The argument you make in your dissertation is a lot of things.

As we covered last week, a dissertation is proof that you can produce new knowledge.

It shows that you have the resiliency and resourcefulness to conduct research and translate it to other experts.

It is proof that you can find and assess relevant secondary literature. It shows that you can identify and address a gap in your field. It shows that you can make a compelling, original argument.

Among all the other things that your dissertation is, it is, also, a story.

All good arguments are stories. They start by telling you how the world is. They end by telling you how the world should be different. Throughout, they tell you why things were the way they were and why they should change.

Because a dissertation is so many things the story part of the argument can get lost.

The biggest problem for writers at all levels is forgetting that other people aren’t in their own heads. I see this in my freshmen students, in myself, and in my coaching clients. In my experience this problem, endemic to all writers, is exacerbated in people who are writing dissertations. 

The dissertation process is designed to turn you into an expert in your field. In practice that means that you’ve spent years learning more and more about your subject and it can be all to easy to forget that the things that are basic knowledge for you are not widely known.

For instance, in my own work, I often have to remember that, while most people have a working definition of virginity, they don’t know that virginity is a term that has no fixed medical or moral definition. 

I guest lectured on this in a colleague’s class yesterday. I was doing a basic lecture I love to give about how virginity is far more important to your life than you think it is.

[SHAMELESS PLUG: I would be happy to video conferenceand give this lecture for you and/or record a version for your class.]

To do this lecture we first start with federal guidelines surrounding sex education in the United States and explain how they are related to the ideology of virginity. From there we look at how virginity, in practice, is a concept only applied to women’s bodies. Then we talk about women’s bodies and sexuality in patriarchal systems.

This is often the part where I find myself educating a room full of legal adults on the difference between the vagina and the vulva, what a hymen is, and where there is no fixed definition of virginity in either medical or religious literatures.

All of the concepts in the last paragraph are foundational to my research and my dissertation argument. None of them are common knowledge (EVEN IF THEY SHOULD BE, DAMMIT).

At the dissertation level, our research is so specialized that even our committee, made up of experts in related fields, often don’t know a lot of the basics of our subject.

In the meantime, we, as researchers and authors, can feel like we are drowning in details that NEED TO BE SHARED WITH THE WORLD and we run into twin difficulties. First, we forget what our readers don’t know. Second, we forget how to prioritize the information we need them to know.

Approaching your dissertation as a story you’re telling can solve both of these problems. 

In addition, approaching your dissertation as a narrative can help you break down a complex, difficult process. Because we are all familiar with stories, because stories are the fundamental form of human knowledge sharing, conceptualizing your dissertation as a story takes a process you will only ever do once and allows you to conceptualize it in terms of a form you are intimately familiar with.

I’ll show you how thinking of your dissertation as a story can help while using my own dissertation as an example. 

When you’re telling a story the first step is to decide what genre your story is. Is it a romance or a mystery? Is it a biography or an autobiography? Is it a suspense novel or a how-to manual? Is it a mix of genres?

In my own case, my dissertation was mostly a manifesto with a little bit of autobiography and a little bit of how-to manual thrown in. 

Once you know what your genre is you can move on to step two: plotting your story. Whatever type of story your dissertation is there are some things are common to ALL stories. The first thing you have to do is establish the stakes for your audience. Why is this story interesting? Why is it important? This is also the place to introduce your key actors, essential concepts, and necessary definitions just as a good fiction author would.

For example, in the introduction to my dissertation, I establish that the stakes of not understanding virginity are both national and personal and effects both women and men. I define how I use the terms “virgin” and “virginity” throughout and I briefly discuss the key actors/concepts I will discuss in later chapters. A little thoughtful foreshadowing, if you will.

In step three, you work on your plotting. For instance, do you tell the story straight through like The Lion, The Witch, and The Wardrobe or do you shift point of view between chapters like A Game of Thrones? Do you follow a linear timeline or do you move forward and back in time? Does your story need an appendix like the Lord of the Rings series needs The Silmarillion? 

Once you know these things you can start to organize all of your data so that your reader can follow the story of your dissertation. 

In my dissertation I proceeded in a mostly linear fashion but shifting point of view slightly between chapters.

