Your PhD Survival Guide

Planning, Writing, and Succeeding in Your Final Year

Katherine Firth, Liam Connell, Peta Freestone

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN: 9780367361839
• eBook ISBN: 9781000286564
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

Accessible, insightful and a must-have toolkit for all final year doctoral students, the founders of the 'Thesis Boot Camp' intensive writing programme show how to survive and thrive through the challenging final year of writing and submitting a thesis.

Drawing on an understanding of the intellectual, professional, practical and personal elements of the doctorate to help readers gain insight into what it means to finish a PhD and how to get there, this book covers the common challenges and ways to resolve them. It includes advice on:

• Project management skills to plan, track, iterate and report on the complex task of bringing a multi-year research project to a successful close
• Personal effectiveness and self-care to support students to thrive in body, mind and relationships, including challenging supervisor relationships.
• The successful 'generative' writing processes which get writers into the zone and producing thousands of words; and then provides the skills to structure and polish those words to publishable quality.
• What it means to survive a PhD and consider multiple possible futures.

Written for students in all disciplines, and relevant to university systems around the world, this unique book expertly guides students through the final 6–12 months of the thesis.

The 'Insider Guides to Success in Academia' offers support and practical advice to doctoral students and early-career researchers. Covering the topics that really matter, but which often get overlooked, this indispensable series provides practical and realistic guidance to address many of the needs and challenges of trying to operate, and remain, in academia.

These neat pocket guides fill specific and significant gaps in current literature. Each book offers insider perspectives on the often implicit rules of the game -- the things you need to know but usually aren't told by institutional postgraduate support, researcher development units, or supervisors -- and will address a practical topic that is key to career progression. They are essential reading for doctoral students, early-career researchers, supervisors, mentors, or anyone looking to launch or maintain their career in academia.

Part I

Focusing on the project

A PhD is a complex project, one that requires working with various stakeholders, managing time and tasks, communicating effectively, meeting deadlines and solving problems. While project management skills are important throughout your PhD, the final year has some unique challenges. New skills to meet these challenges will be needed whether you have been adding to your document for years, have a portfolio of work or publications, or are just now sitting down to write up.

This part of the book first helps you to define your project scope and find ways to articulate your contribution to your field. Next, we’ll look at how and why the end of a project is often called the ‘crunch’. The crunch is intense. It’s nothing like the early or middle stages of a project, and it’s rarely discussed in books that give advice about PhDs. We’ll therefore provide practical techniques to save you time, help you stay focused, and reward you when you make progress. These are the skills we have all transferred to our jobs managing projects, and then transferred back to writing projects like this book, so we know they work.

You will also have to come to terms with the ways in which the PhD won’t be perfect, something that is true for every project. Nonetheless, the PhD, and you as a researcher, will have unique strengths, and so we finish this first part of the book with advice on how to identify those strengths.

1 Defining the project

What is my thesis for?

The argument

What actually is a thesis? You might not feel entirely comfortable asking this question with less than a year to completion, but it is worth being clear.

You may have heard supervisors tell you over the years that you have to have an argument. You might have given a chapter draft to someone in your department to look at over a weekend, and then have that moment – perhaps over coffee, first thing on a Monday morning – when they put their cup down with a clink and look you in the eye and say, ‘but what’s your argument?’ We often ask students this question ourselves, in one-to-one coaching sessions. We frequently get a response like:

I dunno, I just … know what I’m interested in, I know what I want to find out, where I have to go to find it, and I reckon I have the skills to do that. Who am I supposed to be arguing with?

The students we speak to often have a lot to say about their topic, especially after researching it intensively for years. And yet, that doesn’t always translate into an argument as understood in academic writing.

A ‘thesis’ is usually defined as a foundational idea or theory that can be advanced with evidence. The root of the word is Greek, meaning ‘to place something’ or ‘to put something forth’ (OED online 2020). It is a contention at the heart of a longer discussion (or dissertation) that will elaborate the justification for that contention.

A thesis is, literally, an academic argument. It is a position you take on a question or a problem that has yet to be resolved. In its broadest terms, that is all it is. The document you end up submitting is therefore an argument that is sustained over the course of its length, comprised of supporting parts, usually chapters, each of which contributes something to making and sustaining that argument.

A typical challenge is being able to precisely articulate exactly what this argument is. Most thesis-writers know deep-down what they are trying to say, but can’t yet do this in a crisp, clear, concise way. If that sounds like you, how should you go about identifying or explaining your argument? This advice is for people who pretty much know what their argument is, but haven’t necessarily clearly articulated it yet. If you are earlier in the process, we suggest other in-depth resources (e.g. Chapters 3–6, Thomson and Kamler 2013; Chapters 4 and 7; Kamler and Thomson 2014).

Questions and scoping

It’s good to start by succinctly articulating your top-level research question. Sometimes when we ask people about their thesis question, they give us a paragraph-length reply, or they tell us, ‘well, I actually have three research questions. The first one is …’. That’s fine, all those questions are likely valid queries that deserve your attention. In some fields of study, six research questions are normal. But even then, there will be the question or the problem or the issue that sits above them all. What is the issue that binds them all together?

Sometimes when we ask people what their central research question is, we get an instant rapid-fire response. These thesis writers have been pushed to articulate it before: they’ve practised it, they’ve wrestled with it, and it is now as familiar as a limb. And if that’s you, you should have no trouble articulating it in one sentence.

Others have never had to really confront this before, and the process of doing so is hard work. But it is absolutely worth doing. A useful overall thesis question is usually a single sentence long. So, as a thought experiment, if you had to summarise in one sentence what the central question that your project-as-a-whole will attempt to answer, what would you write?

