Writing my Dissertation

So I have finally graduated. This is the first of a few posts on my experiences in grad school.

Some observations on writing my dissertation:

#1: I started early. And it was the best thing ever.

I should have bought myself a cake for doing this. Maybe I still will.

Simply put, there is no substitute for starting early. Absolutely none. It sounds like the most overstated work advice ever, and it kind of is, but when you do it, you realize why. It feels like getting escorted out of cramped coach mid-flight and being placed in luxurious first-class. I’ve never flown first class, but I started my thesis early, and that’s what it feels like.

Nonetheless, I, and many other people, continue to violate this principle time and time again; most of the time for the innocent reason of “I’ve got other stuff to do.” That sounds reasonable, but let’s put it this way, you have little hope of escaping a stressful thesis writing experience if you don’t start early.

“I know I should, but how can I get myself to actually start early?”

Excellent question, this gets me to observation #2…

#2: Early on, I blocked off time. A little bit of time. And it was quite useful.

I blocked off such a small amount of time early on that I wasn’t quite sure if it would be useful, but I scheduled it when I knew I could get something done, and it paid off. For me, this was Friday afternoon.

Friday afternoon was the time least likely for my mind to convince me there were other more urgent things going on. Basically because there weren’t; a perfect time to get in a couple hours of thesis writing. Not to mention, it makes Friday afternoon feel a hell of a lot more useful.

It may not sound like much, but in just 1 month you can log anywhere from 8-12 hours, and it barely feels like you did anything. In two months, that’s 24 hours. If you block of a few more hours on, say, Sunday afternoon, that’s 48 hours in two months without any feelings of a monstrous thesis looming over you. That’s priceless.

These are useful hours too, because they come in 2 hour chunks, as opposed to an all-nighter when you’re brain is fried and you want to kill the world and you’re writing nonsense that you’ll be deleting later.

#3: No one really cared about the details, or much of it at all.

This observation is definitely specific to my particular field. I’m in engineering, and the culture of our department is such that no one really cares about your Ph.D. thesis, and other things matter for your post-Ph.D. career (e.g., publications for academia or experience for industry). You do, however, need to have a thesis, it often needs to be a of some subjective length (in my case, dependent on professors’ biases), and needs to have a general flow.

I had 3 committee members. One didn’t seem to really read it. The other corrected english errors and typos for about 20 pages then stopped. The last seemed to read it in the most detail and actually had some non-trivial big picture scientific objections. So it was hit or miss. Nonetheless, there was some work involved, but not getting hung up on ridiculous details was a worthwhile decision for me (see observation #5).

#4: LaTeX was quite useful.

It was the first time I used LaTeX, and frankly, I was reluctant to because I knew I wasn’t going to use it again, but I got a template that had all the formatting requirements for my school written in, so that convinced me. Boy was it awesome. I could have wasted hours managing figures, equations, and references, but I didn’t. There’s been a lot written on LaTeX so I won’t belabor this any longer.

#5: I avoided attaching my entire self-worth to it.

I don’t want to get all woo-wooy on you, but I will. There’s this feeling I started to get sometimes, that it seems isn’t unique to just me, that involves some level of perfectionism about the thesis; that is, I sometimes slipped into thinking that the quality, breadth, and polish of my Ph.D. thesis was somehow a reflection of me and all that I’ve accomplished in my life so far.

Obviously, it isn’t.

There’s a reason you have to write “in partial fulfillment” on that title page. The Ph.D. is a long haul, and there are multiple milestones along the way. Obsessing over getting this one last document perfect will drive you insane, and likely build up all kinds of resentment towards working on it, which will make it suck more, countermining your original goal of having it suck less.

Caveat: Obviously this observation stems directly from #3, which may not be true of many fields (e.g. humanities). I’ve heard that in some fields it basically will decide academic jobs, your self-worth, whether your children will love you, etc. But if the thesis has an irrelevance factor for you at all, I recommend convincing yourself to chill out as much as possible; it’s bound to make the process a lot less painful. It worked wonders for me.

Those of you with alternate experiences, tell us about your lessons learned in the comments.