Your Expectations and Your Work Schedule

Ph.D. students are expected to be self-directed. Students at the all-but-dissertation (ABD) stage of their programs have already earned degrees in rigorous academic undergraduate and graduate programs and have shown the ability to excel under time pressures and the pressures of academic competition. Furthermore, Ph.D. students often are already teachers who understand the importance of setting a course schedule and sticking to it throughout an academic term. In addition, everyone understands that Ph.D. students also have lives to juggle--families, other jobs, and complex life situations--while they write their dissertations and complete their degrees.

While all of this would lead one to expect the Ph.D. student to be self-directed and meticulous about deadlines and work schedules, in point of fact the opposite is often the case. For one thing, ABD students usually have never written a monograph and are not familiar with the considerable differences in audience and purpose of this project--differences that demand much higher levels of concentration and commitment than did earlier projects. ABD students also are sometimes not as aware as they should be that these differences in audience and purpose now have real-world consequences in ways that previous student writing did not. This project will in fact directly and materially impact your life if you plan to teach at a U.S. college or university after you get your degree.

And importantly, writing a book is hard work, and many ABD students simply don't want to, or are not able to, commit the time and energy that is required to complete a book in a professional field. Many students happily soar through their graduate classes and manage to do well on their comprehensive exams, yet then find themselves unable to sit down and write the dissertation. The inability to write or complete a dissertation is common, and it happens for all kinds of reasons. Sometimes the reasons are material: some students have family obligations or life situations that simply do not give them the luxury of committing another year to quiet intellectual work. Sometimes a student finds that while s/he loves to read and discuss books, s/he is actually bored by what constitutes "professional" literary criticism and theory these days, and would prefer the life of a highly qualified amateur (for instance, writing wonderful online book reviews and blogs and/or being involved in community book cultures). Sometimes, having been given as models only the few "stars" of the profession or the academic life portrayed in David Lodge novels, the student is shocked to find out how monastic a professor's life can be and leaves to seek jobs with more social interaction, more life involvement, and/or more pay. Sometimes the politics of the academy turns students off, and sometimes the low-pay-high-work stress of academic life leaves them disillusioned, and they leave to work in other fields. Sometimes students find that they just aren't smart enough to compete intellectually at the levels of this new arena. Sometimes, students just decide to do something else.

On the other hand, those students who "fit" with their Ph.D. programs often find that this is the best kind of life that they could imagine. Practically speaking, while most English professors don't get paid well, we do, after all, get to read poems, plays, and novels for a living. But more importantly, while writing may be demanding work, it can be one of the most rewarding things that you do--not only because it's nice to see a book on a shelf with your name on it, but also because the process of writing involves one in a life-long pursuit of knowledge and ideas. Living the professorial life can mean being a student--in the best sense of being fundamentally involved in the creation of human ideas that alter life and history and human endeavor--for the rest of your life.

How to Plan Your Degree Timetable

These are the key pieces of information always to keep in the foreground if you want to earn your Ph.D. at UT within the five-year funding period. First, there is the English Department’s general schedule for completing your Ph.D. Second, there are the UT Graduate School requirements for completion of your thesis and degree. Finally, there are my deadlines as teacher of this "course." As the director of Ph.D. dissertations, I try to dovetail all three to help you graduate in a timely fashion.

Why is it important to get your degree within four years?

There are a number of reasons why you should try hard to finish your degree in four years or less. Unless you are independently wealthy, living on a graduate student stipend for more than four years will kill you financially in the short term and will cut into your retirement earnings in the long run. (Starting to earn a "real" salary at age 30 puts you about eight years behind a normal retirement savings schedule, and you probably aren't going to have a high starting salary so that you can quickly compensate for this delay.) Being a graduate student for more than four years will also eat into your psychology: more and more you will be working as a professor in the academy but will not have the degree or status associated with graduate professorial positions, and this can be an exhausting mental place to live. (There also is always an Oedipal dimension to graduate student-advisor relations; you need to resolve the conflict and move on as soon as you can.)

There are also real, but often unstated, professional reasons for getting out fast. First, while the academy prides itself on its fair hiring practices, in reality it has a serious prejudice for youth. Departments will often hire young scholars from good schools who seem to have potential over more "seasoned," older scholars; a new Ph.D. who has gotten his/her degree in fewer than four years gets a check in the "plus column" when hiring committees review his/her resume. Sometimes departments prefer to hire "young" or newly minted scholars for financial reasons (most departments can pay assistant professors less), and sometimes the reality of academe is that it nurtures deep class and age prejudices (though it tends to define these slightly differently than does the public at large).

