Graduating on time - tips and observations?

[lemma]

If I don't graduate on time, my funding runs out and I'll most likely have to go back to work and finish the PhD part-time. So I was wondering, do people have any tips about how to stay on track and graduate on time? Does anyone have any observations from their own programs regarding students who have finished on time and those who have not? 

[GreenEyedTrombonist]

1. Speak to your adviser and professors often. 

2. Don't just focus on classes when you get in. In my MA, one of the largest problems with previous students was that they took all their courses and still hadn't started their research (or even knew what they wanted to do). You don't need to know exactly what you're doing your first semester, but you do need to start working on ideas early. 

3. Once you are in the research, analysis, and writing phases make sure to create a schedule and stick to it. This may mean making a daily schedule for yourself or working out a status update schedule with your adviser. Whatever you do, make sure it is a schedule you can and will stick to so you actually make progress even if you don't necessarily need to come into a lab every day. 

4. Actually, make a schedule early for yourself so you know what you should be doing each semester (classes, what you should be working on for research, any conference submissions you need to work on, school paperwork, etc).

5. If the profs let you, use class assignments to work on your research. Plenty of research essays can help form the foundation of your literary analysis and is a structured way to get you started on your research. 

6. Allow yourself a destressing activity. You'll burn yourself out if you don't have an outlet. 

7. When you make your schedule for writing (and also the analysis stage) assume it will take at least twice as long as you think it should. 

8. Summer and Winter breaks are a great time to work on stages of your research without having to worry about classes. Use this time to write rough (or final) drafts of chapters or, if it's early in the project, use this time to write the proposal/IRB/misc drafts so that you can get them to your adviser earlier in the semester or work on reading for your lit review. 

9. Make friends in and out of your cohort. It's great to have people going through the same classes and at the same stage of their career. It's also nice to make friends with students further in the program who can offer advice (and make sure to repay the favor when the new cohorts come in).

10. Because I feel like it should be a solid 10 and it can't be said enough, communicate! Speak to the DGS, your profs, your adviser, the department chair, or whoever is appropriate about your progress and ways to keep yourself on track. 

 

 

[TakeruK]

Second everything @GreenEyedTrombonist said. Communication is so important. Another thing to keep in mind is the mantra: A good dissertation is a done dissertation. Don't be a perfectionist to get every detail exactly so. From my field's perspective, we generally do 3-4 small projects during our 5 year program and put it together to form a dissertation. So, my advice to students in my field is to do exactly enough in a project to publish it and no more---move onto the next one. Also, when it's time to put together the dissertation, do the minimum work necessary to produce a dissertation! A good dissertation is a done dissertation.

[Hope.for.the.best]

@GreenEyedTrombonist and @TakeruK have given you very good advice.

I have submitted my dissertation not long ago. I would say good planning, communication and relaxation strategies are three key words for timely completion. Have a discussion with your advisor and let him/her know that you wish to finish before your funding runs out, so you can work out a plan to get your dissertation done. From my experience, it is best to plan your submission 2 to 3 months before your funding runs out, as things can go wrong along the way. I know I have been complaining a lot here; I only realised that my main advisor is a nasty man during the write-up process. He pushed me to do more experiments when I had difficulties completing my dissertation. He "agreed" that I completed those experiments after I finished the dissertation when my other advisor stepped in and supported me, but then he expressed his resentment towards us by turning around my dissertation drafts slowly. It was not until my third advisor intervened that he helped me to finish proactively. I don't mean to discourage you, but just to let you know that things can go wrong, so you are prepared. 

Good luck! 

[rising_star]

@lemma, some of this is field-specific. My biggest piece of advice is to make sure you're aware of all the of relevant funding deadlines for any funding you'd need to do your research, particularly if you'll be doing international work. The lead time required to apply for and obtain funding (which might require applying more than once!) is something that I often see people not planning for, especially in the social sciences where your advisor isn't expected to fund your dissertation. In addition, there are some pre-dissertation proposal workshops and opportunities in the social sciences which could help with preparing a good proposal for funding. 

