What happens when the deadlines disappear, the reading lists end, and suddenly the dissertation is yours to write?
I thought finishing my comprehensive exams would feel like freedom. And for a little while, it did.
After months of reading, note-taking, writing, studying, and moving from one enormous academic task to the next, I submitted my final historiographical exam and waited. When the grade came back and I knew I had passed, the feeling was extraordinary. The coursework was finished. The exams were finished. I had made it through one of the biggest hurdles of the Ph.D.
I was elated. I had spent so long working toward that moment that simply being able to say, I passed my comprehensive exams, felt enormous.
Then, somewhere in the celebration, came a much quieter and considerably more terrifying realization:
Now I had to write a dissertation.
Not an exam or a seminar paper. Not an assignment with a carefully defined prompt, assigned readings, and a deadline sitting conveniently in Canvas. I had to produce an enormous piece of original historical scholarship, and the thing I had spent years describing as something I would do eventually had suddenly become something I needed to do now.
And what did I have to begin with? A prospectus, a basic outline, some research questions, a growing collection of sources, and the knowledge that somehow all of those things were supposed to become a dissertation.
The elation did not disappear, exactly. But it suddenly had company.
When the Structure Disappears
One of the things I did not anticipate about moving from coursework and comprehensive exams into the dissertation stage was just how dramatically the structure of doctoral work would change.
During coursework, there was always something telling me what came next. There were chapters to read, discussions to write, papers to submit, and exams to prepare for. Even comprehensive exams, daunting as they were, had boundaries. There were reading lists, dates, expectations, and a clearly identifiable finish line.
Then I entered the dissertation stage, and that external structure largely disappeared.
Suddenly, I was the one who had to decide what came next. What should I read first? How much should I read before I started writing? Should I research one section at a time or read broadly across the entire project? How many hours each week should I devote to the dissertation, and where exactly were those hours supposed to come from when I was also teaching full time?
Underlying all of those questions was the simplest and most unsettling one:
Where do I even start?
For about four weeks, I struggled with that question far more than I expected.
I made schedules. I changed them. I made new schedules. I tried to determine when I could read, when I could write, what needed to happen first, and how dissertation work was supposed to fit into a life that already contained a full-time teaching career and all the ordinary responsibilities that do not politely disappear simply because someone has entered Dissertation I.
I knew I needed protected time for research and writing. Knowing that and actually creating it turned out to be two very different things.
The Freedom Was the Frightening Part
Eventually, I began to understand that the problem was not that I did not know how to do academic work. I had just spent years proving that I could.
What had changed was that, for the first time, I was responsible for creating the structure in which that work would happen.
There was something wonderfully liberating about that freedom. There was also something absolutely terrifying about it.
No one was going to hand me a weekly reading list for Boudica or tell me that this week I should work through the scholarship on cultural memory and next week I should tackle gender and historiography. There was no professor announcing that Chapter One was due Friday at 11:59 p.m.
This project belonged to me.
With that ownership came the uncomfortable realization that I had to learn not only how to write a dissertation, but how to manage the writing of a dissertation. Those are not quite the same skill.
Finding a Place to Begin
That lost feeling has probably been the most difficult part of the transition.
When a project is this large, almost everything feels important. There is always another book I could read, another article I could track down, another footnote I could investigate, or another historiographical connection I could explore. The sheer scale of it makes it surprisingly easy to spend a great deal of time thinking about doing the dissertation without actually knowing what to do next.
For a while, I thought what I needed was a master plan—a perfectly organized roadmap that would carry me from the beginning of Dissertation I all the way to a completed manuscript.
What I actually needed was much smaller.
I needed to know what I was doing today.
What am I reading? What am I taking notes on? What section am I trying to understand? What am I writing or revising next?
That sounds incredibly simple now that I can articulate it. It did not feel simple while I was trying to figure it out.
The Importance of Having a Chair
Throughout this transition, one thing I have become especially grateful for is having my dissertation chair to bounce ideas off of.
There is a strange tension built into dissertation work. It is supposed to be your project. You are becoming an independent scholar, developing your own argument, making your own historiographical decisions, and learning to trust your own judgment. At the same time, becoming an independent scholar does not mean figuring everything out in isolation.
Having someone who can listen while I work through an idea, tell me when I am moving in a productive direction, ask the question I have not thought to ask, or help me see how a collection of ideas might become an actual structure has been invaluable.
Sometimes I need an answer. More often, I think I need someone with considerably more experience to help me recognize that there is a path through the mess, even when I cannot see it yet.
My chair is not drawing the roadmap for me. He is helping me learn how to draw one for myself.
I am beginning to understand that this, too, is part of doctoral training.
Learning a Different Kind of Work
After roughly four weeks of wrestling with schedules, planners, reading lists, and the uncomfortable feeling that I should somehow already know exactly what I was doing, something finally began to shift.
I started building a system.
It is not a perfect system, and it is certainly not a dissertation-writing method I am prepared to package into a productivity course and sell on the internet. It is simply a system that is beginning to work for me.
I started breaking the enormous project into weeks, the weeks into days, and the days into tasks small enough that I could sit down and actually do them. Instead of writing “work on dissertation” in a planner—which is both wildly unhelpful and mildly terrifying—I started defining what that work actually meant.
Read this chapter. Take notes on this argument. Revise this paragraph. Correct these footnotes. Send this section to my chair.
Once I began thinking this way, the dissertation started to feel slightly less like an enormous object looming somewhere in the distance and more like something that could be constructed from hundreds of small, ordinary acts of scholarship: reading, thinking, writing, revising, discussing, questioning, and then doing all of it again.
The dissertation had not become smaller.
I had simply found a way to approach it.
Becoming Dr. Van Wyk
Before I reached this stage, I think some part of me imagined that beginning the dissertation would mean I had finally reached the point where I knew what I was doing.
That has not exactly been the experience.
Instead, I am beginning to understand that the dissertation stage may be where I learn how to work without someone else constantly defining the work for me. The uncertainty is not necessarily evidence that I am doing something wrong. Some of it is inherent in learning to take ownership of a project of this scale.
That is uncomfortable, and sometimes it is frightening. Occasionally it involves staring at an absurd number of books and wondering what possessed me to think writing a dissertation was a reasonable life choice.
But it is also exciting, because somewhere inside all of this uncertainty, something fundamental has changed.
I am no longer completing a series of assignments designed to teach me how historians work. I am doing the work.
There is still an enormous amount ahead of me. Right now, there are more questions than answers, more notes than prose, and considerably more footnotes than any reasonable person should have to think about.
But I have begun to build a structure. I have protected space in my week for reading and writing. I have a chair I trust when I need to talk through the parts I cannot yet see clearly. And, perhaps most importantly, when I sit down to work now, I usually know what I need to do next.
I do not need to know how to write the entire dissertation today.
I just need to know where to begin today.
One chapter at a time. One footnote at a time.
Becoming Dr. Van Wyk.
Leave a comment