Source image credit: statue-of-libertWelcome to the inaugural edition of The Doctor Is In, a recurring column on The GradPost where UCSB faculty answer graduate students' questions about life in academia. In this installment, three members of our outstanding faculty panel answer your questions about balancing competing priorities, the hardest part about writing a dissertation, and bouncing back from setbacks and disappointments.
About Our Faculty Panel
Miroslava Chavez-GarciaDr. Miroslava Chávez-García is Professor and Vice-Chair of the Chicana & Chicano Studies Department at UCSB. She received her Ph.D. in History from UCLA and is the author of the book "States of Delinquency: Race and Science in the Making of California's Juvenile Justice System" as well as articles on gender, patriarchy, and the law in 19th century California. She organizes and leads professional development workshops for UCSB and the Ford Foundation and is particularly passionate about helping scholars of color navigate academia.
Merith CosdenDr. Merith Cosden is a Professor and Interim Dean of the Givertz Graduate School of Education at UCSB. She received her Ph.D. in Clinical Psychology from the University of New Mexico and conducts research on drug courts and intervention for individuals with substance abuse and mental health problems in the criminal justice system. She is a recipient of the UCSB Graduate Mentor Award and the Santa Barbara Psychological Association Legacy Award.
Aaron EttenbergDr. Aaron Ettenberg is a Professor in the Psychological & Brain Sciences Department at UCSB. He received his Ph.D. in Psychopharmacology from McGill University and conducts research on the neurobiology of reinforcement and motivation with particular interest in the neural basis of drug abuse. He is a recipient of the UCSB Distinguished Teaching Award and the UCSB Graduate Mentor Award.
Q: How can one balance professional and/or creative pursuits along with graduate coursework and research?
Dr. Ettenberg: Graduate students work hard, there’s no question about that! However, most graduate students have no sense of how much heavier the workload will be if they succeed and get a job in the private or academic sector post-graduation. So if you think you are working hard now as a graduate student, you should know that the load gets only heavier and the hill significantly steeper as you begin life in the “real” world after UCSB.
All that simply means that there’s no better time than now, when you are still in graduate school, to learn how to successfully juggle multiple tasks and responsibilities – indeed, your success in learning to presently meet this challenge will make your path far easier down the road. So what to do? How to begin? You could actually hire a career coach or consultant (for a considerable fee); this is someone who gets paid to help executives handle time management challenges. But here’s a sneak peak at their approach – and with no payment required!
First, you have to sit down with a pen and paper and calendar and identify the various tasks and responsibilities that are on your desk, including upcoming items that you know will soon arrive on that desk. Literally mark down what needs to be accomplished over the next week or month or quarter. Get organized! Then, identify realistic deadlines by which each task needs to be completed. Finally, look at your schedule and – again realistically – allocate time in your day or week or month for successfully meeting each deadline. Then stick to your plan!
In my own personal experience, you can no longer afford to simply deal with just one thing at a time; there are simply too many things that require your attention. If you are the kind of person that leaves everything to the last moment, then you will eventually begin dropping the ball and letting things pile up and inevitably fall through the cracks (pick your metaphor). Yes, it will seem strange and a bit of a pain at the start, but once you get into the habit of successfully organizing and managing your time, of looking ahead and planning for what’s to come and not just what’s directly in front of you, then you will find that you are not only accomplishing more and being more efficient, but remarkably you will also find that you have actually freed up more time for activities that you want to do and not just have to do.
Dr. Cosden: My advice is twofold. First, tell yourself that graduate school is not a normal time in your life; it is five or six years devoted to your training. Thus, you may not have as much time as you would like or that you will have in the future for other activities. Second, do spend time with friends, especially those that understand your pressures and availabilities. Make fellow students your friends and not your competitors, and you will have them now and for years to come. For the important people in your life who are not students, help them understand what it means to be on a strange quarter schedule. Enjoy time with them when it fits the quarter, and work harder when you have obligations and deadlines without feeling stressed or getting behind in your work.
Q: What was the biggest hurdle you faced writing your dissertation and how did you overcome it?
Dr. Chávez-García: That’s an easy answer – writing. In graduate school, writing was extremely difficult for me because I came to it with weak writing skills. As an immigrant and native Spanish-speaker from a low-income, working class background, I was far removed from writing intelligently, much less academically. And, even though I attended a prestigious public undergraduate institution, I received little one-on-one instruction. I simply fell through the cracks, as many do in the 30,000+ student body populations.
When I got to graduate school, little did I know that my writing was indeed poor. Fortunately, a professor suggested I take a basic course at a community college, a suggestion that alerted me to the gravity of the situation. I was even more fortunate in my third year of graduate school when my advisor took me under his wing and taught me nearly everything I needed to know about writing. It was a painful process, but writing well enough to be understood by a general audience was (and remains) a priceless gift.