[MarineBluePsy]

In addition to the great advice above senior students have told me to learn to say no and don't feel bad about saying it as often as you need to.  There are always more things you can be doing in grad school, but there aren't enough hours in the day.  Once you decide what your priority is then decide if its worth your time to take an extra elective class, be part of an academic committee, add a community service project, or insert whatever other field specific thing comes your way.  All of those are great experiences that could look good on your CV and lead to networking opportunities, but if you don't really have the time for those things and whatever your priority is then you have to start saying no.  Sometimes this will mean telling your advisor no, but with solid reasoning they should be willing to support you.

[ZeChocMoose]

In my PhD program, people finish in a fairly wide range between 4 - 9 years and department funding tends to run out after 5 years.  The people who finished within 4 - 6 years tended to have the following characteristics: (1) received a fellowship for at least one of their years so they didn't need to RA/TA to get funding, (2) knew what their dissertation topic was going to be before they were done with classes and wrote most if not all of their required papers on that, (3) had a fairly strict timeline of what needed to get done each semester to keep moving forward, and (4) had no major hiccups along the way.  Unfortunately, there is not much you can do about number 4 and I have seen it derail people a semester up to a couple of years.

[TakeruK]

My PhD school had a policy that in order to register for your 7th (or later) year of grad school, you need special permission from the Dean of Grad Studies' office. It was fairly simple to obtain, basically just form and something like write a one-page description of your efforts thus far and the reasons for staying longer. It needs to have several signatures of people who oversee your graduate education.

It is not meant to penalize students for staying longer, but instead, to ensure that someone other than your advisor and for an entity external to your department (e.g. the Dean) knows about your progress and it's mostly to protect you against advisors who want to keep their students forever since it's much cheaper to pay a grad student than a researcher or postdoc! And it's to connect you with campus resources to help if necessary (e.g. writing centre if the struggle is with writing, etc.) If there are legitimate delays, it's a very painless and easy process, but it's also very effective at catching problematic cases!

[fuzzylogician]

My advice for any large-scale project is to invest the time in planning and laying out precisely what steps need to be accomplished and when. Talk to professors and senior students to get a sense of what needs to happen the year you graduate and by when. There will be things you might not be planning for: going on the job market involves time-consuming prep work, especially the first time you do it; if and when you go on interviews, that's extra prep work. There might be filing deadlines you'll need to meet for funding/immigration/new job purposes that are different than the normal end of the year. There might be earlier funding cycles you'll want to be aware of for any extra funding. If you need to do any research in the field that is season-dependent or even just external-funding-dependent, it's even moreso important to plan. Likewise if you need specific materials for lab experiments or if your experiments are simply lengthy in time. Plan for the unexpected by giving yourself the time to deal with things that will inevitably come up. 

Get a sense for the average time it takes students to write a dissertation from proposal (if you have one of those) to filing. Give yourself an extra cushion there. Now, planning backwards, are there other qualifying exams, classes, etc that you have to take? Factor those in. Write your class papers and any qualifying papers with an eye toward a larger project. Use opportunities to submit parts of what might be a dissertation project as final papers, and to do background reading that could further the same project. Ideally, you will either have parts of a project already done by the time you're getting ready to focus on your dissertation, or you will have at least educated yourself in the relevant background reading on some topic that's related to your existing work. (FWIW the latter was more or less the case for me -- none of my class projects ended up in my dissertation, but they set the stage for later work on the same topics that was the core of the dissertation.) Once you're at a stage where you have a topic, take the time to spell out as detailed a plan as you can (not: ch1 by January, ch2 by February, etc, but a much more detailed plan of what goes into ch1, with weekly attainable goals). Do some score-keeping and reflection to figure out if your timing is accurate (or more likely, how much you're off), to help you plan better as you go along. Revise your plan periodically. 

Finally, seek regular advice and contact with others. Do this both for professional reasons and for your mental health. The dissertation writing stage in particular can be very isolating. Having company helps. Having feedback from your advisors that your plans are on the right track and that your timeline is attainable and reasonable is crucial. Eat, sleep, exercise, take breaks, allow yourself off days and bad days, because they will happen and that's okay. Time with pets, hobbies, loved ones, nature, whatever it is that charges your batteries will often be more effective than more work.