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Submitting my dissertation draft to my committee in six weeks and I'm in that particular kind of panic where I've read it so many times that I genuinely cannot see it anymore 😶📖 The problem with standard proofreading tools at the dissertation level is that they're calibrated for much shorter...

I want to write about something that I think gets underdiscussed in the practical advice circles around dissertation writing, which is how genuinely isolating the process is — not in a dramatic way, just in a quiet, sustained, this-is-harder-than-I-expected way 😶 I'm in my third year of a...

I need to say this somewhere that isn't my advisor's office because I'm not ready to have that conversation yet, but I think I've been working on the wrong research question for two years and I'm not sure what to do with that realization 😶 My dissertation is in environmental sociology, focused...

I'm going to be really honest right now because I don't know where else to say this. I'm in my sixth year of a PhD program. SIX. YEARS. I'm ABD, I have all my data, I know what my argument is, and I CANNOT. FINISH. WRITING. 😭 Every day I sit down to work on my dissertation and every day I find...

Writing a dissertation is basically a prolonged grief cycle. You're grieving your old life, your free time, your social skills, your sanity. Here's how it breaks down: Stage 1: Denial "I have plenty of time. Two years to write? Easy. I'll just write a chapter a month and have summers off. This...

For months, I couldn't write. I'd block out "writing time" on my calendar, sit down with grand ambitions, and then... stare at the wall. Check email. Stare some more. Write one sentence. Give up. Then a friend introduced me to writing sprints, and it changed everything. How it works: Get a...

I feel like I've unlocked some secret level of academia. I'm a busy mom of two, work full-time, and always dreamed of having that "doctor" title, but the thought of a dissertation? Absolutely not. I don't have years to spend on original research that maybe three people will read. So I went...

Can we talk about how absolutely terrifying the methodology section of a dissertation proposal is? Like genuinely the scariest part of the whole process for me. I'm a social sciences PhD student and I spent weeks agonizing over whether I should do qualitative interviews or quantitative surveys...