Second Exam Professional Development Workshop

December 6, 2013

Part 1: Susan-Buck Morss

• About ideas that matter to you
  • Find out what your questions
    • What interests you when you’re reading
    • What keeps you up in the night
  • Have something to say
• If it violates (disciplinary, etc.) conventions, go for it
  • But ask for help
  • Be your advocate
  • Facing turmoil in all disciplines in academia today
• Trust your instincts
• Writing your proposal
  • You don’t know what you’re going to say
    • If you do, can’t be surprised, can’t say anything new
• Have to convince intelligent people (you’re committee) you have something to say and have a way of figuring out how to say it
  • Some inkling of where and how to look, how to know you’ve found something important to you
  • Archives? Field research? Etc.
  • Be realistic about timing
  • Prove to these people that you have a question, you know the nature of your question, you know how to go looking for answers
    • Some realistic expectation
  • A kind of contract: deliver what you say in your proposal = you’ve succeeded
    • Safety net
    • But doesn’t mean you can’t change
    • Doesn’t hem you into too much
    • E.g. chapter descriptions should give a sense but not overly specific
  • Convince them you have something to say, are committed and devoted
    • And outline as to how to go about it
  • Elephant in the room: your committee knows your dissertation better than you, and each says something different
    • And you know none of them are right
    • Know more than anyone on your committee, anyone in the world
      • Humor them! (respectfully)!
      • You will see something they don’t see – means you haven’t articulated or demonstrated this in an intelligible way
      • Don’t be nervous about this shift (a win-win)!
• Doing a dissertation totally different experience
  • NOT the same as term papers
• Going to write whole chapters you don’t include, you throw out, or rewrite
  • It feels awful
  • Get used to doing fact that you do writing you aren’t going to use: USE THIS as advantage
    • Maybe the piece that doesn’t fit anywhere will allows you to think through something you haven’t figured out yet, and once you think it through, can go back
  • Writer’s block = don’t know what you’re going to say
    • I haven’t thought it through yet
    • Literally, take out a pen and write to yourself
• Don’t be hard on yourself but work on it everyday – needs to be on your mind everyday
  • Be obsessed with it
  • Means it’s working on all levels of your thinking
  • How do you do that in your lives? One perspective
    • Take certain block of time regularly, habitually and make it sacred where no one else
    • Okay if you don’t write every time you’re in this space
  • Takes time
  • Give yourself habits and know yourself
    • Really guard this time, particularly if you’re deferential/easily guilted
  • Reward for yourself for this time
  • Don’t associate your worst habits with your new dissertation habit
    • E.g. smoking
  • Give yourself some release
    • Mind and creativity don’t obey a set schedule
• Going to feel bad lots of times
  • Really easy to project inadequacy on things
  • Get your needs met
• Hard in NYC, but figure out space/place where you write things
• If you can’t start chapter at the beginning, start somewhere else
  • Start at the place where you know precisely what you’re going to say; start at the place where you’re really stuck and you need to work through
• When you’re stuck, find someone “who you can trust to be totally stupid with because you feel like you’re back at square one”
  • Be incoherent (incoherence as sign of creativity – can say it clearly = not new)
• Getting your committee together as herding cats
  • But at this point not intimated by them
  • But you’ve become an authority
    • And it feels cool – through your hard work, about something you really care about
• Be willing to follow up to get feedback/response from your committee members
  • Don’t take it personally if they don’t response
    • 9 times out of 10 they just didn’t get to it
  • Can hold faculty accountable for being professional