Second and most importantly, getting your degree in four or five years or less tells a hiring committee that you are able to do research within the same kinds of time frames that you will need to follow when on the tenure track. When you are hired in a tenure-earning position, you enter a "probationary period" usually of 5 years in which you are expected to prove that you are and will continue to be a scholar who produces important research and is in constant dialogue with the most important ideas of your field. Usually this is translated into very mundane terms: you need a book for tenure. If you show now that you can't produce a dissertation in four years--with all the attendant help and advising you are getting from your Ph.D. committee--then you do not inspire confidence that down the line, on the four- or five-year tenure track, on your own, you will be able to earn tenure.

What do you need to do first?

At this beginning stage of your dissertation work, you need to do a few things.

• First, you need to memorize the timetables provided by the Department of English in the Graduate Student Handbook: Timetables are at the end of that document. Pay particular attention to recommended deadlines for submitting your dissertation prospectus, your first task.

• Second, you need to set up an appointment with me a few weeks after passing your last comprehensive examination in order to talk about your dissertation project and work schedule. I probably have been your unofficial or official graduate advisor up to this point, and know where you are in the program and what your dissertation will be about, but there are still many things to talk about as we work through each step of this project.
  Look at some dissertation prospecti from former students in our department to see what a good dissertation prospectus and summary look like. Set up your committee and start working on your prospectus early.

• Third, look at some really good, perhaps award-winning, dissertations. Get a feel for what a good dissertation in your field looks like. Remember that in contemporary arts studies, in addition to critical theory and literary criticism, there are projects such as author studies that can take you into historical and archival work.

• Start looking at the introductions of lots of good books in your topic area. Make notes on how the introduction is organized and what is said in it. Most importantly, look carefully at how the author frames and highlights his/her argument. How are you able to tell what the main argument of the book will be from the first few pages of the introduction? How is the argument framed and stated succinctly as a thesis claim? How does the author frame a rationale for the study? How does the author claim ethos in relation to other published work in the field? And after reading many introductions, which led you to think the books they introduced were important, which didn't, and what was it about the book summary that led you to draw these conclusions? The point: you will need to write a dissertation prospectus before beginning your project, and in the dissertation you will eventually need to write an introduction: both documents will require a statement of purpose and conveyance of ethos of the kind you see in these book introductions.

• Also start looking for ways to fund your dissertation period apart from teaching. There are many scholarships and grants available both nationally and locally at UT that will give you money to write your dissertation. (Often the grants and scholarships are considerably higher than what you would earn as a graduate teaching assistant. The American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS), for example, offers 64 Mellon dissertation grants for one-year with stipend and benefits of $33,000.)

• Find out about all travel grants available: you will need start presenting your work at professional conferences, and you might need to travel to libraries to research your subject. (See, for example, the UT Graduate Student Travel Fund.) Getting grants and scholarships to fund your travel and dissertation research not only gives you time and money to do this project well; it also gives you important CV lines when you go on the job market.

• Finally, this might seem odd to say, but think about where you plan to work and about creating an optimum writing environment for this project. See if it is possible to secure a study or writing space in the library, for instance. Many dissertations go astray simply because their writers have not set aside space and time to write. Different writers write differently, and you may be one of those people who can churn out a perfect 30-page chapter at odd, snatched wee hours while the baby is crying and the dishwasher is running and the books you need are out of pocket at another location. If you're not, then think now about when and where you can write on a daily, regular basis. Studies have shown that people who write 1/2 hour a day every day of the week end up accomplishing more, writing more, and finishing projects more frequently than people who write for 8 straight hours once every two weeks. Much academic work is accomplished not through shining bouts of brilliance but by resolute plodding. Work steadily, and develop regular work habits: it will pay off in the long run.

Starting your project: the Dissertation Prospectus

The UT English Department requires you formally to submit a dissertation prospectus to the Graduate Office and have it approved before starting your dissertation. A summary of this proposal will also be distributed to every member of the English graduate faculty. So before you begin your dissertation and ask graduate faculty to serve as readers on your dissertation committee, you need to have an extremely clear idea what your dissertation will be about, how you will write about this topic, what you want to say about it. All the members of your dissertation committee need to approve your dissertation proposal before it is sent to the English Graduate Office for department approval.

Look up dissertation prospecti on file in the English Graduate Office to see what these look like and how they function. Prepare to submit at least two drafts of the proposal to your dissertation director (me) before it goes to other members of your dissertation committee, and prepare to revise further after meeting with the committee before being given permission to submit the proposal and committee roster to the Graduate Office. This means that for a dissertation prospectus to be approved and distributed to the faculty by fall of your fourth year, you need to begin as soon as possible after passing your last comprehensive exam in year 3.

Any good dissertation prospectus will require you to do the following:

• Research the topic that you wish to address in your thesis. Look through the MLA Bibliography and other databases (Humanities Index, databases in history, psychology, anthropology, linguistics, or other areas related to your topic), and do a thorough search of online web sites and resources. Remember Dissertation Abstracts.