Thinking of your dissertation as a story you tell can help you make progress when you’re stuck because, while we rarely read dissertations, we consume stories constantly from novels to commercials. Knowing how to proceed with a dissertation can be difficult but knowing how to proceed with a story is, while not necessarily easier, much more familiar. 

Even if you’ve made significant progress on your dissertation you can use the story framework to help you in your edits. Read it as a story. Does it make sense? Do you know all the characters and all the story points you need to follow the plot/argument?

If you want more help on how thinking of your dissertation as a story can help you make progress and make your writing stronger use our Contact form to sign up for our FREE Dissertation as Story webinar!

 

Recently, while working with a client, I was searching through old posts here on the site for the one I was *sure* I had written about the purpose of a dissertation.

While we have several posts that address different aspects of the dissertation process (here and here and here) and dissertation format (here) we don’t actually have a post about what the point of a dissertation is.

Simply put, a dissertation is proof that you can create new knowledge to the standards of academic rigor.

There’s three things to discuss here: what “new knowledge” means, why creating new knowledge is important, and why it’s so damn hard. Today, we’re going to address those topics starting with the last one first.

Why creating new knowledge is so damn hard: A Treatise

If you’ve made it to a PhD program, especially if you’ve conquered your coursework, survived your prelims, and defended your prospectus, then the odds are that you have over 20 cumulative years of being a student–minimum. In the US academic system this is usually K-12, a four year Bachelor’s program, a 2 year Masters, and at least 2 years of PhD work before you are finally All But Dissertation. This is in the most aggressive schedule in which you are completing your prelims and prospectus while simultaneously doing coursework which I have only ever seen one person do. Most people take longer than this.

That means that, even on the most truncated plan, before you start to write your dissertation you have 20 years of experience and training as a student.

This is important because students are consumers of knowledge.

Students read the things other people wrote. They criticize the arguments other people make. Students judge ideas.

The process of getting a PhD is the process of transitioning from a student to a scholar.

Scholars write new things.

Scholars make new arguments.

Scholars have original ideas.

The transition between student and scholar is, paradoxically, both minute and vast.

While there are a lot of reasons why people leave PhD programs after completing every step but the dissertation I’ve always thought that one of the biggest reasons is because of the transition of from student to scholar.

Many of us go into PhD programs, whether they be STEM, social science, or humanities, because we like being students–we’re good at it, and we want to keep doing it.

We’re not making this up, either.

On the rare occasions that grad students are depicted in popular culture we are often portrayed as old-students doing homework for professors rather than innovative research of our own or teaching classes or any of the thousand things we do.

[SHAMELESS PLUG: If you work for a media company and are thinking of portraying grad students in film, television, podcast, or radio please consider hiring me so I can make sure your depictions are accurate. I have very affordable hourly rates.]

As frustrated as I am with media depictions of graduate study, they aren’t making it up either.

The myth of the eternal student is precious in academia. It’s a story we tell each other about why we chose this life over others where we could make more money for less work. I think, at some point in time, there was an element of truth to this portrayal. If  you are particularly privileged it may still feel like this for you.

BUT.

People with PhD’s are not just really accomplished students. They are scholars.

Being a scholar means a lot of things but the most important thing is creating new knowledge. This is why creating new knowledge is such an important part of the dissertation process.

You might check out this hilarious, phallic, but still effective visual explanation from Matt Might.

For my money, my favorite look at what “new knowledge” can mean is the brilliant website lolmythesis.

What I like about lolmythesis is that it captures the funny, often underwhelming nature of what “new knowledge” means. It is very, very rarely a groundbreaking “Eureka!” moment.

Instead, it’s often more along the lines of helping to prove something that seems very intuitive. What can I say? Now it seems obvious that electricity is, well, electricity but we used to think it was something called phlogiston. Knowledge almost never changes with a lightning flash of undeniable insight. Instead, it’s a slow accretion of evidence that changes what we know.

THIS is what a dissertation is.

It’s not “new knowledge” that redefines the field (unless you’re Gayle Rubin). It’s new knowledge in the sense that it’s another track leading us down the most logical path, like so,

I’ll use my own dissertation as an example here.

In a sentence, the argument in my dissertation is: Virginity is the sine qua non of the patriarchal nation state.

