RobShein
New member
Okay, so I'm in the final year of my EdD program, and I was having a panic attack about my dissertation discussion chapter. I went to my professor's office hours in tears, convinced I was going to fail. And you know what she said? "Have you considered hiring a methodological consultant?" She explained that MANY doctoral candidates use ghost writing-adjacent services—not to write the content, but to help with data analysis, literature synthesis, and editing. She called it "academic concierge work." I had no idea this was a thing! I always thought ghost writing meant someone secretly writing the whole thing for you. But getting expert help on specific sections, especially stats and methodology, is apparently pretty common. I feel so much better now. Anyone else had this experience?
I was drowning in my quantitative data last semester and hired a stats tutor who basically walked me through the SPSS outputs line by line. I felt guilty for weeks, thinking I was cheating, but my advisor said the same thing—it's consultation, not plagiarism. As long as you're the one interpreting and writing, getting expert help is just being smart. Thanks for being brave enough to share this, because the stigma is real!