  HELPFUL HINT 1: Actually walk over to the library and spend some time looking at books on the shelves. Sometimes you find wonderful resources that you never would have thought to look for just by physically seeing books germane to your topic. I am amazed at how often graduate students these days simply ignore the physical space of the library: make that space your own.

  HELPFUL HINT 2: Look at the bibliographies and Works Cited sections of good books about your topic. You might find resources (books, articles, web sites, etc.) there that you missed in your own database searches.

• Compile a full working bibliography of sources that you will read for your study. Get an idea of what has been written about your topic and compile working primary and secondary bibliographies. These are required parts of the prospectus, but you need to do this bibliographical work anyway for the dissertation, so start early. This bibliography must be as complete as possible, though it is assumed that you will add to it as you write the dissertation itself and find other sources relevant to your argument. By the end of the dissertation process, you must have read the entire “conversation” about your topic in order to participate in it with ethos. If there are 100 books on your topic, and you don’t want to read them all, then you need to choose another topic. If you don’t want to read literary criticism and/or critical theory at all, then you should go into a different line of work.

HELPFUL HINT 3: Start collecting your resources as you compile your bibliography. Order any books and articles that you will need to look at that are not available online or currently available through our library. Sometimes it takes a while for books to be returned to Hodges if they are checked out or for articles to arrive through ILL, and you don’t want to be held up later. Order what you need now.


• Write a draft of your dissertation prospectus, and attach your working bibliography. A full prospectus is approximately 20-30 pages in length. Give me the draft of your proposal, and discuss it and the overall plans for your project with me thoroughly and as often as need be in order to clarify your project in your own mind and to make the dissertation prospectus as clear, logical, and effective as possible. Your prospectus should include the following:

--  a brief but explicit description of the project (What is your topic? How would you characterize your study? What is it about?);

-- a clear statement of your hypothesis, argument and thesis (What questions are you going to address? What are you going to investigate and prove?);

-- a STATEMENT OF SIGNIFICANCE that clearly shows how your project engages with the critical conversation about your topic (i.e., a statement about how your paper is different from and adds to existing scholarship). THIS IS THE MOST IMPORTANT PART OF ANY PROPOSAL.  How might your argument change standard interpretations of a work, a theory, or a cultural site? What are the important disciplinary ramifications of your study? Why should anyone care about your discussion?

-- a chapter-by-chapter summary of the dissertation. What is the title, topic, and focus of each chapter? What primary and secondary sources will inform each chapter? How does each chapter develop the overall argument of the dissertation? Have any chapters been published to date? (See the Guide to Writing Dissertations: you are allowed to include newly published work in your dissertation under specific circumstances.)

-- a brief argument for your qualifications to do the project. (Why should I be confident in your ability to do this project well and according to schedule?) and a schedule for completion of the project;

-- attached, your working bibliography.

• Submit a final draft of your prospectus to the dissertation committee. After I approve it, you can take it to the other graduate faculty on your committee to inform them about your project. You may also take the proposal to faculty you wish to add to the committee at this point, to elucidate for them what your project will be and convince them to be on your committee. The committee will meet as a whole at a "prospectus defense" shortly thereafter. This is a meeting at which members of a prospective dissertation committee come together to discuss the proposal with you. (You should come prepared to answer questions, but bring questions you have as well.) Questions can deal with any aspect of the proposal, and suggestions are typically made concerning the project’s definition and plan of attack. This is the only time the whole committee will meet together before the defense, and so this is an opportunity to make sure that the project is launched in a way that everyone can support. Usually, the prospectus is approved pending whatever revisions the committee wants made to it. You will then work with me on final revisions, and we will send it on the the English Graduate Office; if it is approved, the summary will be distributed to all of the English professorial faculty.

Writing the Dissertation:

If you write your dissertation with me, you probably will submit your chapters to me and to other committee members as they are written and revised, unless a committee member has requested that s/he receive the entire revised dissertation at the end of your writing process. The procedure will be this: you will write a chapter and revise it, then send it to me. I'll read it and suggest revisions, we'll meet and discuss those revisions, and then you will revise the chapter and send it back to me. If the chapter needs no further revisions, I'll recommend that you send it on to the other committee members. You may send chapters one or two at a time to other committee members, as they have requested at the prospectus defense. Your committee members and I will suggest further revisions of the chapter, which need to be completed before the full draft of the dissertation is submitted to the committee. Thus you can expect at least two revisions per chapter, maybe more.

This kind of schedule means that you will need to take responsibility for your own deadlines as the year goes on. Generally, you should allot approximately 2-3 months of research and writing time per chapter. As you can see, however, at some points you may be writing one chapter and revising another at the same time--while you may be teaching and juggling home schedules. There is only one thing to do in this situation (which is essentially the situation you will find yourself in for the rest of your academic career): make a work schedule and stick ruthlessly to it.