In a paragraph, the argument of my dissertation is: Feminist scholars across disciplines have observed a consistent association with the advent of virginity for women and the rise of the nation states in several different societies over several different time periods. Feminist scholars have established that the patriarchal nation state is based on the control of women’s bodies and, particularly, their reproductive capacity. I argue that virginity is the first and most essential form of control of women’s bodies and that virginity is essential to the establishment of the sexual control of women and, therefore, the establishment of the patriarchal nation-state.

Is this a revolutionary claim?

I don’t think so.

It’s a pretty logical conclusion, all things considered, given what we know about how the patriarchal nation state relies on the control of women’s bodies and how virginity exists as a form of sexual and economic control of women.

The reason it counts as new knowledge is because I put two literatures in conversation with each other that had not previously been in conversation with each other in scholarly circles.

Believe me. I know. Because I read ALL the things about virginity.

That’s why the difference between being a scholar and a student can feel so very small. To be a good scholar you have to rely on all your training as a student to learn all the things that have been said about your topic so that you know what remains to be said.

You may have noted my small caveat above–that the literatures and historiographies I put in conversation in my dissertation had not been put together in scholarly circles.

That is important because the scholarly standards are the heart of a dissertation.

There are many, many smart people who, for various reasons, don’t do scholarly writing.

They may be writing very smart, innovative things. (My personal favorite example of this brilliance is Damon Young over at Very Smart Brothas.)

[SHAMELESS PLUG: I’ve published some stuff over at the Ms. Magazine blog and I’d love if you’d check it out here or here. In my case, I published these in non-academic spaces because both pieces were related to current affairs, but I digress.)

Given that people can and do publish smart, original things outside of the academic context why is it so damn important to the dissertation process?

It’s about standards.

I genuinely don’t know if there’s any way to explain this but I can try and give you some perspective from my experience as a ghostwriter of popular books. When you are pitching a book to a popular press, or a literary agent to take your book to a popular press, you are expected to compare your book to the five(ish) most similar to it. You give a two-sentence summary of the book and then a short paragraph of how your book is different. It’s a very, very truncated literature review. The reason you do this for the popular press is because literary agents and publishers aren’t responsible for knowing the relevant literature which is, in fact, the entire purpose of your dissertation committee.

It was less than a year ago that Naomi Klein’s book, Outrages, was recalled from stores by the publisher due to issues with her research that were spotted (by academics) in early interviews she gave promoting it. For my academic friends the idea that a major flaw in your argument would be revealed in a live interview was their worst fear. Many of them were left aghast wondering how this could have happened to Wolf. It happened because the popular press is so completely different from the academic press. It’s not the job of the editor or the publisher to check the veracity of the claims the author is making. It’s up to them to make the writing better and sell the book.

This is, of course, the complete opposite of academic publishing. During my MA a faculty member became the editor of a major journal in her field and she recruited grad students to help with fact checking. My job was to check out all the books the author referenced in their article and double check that the quotes were, in fact, on the page of the edition the author cited.

Academic writing is a whole order of magnitude different from popular writing in terms of checking one’s argument and one’s sources.

A dissertation is, fundamentally, designed to show that you can create new knowledge and new knowledge is separate from having a really good idea.

New knowledge requires proof and citations and review by experts.

That, beloved, is the point of a dissertation and why it’s so damn hard.

For the rest of the month we’ll be talking about what a dissertation is and what it’s designed to do. The point of these conversations is to help break an overwhelming task down to its essence so that it feels more approachable and more doable.

Come back Friday for a brand new post on what a dissertation is and is not. For now, I’ll leave you with this.

TL;DR:

 

 

 

 

For the month of January, and in celebration of our two year and 100th post anniversaries, we’re revisiting some of our most viewed columns. Today we’re remixing a post about how the skills you developed as a student might be hurting you as a dissertation author. Enjoy!

Last week we talked about the role of executive function in your life/dissertation.

While executive function in adults is understudied we do know that problems with executive function are part of ADHD, ASD, and anxiety.

I’m not a neuroscientist, or a psychologist, but as someone who lives with anxiety I’ve noticed two important things. First, most of the PhD students I know are neurodivergent in some way. (I know, I know–there’s all sorts of caveats here: maybe all my friends are neurodivergent because I am, maybe it’s a self-selecting population, etcetera–but I’m not worried about the mechanism here.) Second, it TOTALLY makes sense that people with anxiety, ADHD, ASD and other brains impacted by executive dysfunction are really good at PhD programs.