This question may not be formally written down in your thesis anywhere, but even so, have a go at writing that question out. What is the thing that we don’t know enough about, that your project will address, and that each chapter will unpack in a lot more detail and nuance?

You might use one of these prompts to help you formulate or re-formulate your question.

• How is …
• Why are …
• What is …
• What should …
• What could …

Think about the question. Put the book down and write it out now.

The central question that my entire thesis seeks to answer is:

This is your thesis question, and we want you to be really clear about it.

An effective thesis question should require a response that can be demonstrated with evidence, but that can still invite debate. Briefly, it should not be too simple, narrow, vague, descriptive, or without internal coherence.

Here are some examples of how to make your thesis question more effective:

• Too simple: When were hamsters introduced to North America?
  Better: What were the chief drivers of hamster population growth in North America in the nineteenth century?
• Too narrow: At what rate does the efficiency of cutting through grass blades correlate with hamster-teeth sharpness?
  Better: How have changes to bone structure from crossbreeding affected hamster nutrition and lifespan?
• Too vague: Why do parents buy hamsters for their children?
  Better: What effects on social development of children does owning hamsters as pets have?
• Too descriptive: What happens to their fur when hamsters moult?
  Better: What are the evolutionary benefits of seasonal fur moulting to hamsters?
• Without internal coherence: Have hamsters been affected by climate change and if so are the effects larger than in guinea pigs?
  Better: What are the causal links between hamster reproduction rates and climate change?

If you look at your overall research question and it appears to fall into one of these traps, it is likely that you need to adjust your scope, either to make your argument more analytical, manageable, sophisticated, or allow you to ‘open up’ your discussion.

Clarifying and crystallising your core research question allows you to sharply define the limits of your study – what is in scope and what is out of scope. It can be tricky because you need to make binding decisions about what you’re researching and why, particularly when you’re approaching a complete first draft of the work.

Making decisions about scope can be painful. You might have conducted a significant body of research that you decide is no longer going to be part of your thesis because you’ve realised you need to reduce your scope. If that’s you, then you are going to cut a lot of material out of your thesis that you have laboured over. This is difficult, but your thesis will ultimately be the stronger for it. And, remember, whatever is removed can often be repurposed for a separate journal article or conference paper.

Perhaps after reading this far, you feel you could have a second, improved, go at writing down your central thesis question. We are definitely believers in multiple drafts, so here is another chance to refine:

The central question that my entire thesis tries to answer is:

Answer statements

When you have your thesis question written down and in a form that feels right, the next challenge is to ask yourself: what is my answer to that question? If you had to summarise your answer in one sentence, what would that sentence be? Again, it is just a thought experiment. The sentence itself may not actually turn up anywhere in your thesis.

Have a look again at your thesis question that you wrote out earlier. Based on everything you have researched, and all the data you have gathered, and everything you have read, and everyone you’ve spoken to – even if it all changes next week, but at this moment – what is your answer to that question, in a single sentence? Unlike the thesis question, if you want to expand your single sentence into a paragraph, then go right ahead.

This sentence is your answer statement. You might sometimes see this described as your ‘position’, or ‘view’. The answer statement contains the essence of your overall argument for your thesis. When someone says to you, ‘so what’s your argument?’, they are asking you to tell them your evidence-based response to your overall, central research question. What is the position that you are taking on the core question or problem that your thesis will address?

Now, of course that answer statement is a very high-level summary of what your argument is and will be. The fullness of what you will contribute to your discipline through your thesis will always be vastly more nuanced and complex than this one-sentence answer. Each of your chapters will unpack that detail and contribute a piece to the reader’s understanding of your argument. Nevertheless, it is worth keeping a version of this high-level answer statement in your mind. It is the thing that you learned from your research that you want the world to know.

If you are in the final year before you submit your thesis, now is the time to articulate your thesis question and answer statement. Now is the time to go from thinking about the work as a chapter-by-chapter proposition (‘what is this chapter about?’, ‘what is the next chapter about?’) to thinking about your entire project as a whole coherent entity. We want you to be articulating these things now, today, especially if no one has pushed you to define these things before.

Spending an hour refining and clarifying your thesis question and answer statement will repay you in many ways. The benefit of writing it out now is that it will help clarify your thinking. Step back from the detail in the separate chapters, give yourself space to consider the big picture and put it into words, even if those words are for your eyes only. It will sharpen your understanding of your research and provide something tangible to seek feedback on, to further refine as you head towards completion. Does the statement make sense to your supervisors? If so, how? If not, why? If your core idea is too vague or nebulous, or is bogged down in detail, it will not be so easy to explain.

You are the only person who knows the answer to your thesis question, so make sure you can explain it to yourself, your supervisors, and your examiners. Your supervisors might have said to you on a few occasions, ‘it’s your thesis’. That’s because examiners want to know where you are in the contribution you are making to your discipline. Examiners want to see that you have a strong grasp of the literature, that your research ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• List of illustrations
• List of abbreviations
• Acknowledgements
• About the authors
• Introduction
• PART I: Focusing on the project
• 1. Defining the project: What is my thesis for?
• 2. Getting through the crunch
• 3. Practical project management
• 4. Working with your strengths and weaknesses
• PART II: Focusing on the person
• 5. ‘No pain, no gain’ and other unhelpful myths
• 6. Your harshest critic
• 7. Getting unstuck
• 8. Working with your supervisor
• PART III: Focusing on the text
• 9. Getting words down
• 10. Making the thesis into a coherent work
• 11. Making the words good
• PART IV: Finishing the PhD
• 12. Reflecting on what it means to be a researcher
• 13. Do you actually want to finish the PhD?
• 14. Relief and grief of finishing a PhD
• Index