People say that every PhD journey looks different. As a student who is used to working at a high level and pushing through obstacles, it was difficult to imagine that I would need to approach my dissertation work different than my peers who function in a very similar way. People say that a doctorate degree is a completely different educational experience than an undergraduate and even master’s degree. As a student that completed an engineering undergraduate and master’s degree in six years, I thought I had nailed down how to be a successful higher education student. I set time-based milestones in each of my previous degrees as a way to motivate my progress toward completing them. I thought I could use the same tactic for motivating progress toward my dissertation.
As it turns out, I was wrong.
Burnout is no joke. Attempting to complete three higher education degrees in succession without a break can cause some serious feelings of burnout. A worldwide pandemic is no joke. Living with a genetic lung disease that causes you to take quarantining extra seriously leads to some serious feelings of loss and lack of motivation. The combination of these two mentally heavy loads along with extremely high expectations of myself led to a much overdue breakdown and halt in my dissertation progress. When this happened, I had to have a serious look at how I was and was not functioning as a PhD student.
At that moment I turned to my advisor.
Together we worked to create a new system for how I motivate and make progress toward completing dissertation milestones. For me this looked like focusing more on the learning process and not as much on sticking to a timeline I had previously created. I had to change my mindset of meeting deadlines to leaning into my curiosity and passion for K-12 engineering education. This alleviated a lot of my daily stress and allowed me to begin making progress again. My biggest takeaways from this very hard lesson to learn are that completing a dissertation can require a change in mindset on how you get work done, be honest with yourself when things aren’t going well, and ask for help early and often.