Our brains are really good at finding connections other people might not see and weaving them into arguments to create knowledge.

This natural propensity is enhanced by the structure of a PhD program itself which encourages us to think not in five paragraph arguments but in five chapter monographs.

When we train brains that are already good at making connections to make more connections we really shouldn’t be surprised that we have a bunch of people who struggle with the executive function skills of breaking a task down into parts, planning, organizing, and completing it.

I would argue that humanities students struggle with this more than STEM PhDs because STEM PhDs are often based on fieldwork, an equation, and experiment, and so on. In short, STEM PhDs have a definable start and finish in ways that humanities projects often do not.

For instance, in my own project I was looking at how U.S. doctors and legislators talked about virginity in World War II and the War on Terror. Part of my committee, the part made up of historians, wanted me to do a longitudnal study instead of a comparative study. Even when I got them to agree to a comparative study there was still the problem of how to define WWII and the War on Terror. For instance, did I define WWII as when the US entered the war? When the war started in Europe? Or when the US army started preparing to enter the war? Defining the War on Terror was even more complex as a War on Terror is, by definition, and endless war.

My point here is that breaking our projects into workable pieces is HARD and it’s made harder by the fact that our job and our training are teaching us to look for connections between those pieces.

When you look at your project you see all the connections. The inside of a dissertating brain usually looks something like this:

If it feels crazy-making that’s because it is.

You are not crazy or dumb for having difficulty sorting through the connections. It’s antithetical to everything you’ve been trained to do. That’s why, sometimes, you need someone else to come in take a look at your project to help you sort it into doable pieces.

In theory, your committee should be able to do this for you. That is, after all, what committees are for. In reality, there are a lot of reasons you might not seek this sort of feedback from your committee. Maybe they’re on sabbatical. Maybe they only read finished work. Maybe their feedback is contradictory or unhelpful.

Fellow graduate students can be a great resource to give you this type of feedback as well. I’ve known graduate students who have been able to get reading/writing groups together that meet regularly and give each other feedback. This has been extremely successful for them.

I tried, several times, to set up a graduate student reading group during my PhD. It never worked out.

In general, I’ve noticed that reading groups tend to work out if you have a group of people who are on fellowship. If you have a group of graduate students who are teaching or TAing it’s a little harder to get going and may never take off.

Sometimes graduate students can offer you much needed sympathy and support but not the perspective you need. Sometimes you need the help of someone with more distance from your project and your program. And that’s okay.

Getting a PhD isn’t about how smart you are. Getting a PhD is about persistence and persistence is, among other things, about knowing when to ask for help.

If you need it, or think you might need it, we’re here for you.

For the month of January, and in celebration of our two year and 100th post anniversaries, we’re revisiting some of our most viewed columns. Today we’re remixing a post about how many workable hours are in the day. TL;DR: We don’t all have 24 hours in a day. Enjoy!

Long ago, I took a class in HR Management.

We all try things.

To this day, the class in HR Management remains one of my favorite classes of all time. I have dozens of good memories from that class and one not-great memory from that class. Guess which one I’m gonna tell you about today?

The professor of that class told us that everyone had the same amount of time in the day. At the time, this didn’t quite sit well with me but it took me YEARS to figure out why.

In fact, it wasn’t until I heard about spoon theory that I fully understood what made me so uncomfortable with the statement that everyone has the same 24 hours in a day to get stuff done. If you haven’t encountered spoon theory before this image explains it:

Essentially, people who live with chronic illness do not have an equal 24 hours in a day to get things done. They have as much time and energy as their illness will let them, which is not always predictable but is non-negotiable.

And while talking about chronic illness in grad school is important it is not the only thing that can inhibit your ability to get work done. As we mentioned in a previous post, thinking about budgeting or where your next meal is going to come from takes up brain space you can’t give to academic tasks (you can also see here and here). In addition, stereotype bias can inhibit academic performance (see here, here, and here).

What I’m getting at here is the incredibly obvious point that how many usable hours you have in a day is a function of your privilege. In fact, I often introduce the concept of privilege to my students by asking them to think of reasons why the same activities might take different people different amounts of time where less time to task completion = more structural privilege.

