You Can Finish Your Thesis Even When You Are Spread Really Thin… Boom! Everything went black for a few seconds… What happened? When I opened my eyes I was lying on my back on top of a fresh pile of snow. It was almost 9 pm and I must have slipped and fell on an ice […]
Writing and Publishing
Why Writing a Dissertation is About Showing Up, No Matter What
Why is Writing a Dissertation So Scary? When Aileen, a Chemistry PhD student, started graduate school, she didn’t think that writing a Dissertation would be a challenge. She passed her PhD candidacy exam with perfect grades and had a great relationship with her PhD thesis supervisor. Fast forward several years… As Aileen was beginning her […]
Writing a PhD Thesis in Half the Time When You Don’t Know Where to Start
Does Writing a PhD Thesis Have to Be Painful? “Writing a thesis is probably so stressful,” said the kind doctor at the emergency room, as he examined my elbows throbbing with pain. “You may be able to avoid surgery because you are young”, I heard him say, “but if I were you I would strongly […]
How to Finish Your Thesis a Few Minutes at a Time
Sometimes A Few Minutes is All You Have to Finish Your Thesis and (Finally) Get Your PhD Is it possible to finish your thesis a few minutes at a time? It was certainly not something I had planned. I had envisioned sitting in front of the computer for many hours typing incessantly until my thesis was […]
7 Rules You Must Violate to Finish Writing Your Thesis
Why I Had to Unlearn Everything From the 7th Grade to Finish Writing My Thesis Writing my thesis challenged everything I had learned about proper English writing. My first real writing assignment in 7th grade was to write a report about my favorite book that I read during the summer. Our teacher, Ms. P, was […]
Five Steps To Writing an Outstanding PhD Thesis Proposal
Your Thesis Proposal Isn’t Just About Getting Your Degree I remember the time that I was in the process of writing a thesis proposal in my second year of graduate school. It had to be 10-20 pages long, which was short compared to the length of the actual doctoral dissertation (close to 200 pages). Yet, […]