As an Assistant Professor, I improved my writing by strengthening the mechanics of the process, enabling me to publish a first book. It was not until I was an Associate Professor working on a second book that I developed a style that allowed me to engage a wider audience. And, I must admit, I actually enjoyed the process, even though it was difficult. But before I began writing, I made up my mind that I wanted “regular” people – not just academics – to read my book. To learn new writing techniques, I read many books (mostly historical fiction) by authors I sought to emulate as well as books and journals on the process of scholarly and popular writing. I even joined Writer’s Digest. Through that process, I produced a study that I know has been read by more people than the first. I hope to make my new project – a family history – even more widely accessible.
Today, I continue to polish my writing by attending writing workshops, circulating preliminary work to colleagues, and submitting articles to journals for publication. And, I would add, writing for blogs and similar online spaces also enhances the fluidity that should (but often does not) come with writing. Rejection notices – while painful (I’ve learned to contain the pain, something you’ll learn over the years) – provide a useful opportunity to expand your lexicon and style. I also recommend organizing or participating in peer-based writing groups, which I only recently attended since graduate school, and found it immensely energizing and rewarding. Writing is a lonely and difficult process and, as I often say, the main reason why people don’t finish their Ph.Ds. and why associate professors don’t advance to full professors, but you can find ways to change that without heading down an abyss.
Dr. Ettenberg: This one is simple – the biggest hurdle I faced in writing my dissertation was Time – and more specifically, my inadequate estimation of how much time would be required to complete the task. And I can honestly tell you that in my 32 years of mentoring graduate students here at UCSB, that hurdle is as relevant today as it was back in the Pleistocene Age when I was writing my own dissertation in 1980. Truly every one of the 16 doctoral students that I have mentored during my tenure here has underestimated (admittedly to varying degrees) the amount of time it took to complete the writing of their dissertation. The need for multiple drafts, incorporating the comments of one’s advisor and committee members, the time it takes to check references, footnotes and citations, of ensuring that the document is carefully edited for grammatical and spelling errors, etc. is well in excess of what you will think it will take to complete these tasks.
And of course the driving force here cannot be a campus deadline for dissertation submission – you, the student, need to make certain that you give yourself (and your committee) sufficient time to read, evaluate and edit the document before it is ready for final submission. The argument that “the committee has to read this by next week or I won't be able to graduate at the end of fall quarter” is, quite frankly, not the committee’s problem, it is the student’s problem. So give yourself ample time to complete the component tasks required for dissertation submission, and then double that number and you will better approximate how long it will actually take. (And no, I am not kidding!)
Now of course the time required to write a dissertation does vary by discipline and by graduate student within each discipline, so the best advice I can give you is to sit down with your advisor and identify a realistic timetable for the various steps that you will need to take in order to accomplish your goal. You can start with a campus submission deadline and then work backward…. how long does the committee need to read the thesis, how long will you need to complete changes/edits required by the committee, how long will it take to complete the first draft of each chapter, etc. Then take your timeline and run it by your advisor for a reality check. And then take his/her advice about any changes (usually lengthening) to your proposed timeline. Your advisor has much more experience about such matters than you do! Do not fool yourself into thinking that if you lock yourself in a room and work through without resting that you will be able to complete this in less time than your advisor proposes – you won’t! And if by some chance you will, then it is highly likely that the quality of your product will not be up to the standards that your advisor, the committee, or even yourself would like to see.
Q: How do you recommend bouncing back from a setback or disappointment in graduate school (such as taking an incomplete in a class, failing to get published or accepted to a conference, or missing a milestone deadline)?
Dr. Cosden: Evaluation is not just part of a graduate student’s plight. As faculty members, we are often evaluated professionally – in terms of our publications, presentations, teaching, and promotions. Thus, learning to deal with negative feedback is important for one’s long-term career. When receiving a negative review of one’s research or failure to get a paper accepted, my recommendation is to be sad and angry for a while and then to see how the feedback makes sense. We tend to get so close to our work that we are not able to evaluate it effectively ourselves. It is sometimes the case that we do not express our ideas as clearly as needed. A lot of the feedback we receive is useful, and the rest you can ignore.
Taking an incomplete or missing a milestone represent a different type of setback. One of the hardest things for graduate students to learn is how to organize their time and establish realistic goals. In my experience, almost all graduate students underestimate the time required for their dissertations. You need to give yourself enough time to accomplish each task. This means devoting the time needed to your graduate student requirements as well as setting realistic timelines for your work.
Got a question for our expert panel? Submit your query to Shawn Warner-Garcia, the Graduate Division’s Professional Development Peer Advisor.