This is obviously correlated to the fact that the more energy you are required to spend on one task the less time you have for other tasks.

And guess what? We all have finite amounts of energy.

When it comes to rest, and how much you need, or what type works for you there is only one expert: you.

The key to surviving graduate school with a modicum of sanity is to allow yourself to take the rest you need without guilt, shame, or comparison.

The simple fact is we don’t all have the same 24 hours in a day. We never did.

I would go insane if I compared my productivity to my colleague who doesn’t need more than 4 hours of sleep a night. I typically need at least 10 to function. I could waste time thinking about those 6 hours I wasn’t writing or I could acknowledge that I do better work in less time when I’m well rested.

So, from this post to the next, I’m giving you a bit of homework: Think, really think, about how much rest you would like to have in your day, your week, and your month.

 

For the month of January, and in celebration of our two year and 100th post anniversaries, we’re revisiting some of our most viewed columns. In our last remixed post we talked about the importance of letting ourselves fail during the dissertation process. Today, we’re remixing our best strategies for how to fail forward. Enjoy!

Earlier this week we shared that a crucial part of making progress on your dissertation isn’t just letting go of perfection but actively giving yourself the freedom to fail.

Today, we’re going to share our favorite ways to fail.

If you take lessons in acrobatics, stagecraft, or tumbling, one of the first things you will learn is how to fall. While we’ve all been challenged by gravity a time or two there are better ways to fall than others. There are ways to fall that you can recover from so the routine goes on and, if you can’t recover, there are ways to fall that minimize the possibility of injury.

In the same way, there are better and worse ways of failing.

Trying to prevent failure in the dissertation process is futile. The only thing you can do is learn to fail forward.

If you’re in a US institution then you are in a culture were we are discouraged, in numerous ways, from talking about our failures.

Beyond this broader cultural taboo, however, is a problem peculiar to academia: most of us chose to be in academia because we’ve always been good at learning.

We were the kids who got “A”s on most of our school work. We are better than average at testing of all kinds, at reading comprehension, and writing. We like making nuanced arguments. Many of us were encouraged to go to grad school because we are good at these things.

We choose graduate programs that play to our strengths. For instance, I find media and culture incredibly interesting so I picked a PhD program that would allow me to focus on cultural critique and media analysis. Once I was there I had a choice between collecting data through interviews or analyzing historical documents. I love analyzing documents. I’m very good at it. I conducted exactly one interview during my MA program and learned that I hated it.

My story is not uncommon. Most of us, particularly in the humanities, are blessed to be able to choose our programs and projects according to what interests us and what we are good at.

This will serve you well in coursework and even through your prospectus writing.

It will work against you in writing your dissertation.

You see, for many of us, pursuing a career in the academy has kept us safe within the bubble of our skill where we rarely have to fail. But writing, like most successful ventures, is a process of failing until you succeed.

I think one of the reasons a full 50% of PhD students drop out is because writing an original manuscript like a dissertation requires them to fail and it feels indescribably yucky.

You are not going to complete a dissertation without some version of what feels like failing and when you’re not used to it “failing” can feel like dying.

I put failing in quotes there because what grad students count as failure often wouldn’t count as failure in a different workplace.

I passed my prospectus defense with revisions and I counted that as failure.

Every time my advisor gave me back a draft with extensive notes I felt like I had failed.

If I hadn’t been so used to turning things in and getting “A”s on the first try I might have had a better adjusted sense that revision is a normal, inevitable, vital part of writing.

In my workplace now it’s normal for most projects to go through several stages of revision and it’s not failure; it’s not even a big deal. It’s just work.

Beyond that, most graduate students I know, particularly those in the humanities, hold themselves to an impossible, invisible standard known or cared about by no one but themselves. That standard is often simply, “be perfect.”

No one can be perfect but when you’ve always been close to perfect, an “A” student, being less than perfect can feel like failure. When the only way forward is through imperfection and failure and you’re terrified of failure then you may find yourself standing still. I’ve known people who have stood still, doing nothing on their dissertations, for years. I know people who have left their graduate programs rather than face the sort of failure inherent in the writing process. If you want to finish your dissertation then you have to give yourself the freedom to fail and you have to learn how to fail forward.

