This is it – My final post on the RIME blog as a graduate student. In late February I successfully defended my dissertation, made revisions through the month of March, submitted the final document in April, and graduated in May. I wondered for many weeks what I wanted the topic of my last graduate student blog post to be and came to the conclusion that no graduate student can really go wrong with some reflective advice. What do I wish I would have known a few years ago? What would I tell a graduate student who wanted insights and secrets into the world of what it is like to do an engineering education PhD?
I would tell them that their dissertation really isn’t done completely on their own. It truly is a unique version of a group project.
I will fully recognize the statement I just made is a ‘hot take’ – a potentially controversial claim. In academia dissertations are commonly framed as what is used to determine if a person and their research measures up to the standards necessary to be awarded the PhD. They are considered tests that must be ‘taken’ – in written or oral fashion – alone (as most assessments are in academia). But when reflecting upon my 4-year PhD experience, specifically the 3 that were spent working most on my own dissertation research, the credit for my dissertation belongs to many others beyond myself for various reasons. To demonstrate this, below is the checklist of basic items you will likely need for a dissertation.
Ideas and Questions – Before you can start a dissertation, you need a dissertation topic. This might sound like a simple first step, but this also might have been where I spent the most calendar days working on. Trying to find a topic that inspires and interests you enough for it to be the focus of your work for the next three years is challenging. The conversations with my advisor, other faculty, and peers ahead of me in the program were important in helping me scope and better define my interests as I worked toward a dissertation topic. These simple conversations and short notes jotted down add up over time and can inform some awesome ideas.
Data – Getting data to study is not a walk in the park. Whether you are sending out surveys, interviewing people, or gaining access to pre-exiting data sets, it is HARD to do this alone! I certainly didn’t. Whether I needed to know how long my survey took to complete, or if my interview questions were eliciting the data I needed to answer my research questions, I leveraged colleagues both inside and outside my research group. I would say a total of 10 different people helped me test either my survey or interview questions! And this doesn’t count the three people who spent a total of 17 hours in interviews with me taking detailed notes as I focused on engaging and connecting with my participants! Getting the data I did for my dissertation would not have been possible without the help of other graduate students.
Funding – Research often needs money to fund it for one reason or another. Whether that be for conference travel to present your research, incentives to encourage participants to fill out your surveys or talk to you in interviews, or data analysis services or software, research is expensive. While I tried (and tried, again) to apply for fellowships to fund my research, I did so with no such luck. For these applications I needed letters of recommendation from others who I had worked with! I couldn’t apply completely on my own. Through these experiences I gained a new perspective in rejection (see my May 2021 blog post), but did not gain money for research. Thanks to the generosity of another research team member who had funding leftover from their research and donated it to the research group as general funds, I was able to fund my own work. For this reason, when I was the recipient of professional development funding this Fall, I donated that money back to the research group to help someone else fund their dissertation research!
Quality Checks – Once you get all of your data you will have a whole lot of analysis to do. Despite all of the YouTube videos that exist on JMP software, I had to call on a graduate student and post doc more experienced than I am to help me work through some quantitative analysis roadblocks. And quantitative analysis was the smaller portion of my analysis! While doing my qualitative analysis I was consistently (like once a month) checking in with multiple members of my research group to check the quality of my work to 1) minimize the influence of my positionality and implicit biases in my data analysis and 2) ensure I was documenting my methods in a repeatable and consistent way. I would also do similar regular check-ins with my advisor and my committee members. Leveraging the expertise of others who are strong where you may not have the knowledge or expertise needed at that time is a sign of good and responsible research practices and important to improve the quality of your work.
Editing. A lot of Editing. – And finally comes the writing… that I mostly saved for the end – don’t do that. But for when you inevitably procrastinate this part of the dissertation process and you spend 4 straight months writing, you will need editors. There comes a point when you know something too well and you’ve spent too much time with the data. Your writing will make sense and be clear to you, but probably not anyone else. This is where the perspective of others is helpful. Ask as many people as you can to read it across a spectrum of expertise levels and disciplines. You will want people to read for if it even makes sense, if sections are in an order that flows well, if spelling/grammar/tense are all correct, if your figures and tables are organized clearly, etc. I must have had 15 different people read and give me feedback on anything from individual paragraphs to the whole 200-page document, and while this process was iterative and exhausting, I am a much better writer for it.
While my experience is only my own and is likely different than the experiences of others in different disciplines and at other universities, I still think the belief that dissertation research is meant to be the work of a single person and that person alone is an outdated definition of the experience and not reflective of the world of research. I kept hearing encouragement to the tune of “this is the last time you’ll have to do research alone” as I was trudging through my final year, but I didn’t do my research alone. I had the mentorship of my advisor and committee, and the support of my research group colleagues and peers in the program. What I believe is the truly individual aspect of completing a dissertation is learning to identify your group project members – the mentorship and support needed – and taking the initiative to pursue and leverage those group members to elevate the quality of your research and the quality of the experience you have.