. Double oops. I got an email from the grad college giving me a short extension but I still had to format the dissertation in one day (not advisable) and then waited anxiously to see if it would get passed through the revision process in time. Because this process is apparently much more important than I realized and you can’t defend until it passes this process. I got the go ahead from the grad college the day before my defense. Whew! 

So learn from my mistakes. Pay attention to all the deadlines. Double and triple check them. And aim to get everything in a few days ahead of those deadlines. The dissertation writing process is often very isolating. You’re working on your own and setting your own deadlines. But as you near the end of your PhD journey, your committee, your department, the graduate college are all going to come into play and they’re all going to have their own deadlines and expectations. So make sure you know about them all and are managing those expectations and deadlines accordingly. It will make the process so much less stressful. 

Tip #11 - Give yourself enough time to prepare for the defense

The defense can be a crazy and nerve-wracking time. So give yourself plenty of time to prepare, don’t wait until a few days before. Ideally, be done with the major prep by a day or so before so you can relax that last day before and get plenty of sleep the night before. Because of the above deadline confusion, the day I was going to make major progress on my defense prep was instead spent on formatting. Looking back I wish I’d cleared my schedule a little more, but I got it done. But as those watching the weekly vlog from that week of the defense I was working on it up until about 8pm the night before (I do NOT advise doing this!) and it took my friend the next few hours to scrape me off the ceiling and calm me down enough to go to sleep. 

Give yourself time to prepare as well as time to rest before the defense. The defense is quite possibly the biggest day of your entire PhD journey. You might think graduation is—and don’t get me wrong, graduation was awesome—but graduation is just a party. The defense is what you’ve been working years towards, it’s what all this work comes down to. You, in a room, in front of your committee, explaining and defending your work. And when you pass, you’re a doctor! I walked in to the Languages & Literature building (LL as we affectionately call it) Andrea, a PhD candidate…I walked out of that building Dr. Severson. You want to be able to enjoy the defense and your success, so prepare well and get enough sleep the night before.

Tip #12 - Post-Defense Revisions…just breathe and get it done

In my program, the typical defense outcome is a “pass with minor revisions,” a “high pass” or a “pass with major revisions” happen, but rarely, and a good advisor would never let a candidate schedule a defense if they expected a “fail.” But that’s my program. You have to know the relationship with your advisor and what the usual situation is for your department. We all hear the horror stories of advisors who steal student’s work or don’t read/give feedback on any chapters prior to the defense. If you’re in that situation you’ll need to get help from friends you trust to help you fully prepare.

In my case I received a “pass with minor revisions,” which was amazing because I was prepared for major revisions based on previous feedback and self-doubt that I’d fully addressed all of the previous comments. Apparently I had. But I scheduled my defense to give me plenty of time in case I did have major revisions. I defended on April 4, formatted dissertations had to be submitted to the grad college by April 20, so that gave me just under two weeks to make any revisions. The final revised and formatted draft had to be submitted by April 27. Thankfully because I only needed minor revisions I had everything done in a matter of days, I didn’t need the full time. But if you can schedule to defend earlier rather than later, it can give you more breathing room to make any requested revisions—or can help you finish your PhD before the end of the semester. 

So there you have it, those are the last of my tips for now. There might be a follow up to this series as I think about other things I wish I’d known about the dissertation process. Writing a PhD dissertation (or any kind of thesis/dissertation process really) is long, exhausting, and full of self-doubt and second guessing. But at the end of the day you just have to get it done. If I take this forward to publish it there will be about a million and one things that get changed. But for the PhD all I had to do was pass (my dissertation chair’s exact words, not mine). So as the end of the semester creeped up on me I just focused on getting it all done as quickly and as best as I could.

I did it! I'm Dr. Severson!

The defense itself was a blur, I’m glad I recorded it for my YouTube channel (watch it here) so I could relive it later with a clear head. It was a pretty amazing day and as nervous as I was, I also really enjoyed it. The days after the defense went back to that slow feeling I was used to from the writing process. I had few enough revisions and enough time before I had to submit that I could take a couple days to sleep and let my body recover before diving into the revisions. When I finally submitted the dissertation it felt so weird. Like I literally had nothing to do now. Sure, I had stuff to do, but the dissertation had consumed 90% of my life and now it was over. I don’t think anything can prepare you for that feeling. And I don’t think I can fully describe it, that’s for another blog post perhaps.

Did you defend and submit this semester? How did you feel afterwards? Would love to hear in the comments. Are you defending soon? If so, try not to worry, you’re going to ace it.

Please say hello in the comments, I love hearing from readers. And if you found this post helpful, please feel free to share it on your socials.

Until next time,

Andrea