Write Badly. Write as badly as you can. Instead of worrying about how to write a good sentence or how to succinctly state the significance of the problem do those things as badly as you can. It’s always easier to edit than to generate original content. The most intimidating part of a blank page is the pressure we put on ourselves to write something brilliant. Set that aside. Write as badly as you can. You can always make it beautiful later.

Writing Is Not Cooking. My aunt taught me that, when I was cooking, I should always add less salt to a recipe than I thought was warranted because, while I could always add more at a later stage, I couldn’t take the salt out once it was in the dish. This is a good principle in cooking and a terrible principle in writing. You can always go back and erase what you’ve written if you decide you don’t like it or it doesn’t fit. Don’t stop to think or critique your work while you’re producing it. Don’t worry or wonder if what you’re writing is good. Just let it all flow out and trust your inner editor to clean it up later.

Create a”Pieces” Document. I suggest doing this for every part of the dissertation: each chapter, the introduction, even the acknowledgements. A pieces document is an intellectual security blanket. When you know that a sentence or a paragraph or a section doesn’t quite fit where you want it to but you don’t want to delete it because, damn it, you worked hard on those words, then you can copy and paste it into your “Pieces” document. Chances are you will not actually go back and use these pieces in your dissertation. If you’ve made the decision to take them out then they probably need to be out. However, reading through my old “pieces” document has often worked as a great way to get over writer’s block.

Follow Bunny Trails. One of the most defeating experiences as a writer is when you spend all day (or week or month or year) chasing down a lead. Sometimes all you have is the name of a scholar who said something you know would tie together your whole argument in this one place. Sometimes you remember the gist of what was said but not who said it or where. Sometimes, you find what you’re looking for but once you find it it’s not obvious why you were so sure it would fit. Sometimes, you spend all day looking and you don’t find what you’re looking for. Either way, at the end of these days it’s easy to feel frustrated with yourself for wasting so much time chasing down a bunny trail. But those bunny trails are actually an essential part of the writing experience and help prepare you for your dissertation defense. In your search for whatever piece of scholarship you are looking for you are acquainting yourself with the literature of your field. If you find the thing you were looking for and it doesn’t fit then you’ll be prepared to articulate to your committee or a job search committee why you rejected it because you made a conscious decision to do so. Mostly, you have to trust that you’re not an idiot and if you have a hunch that you need to hunt something down then that work will pay off sometime, somewhere. It always does.

This is the last entry in our September series on letting go of perfection and embracing progress.

For October we’ll be focusing on how to spend less time teaching and create more time for your dissertation without short changing your students. This is one of our favorite topics and we can’t wait to dive into it with you!

For the month of January, and in celebration of our two year and 100th post anniversaries, we’re revisiting some of our most viewed columns. Today we’re re-posting an unusual coping mechanism that got me through my dissertation and what I learned from it. Enjoy!

Being from a working-class background, I grew up identifying “work” as something with visible, tangible results. My stepdad poured concrete. His work was a series of discrete tasks. That is not to say it didn’t take skill–it absolutely did–but at the end of the day, when his work was done, there was concrete where there had been no concrete. My grandfather was a machinist. When his work was done there was a thing where there had been no thing. My mom was a secretary and a large part of her job was archiving documents. She started the day with a pile of documents to archive and at the end of the day they were archived. That’s how you knew that work was done.

Academic work is not like that.

Writing, in general, is not like that.

You sit down at your computer and you start to write. Then you start to edit. You might end the day with more words than you started with. You might end the day with fewer words than you started with. If you track your word count over time you will see a steady increase, but even then there often isn’t a tangible product at the end of the day to show that you did something other than sit at a desk all day. And that’s on the good days! The days when you actually get to write. There are other days where you go down research trails that may or may not lead somewhere. (Well, they all lead somewhere, but they often don’t lead where you expect them to.) There are days where you are mired in meetings or days when teaching takes all of your energy and you feel like you didn’t make any dissertation progress.

Without concrete proof that you are moving forward, the ebb and flow of writing can feel discouraging and self-defeating.

To help myself fight this discouragement I made a seemingly small decision on a completely ordinary day. At the time, I was using this little post-it sized to-do lists I’d gotten at Target. I had enough space to write about five tasks on each one and, because they were square, they were perfect for origami. I decided that, when I completed all five items on my to-do list, I would fold it into a paper crane.

