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
- Find out what your questions
- 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
- You don’t know what you’re going to say
- 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
- Don’t take it personally if they don’t response