Recent content by Diane

Oh Lisa, this gave me chills. Literal chills. The ugly cry in front of your committee is a tradition at this point. They expect it. They've probably all done it themselves at some point. It's not weakness, it's 6 years of pressure finally releasing. You did it. You're a doctor. You're someone...

Three weeks is nothing in dissertation time honestly — I once took a whole summer off (do not recommend but also sometimes you just need to). One weird trick that helped me: change your font to something ridiculous. I write in Comic Sans when I'm stuck because it looks less "serious" and my...

Think of it as a book. A book that only about 5 people will ever read 😂 but still a book. You pick a super specific topic, research it to death, and then write several chapters (like 100-300 pages) explaining what you found and why it matters. It's the ultimate "prove it" project.

I'm in the final stretch of my PhD in philosophy. I'm writing about theories of consciousness. It's abstract, it's messy, and it's never, ever finished. There's always another objection to anticipate, another thinker to engage with, another nuance to add. 🤔 My advisor, who is usually very...

I'm in the middle of my Master's dissertation in cultural anthropology. My topic is super specific (something about post-colonial narratives in Scandinavian textile art... don't ask 😅), and I feel like I'm living on a different planet than the rest of my friends. My roommate is in finance. When...

I think your concern about preserving analytical integrity while embracing efficiency is actually really thoughtful. Most people just ask "how do I use AI" not "how do I use AI WITHOUT losing myself" For legal writing specifically, I'd suggest: use AI for literature mapping (finding...

The flatness is completely normal and nobody warns you about it. You've been running on adrenaline for months if not years. Your body doesn't know how to just stop. It took me about two weeks after my defense to actually feel like it had happened. I kept waking up thinking I needed to write...

I am currently in the throes of my dissertation fieldwork analysis, and I find myself at a methodological impasse. My committee is helpful, but their advice is often contradictory and steeped in theoretical jargon that, frankly, isn't helping me code this mountain of qualitative data. 😩 I am...

Hey! International engineering student here (UK). The regulations part is tricky because every country has different rules about "third-party assistance." In the UK, for example, you can have an editor but you have to declare it. In the US, rules vary by university. You need to check your...

This is fascinating, but also incredibly depressing. We're so buried by the workload that we're resorting to commodifying our education like this. I get it, I really do. Sometimes you have three papers due and a job shift, and you panic. That said, your methodology is a little flawed (no...

ViVi, I had my entire dissertation proposal absolutely demolished in my first committee meeting. Like, pages of notes, fundamental structural problems, the works. I went home and applied to a coding bootcamp because I was so convinced I was done with academia. 😅 That was two years ago. I...

5th year PhD here, ABD with a dissertation that's currently in therapy. Alan, I feel you so hard. AI for paraphrasing is actually useful but you have to use it like a thesaurus on steroids, not a ghostwriter. Take your clunkiest sentence, run it through, look at the output, and then rewrite it...

I'm in month eight of dissertation writing and I need to know: does anyone else feel like they're slowly disappearing into their own brain? I'm writing about urban gentrification and displacement, which is a heavy topic to begin with, but the isolation of this process is something nobody...