I had no idea how to make paper cranes.

I finished the to-do list and looked up a YouTube paper crane tutorial.

I made a crane.

There it was, sitting on my desk, a little reminder that I had completed the tasks I had set for myself.

The next day, I decided to try the same thing. I made a small to-do list. I completed it. I made another paper crane.

Now I had two cranes and two tangible reminders that I had completed all my tasks for the day. When I started there was no crane. When I finished a crane existed. This was a form of work that made sense to me.

I found that this method helped keep me focused on my progress rather than what I didn’t get done.

About a week into this I thought, “Wouldn’t it be neat to make 1000 cranes and turn them into streamers for my dissertation defense?” It’s said that, if you make 1000 cranes you get a wish. Maybe I could use them to wish to become a doctor.

Reader, I did it.

I made 1000 cranes.

They weren’t all to-do lists. I also used the hard copy drafts of my dissertation that I printed out to edit. (You can get about 4 cranes out of an 8.5×11 piece of paper, btw.)

Was it great to have my crane streamers in the room when I defended my dissertation? Absolutley.

Do I still have them? Of course.

Here’s what making 1000 cranes taught me.

1. You will get bad advice. You will recover. Remember when I told you that I didn’t know anything about making paper cranes and searched a YouTube video to learn how? Well, the first video I found was not a good tutorial. I don’t think the maker of that video new how to make a crane either. As a result, my first dozen “cranes” aren’t, technically, cranes. They kind of look like cranes, if you squint. When I realized that these first cranes didn’t look right I found another tutorial which I followed religiously until I could make a crane with my eyes closed.
2. You will feel crazy. Here’s the thing about making 1000 of anything. At first, it will be fun and cute. People will comment on it saying, “What a neat idea!” or “How fun!” Once you get about 30 of them and they are strewn across your desk people will stop commenting. They are no longer cute. They are messy and a little weird. When you have to get a box to store your first 100 cranes in you will start to wonder if you are crazy. Once you reach 500 it will feel like there’s no point in stopping. Once you reach 925 you will wonder if you *really* have to make it to 1000. Once you hit 1000 you will be so incredibly proud of yourself.
3. It’s not about one crane. Remember back in step one when I said that my first dozen cranes were made incorrectly? Well, they weren’t the only ones. Even after I learned to make cranes there were still days when I made bad ones. The paper wasn’t perfectly square or my fold was off. The thing is, though, when you make 1000 of anything what each individual one looks like isn’t as important as what they look like together. Let me tell you, friends, those 1000 cranes together are a beautiful sight to behold.
4. Ask for help. It may sound odd given everything I’ve said up to this point but making 1000 cranes was actually the easy part. I severely underestimated the difficulty of making streamers out of 1000 paper cranes. I’m also not what you would call a “crafty” person. This meant that I was about a week out from my dissertation defense and had no streamers and felt frustrated and overwhelmed. I reached out to see if any of my friends wanted to come over, watch movies, and make streamers. I will be eternally grateful to the people who came over and engaged in that ridiculous activity to make this dream come true.
5. Celebrate. You did something difficult. Show it off! Be proud of it! Tell people about it! Do your favorite thing! You earned it.

A dissertation, it turns out, is remarkably similar to making 1000 cranes.

1. You will get bad advice from faculty who think grad school hasn’t changed since they were in it, from abusive advisors, from bitter grad students. You will recover. Your ability to course-correct is unlimited.
2. You will feel crazy. At first it will be exciting (and intimidating), then it will feel boring (and daunting). You will feel crazy. Then you will feel like you might as well keep going since you’ve gotten this far. You will feel crazy. Then you will wonder if you really wanna finish this thing. You will feel crazy. Then you will be done and feel glorious.
3. It’s not about the individual words or sentences. It’s not that words aren’t important, because they are. It’s just that there’s no reason to get hung up on individual words or sentences that don’t sound “perfect” because it’s about the totality of the thing you are doing. It’s about the book, not the paragraph. Just keep writing. You might come back and find those sentences you agonized over weren’t so bad after all.
4. Ask for help. Find people you trust. Ask for help. Do this often.
5. Celebrate. Celebrate fiercely. Celebrate the little wins and the big wins. Celebrate.