Context

Students considering pursuing PhDs with me often want to know about how I approach graduate advising.

There’s lots I could write about this. I will do that in future posts.

For now, I thought I’d post this message. It’s an updated version of a message I sent my then-current advisees several years back about how I think about the formal milestones that they progress through en route to degree, and my own responsibilities in supporting them as they make that journey.

A Message to My Advisees

Dear Students,

Here are my process expectations for how you will work with me and your committees to complete your doctoral dissertations. These expectations stem from my own experiences as a student (see the current policies for that program), as well as my observations over the years of what seems to best ensure a doctoral degree process that avoids being unnecessarily stressful while still yielding high quality work.

You should think of these as defaults: I’ll assume them, and hold you to them unless we agree otherwise. When there’s a need to over-ride them, we can discuss the best ways to do so. Because these may not be other faculty members’ defaults, it is my responsibility as advisor (i.e. committee chair) to also share these with your other committee members and ensure their understanding of and compliance to them. In cases where I am co-advising you, this document reflects my starting place for negotiating expectations with you and your other co-advisor(s).

If have you have not already read the University of Washington graduate school rules, I encourage you to do so. My expectations are a superset of theirs. The graduate school rules state that a dissertation defense may be scheduled when the following conditions (among others) are met: “…(b) a reading committee is officially established with the Graduate School; (c) the reading committee has read an entire draft of the dissertation and; (d) the entire supervisory committee has agreed that the student is prepared…” The process I prefer (and describe here) includes a clear mechanism for the the supervisory committee to reach agreement about your readiness, one that is deliberately intended to ameliorate as much of the stress of the defense as possible, ideally making it a low-stakes, celebratory event rather than an high-stakes evaluation.

Dissertation Structures

There are two common ways to structure a dissertation, a traditional dissertation or a so-called 3-article dissertation. I favor the latter but am open to either.

Traditional Dissertation

A traditional dissertation is basically a book, and its common to have a set of chapters like this:

1. Introduction
2. Background - literature review goes here
3. Study design - context, methods, etc.
4. Findings - possibly several chapters for this
5. Discussion
6. Conclusion - here you talk about what it all means, why it matters, and what kinds of work the field ought to do to keep making progress

This structure is essentially that of a journal article, and each chapter in it does the work that a section in a journal article would.

Three Article Dissertation

A three-article dissertation is, essentially, a compilation of three published or (in the judgement of the committee) publishable journal-length manuscripts. In such a document, you’d expect to have chapters like this:

1. Introduction
2. Paper 1
3. Paper 2
4. Paper 3
5. Conclusion - all the same goals as in a traditional dissertation.

In many cases, students who have been making good academic progress, including publishing work as they go, find the 3-article structure easier to complete.

For those who seek research jobs post-PhD, this structure pays dividends later, because then any unpublished pieces are ready to be submitted by the student after they defend (e.g. when they are starting an academic job and want to have an easy time publishing about older work while getting new projects started). Note the use of the adjective publishable above! When you include 1-2 unpublished (really, unsubmitted) papers, I give your committee a specific charge: to act as-if peer reviewers. Thus, if the committee is satisfied with the papers, then you should feel fairly confident that arms-length peer reviewers will be satisfied too. The committee’s formative feedback is meant to help you improve your papers, and boost your confidence in how they will fare when submitted for publication later.

Doctoral Progress Stages

The rules of the specific academic programs you’re enrolled prescribe a series of gates that you must to pass through in order to complete your degree. These are typically the qualifying exam (or “quals”), the proposal defense, and the dissertation defense. Officially, these may go by other names, with the proposal defense serving as the general exam, and the dissertation defense serving as the final exam. For students in the Allen School, the pertinent milestones and policies are listed here.

