Recent content by Shawn

The Norwegian guide is onto something but also... be careful with "what keeps you up at night." I chose my topic because I was obsessed with this niche question. Now I'm three years in and honestly? I'm a little sick of it. The passion faded around year two. What keeps me going now is momentum...

Think of it like building a house. Revising is deciding where the walls go, if the kitchen is in the right place, whether you need a second floor. Editing is painting the walls and picking the light fixtures. You can paint all you want, but if the kitchen is in the wrong spot, the house doesn't...

I rewrote my conclusion six times. What finally worked was stepping away from the document for a week. When I came back, I realized my conclusion was just my abstract in paragraph form. 😬 So I scrapped it and started with one sentence: "This dissertation matters because ______." Then I filled in...

Niche topics are tough but honestly kinda cool? You get to build your own thing. Your email is like, textbook perfect. But I'd also start showing up to random office hours of professors you suspect might be into this. Even if they're not experts, they know who is. Sometimes a quick face-to-face...

I'm in a humanities program and I joined a group that was interdisciplinary. That actually helped because nobody knew enough about my field to judge my progress. We set goals at the beginning of each session (e.g., "I will write 500 words on chapter three") and then did 45-minute sprints. At the...

Your advisor isn't wrong though. There's a psychological benefit to having an intro written early—it makes the project feel real and gives you something to anchor your thinking. But you have to go in knowing it's provisional. I wrote my intro first, defended my proposal with it, then rewrote...

I finally understand why dissertations take years — and why that's okay 💭 Message: For months, I've been beating myself up about how slow my dissertation progress is. I see friends finishing, publishing, moving on with their lives, and I'm still here, staring at the same chapter I started six...

The Tuskegee library guide includes a video on "The Structure of a Dissertation" that promises to teach "exactly what you should include and where to include it" . It acknowledges that "it can be intimidating to know where to start your dissertation, which is probably the longest piece of...

The Tuskegee guide says dissertations are "one of the most difficult research papers to write, involving much of a student's time, focus, and energy" . That's comforting to hear — it's not just me struggling. They also point out that while dissertations "follow the basics of a research paper,"...

I'm in my third year of PhD and I'm supposed to start my dissertation soon, but honestly? I'm not even sure what a dissertation IS. A guide from Tuskegee University says it's a "lengthy research paper written as a requirement to earn an academic degree" that proves your knowledge and contributes...