Qualifying Exam

The qualifying exam (sometimes called “prelims”) is meant to evaluate your mastery of a body of scholarly literature and a set of practical skills related to your intended doctoral research area focus. In the Allen School, this exam typically entails you writing a paper about a study you have conducted, giving a talk about that study (approximately 20 minutes in length), and then answering questions about that study and your intended next steps. I (as your advisor) will evaluate your performance in conjunction with another faculty member whom we mutually agree upon (this may be your co-advisor). Other academic programs may have different requirements. We should review and discuss those together.

Most academic programs also have additional, non-exam, requirements for satisfying their qualifying evaluations, such as completing a certain amount, breadth, or depth of coursework. Accordingly, completing this exam is a necessary but not sufficient condition for finishing your quals.

Dissertation Proposal Defense (General Exam)

The General Exam is meant to assess whether you have developed all of the skills that you will need in order to complete a dissertation. In my experience, the best way to do this is also the most authentic: it’s to write the bulk of the dissertation and provide a clear, written roadmap for how you will finish the document. You will also present your work and roadmap to your committee verbally, and field questions about both.

If doing a traditional dissertation, your proposal would be all of Chapters 1-3 and most of the remaining chapters. In place of what is missing, you lay out what you’re going to do to fill in the gaps. If doing a 3-article dissertation, your proposal would be all of the chapters, with the final study missing findings, discussion, and conclusion (and possibly more, if we agree to that), and the parts of the Conclusion chapter that would draw on those results will describe what you could end up writing in the event of different possible study findings.

Whereas most students think it is the dissertation defense that will be their moment of maximum stress, for my students this can be the most stressful step toward the PhD, though I do all I can to reduce the risk and uncertainty (and thus, hopefully, stress) you experience at this stage. I am happy to work with you to plan for this step, iterating with you (and ideally also other committee members) to define your exam charge. This charge is a specification of what you will write independently, which could be the introductory chapter, conclusion chapter, and plan for completing your third article (or other remaining empirical research).

My aim is for this to feel like a collaborative process, rather than an adversarial one.

Organized this way, you can think of the comprehensive exam as the committee’s main opportunity to give you feedback on how to improve how you’re presenting (verbally and in writing) the work you have already done thus far and on your plan for how to finish the remainder of your work. In that vein, your proposal defense is something of a dress rehearsal for your eventual defense talk. Since most of the content is the same, you can expect that any “hard” questions will come up here.

One essential responsibility I have at this stage of your degree is to manage the other committee members. I will be your buffer against nonsense and additional work. For example, if during or after this exam a committee member recommends that you plan and conduct some new, substantial research study before you defend your dissertation, I will tell them no (unless you and I agree otherwise).

Once you complete this exam you are officially a Doctoral Candidate.

Because of how much of your dissertation I expect to be complete by the time of your proposal defense (i.e., general exam), you may find that you reach this stage a bit later than peers with other advisors. On the other hand, you will likely spend much less time between this exam and your dissertation defense than they do.

Pre-Defense Committee Meeting

Once you have a complete draft of the dissertation that I think is good enough to move forward (i.e. it addresses any feedback provided at your proposal defense and completes whatever work was left to do, according to your written roadmap), I will schedule a pre-defense meeting with you and your entire committee, to take place at least two weeks later and at least one month prior to your dissertation defense.

This meeting is the last acceptable time for any committee members (including me) to raise major questions or concerns about your dissertation. And even then, I will be highly resistant to requests for more-than-minor changes.

Any revisions that the committee requests in this meeting will be due by you to the committee at least two weeks prior to your defense. Those two weeks are necessary to ensure that the committee has time to read your dissertation. If you miss this two week deadline and have already scheduled the defense, I will generally require you to reschedule it.

Dissertation Defense (Final Exam)

Here you publicly present your work, and explain its scholarly contributions. Any major concerns held by the committee, either about the written document or the oral presentation, should have been resolved before this point. The committee may have minor changes that they wish you to make to your dissertation before it is officially complete. I will encourage the committee to distinguish between essential changes and preferable ones, and to draw this distinction in light of the time you have available. Once you address any changes that I deem to actually be essential, you are done.

I think that’s everything…Any questions?

Ben