I started dissertation writing in earnest back in October. I started by taking my proposal defense document (which was around 20,000 words) and adding and reorganizing from there. Besides some holiday time set-backs, I’ve been making some slow but steady progress.

In the beginning, I believed that my dissertation would be somewhere around 50,000 words when it was done. 50,000 is the average number of words for a novel so I figured that would be a good estimate for my dissertation. However, I think my dissertation might be longer than that in the end. I recently crested the 40,000 word mark and I still have a couple chapters left to write and literature review to add. Perhaps mine will be more like 60,000? I’ll let you know when I get there.

I wanted to take a time-out from dissertation writing for a few minutes so I could share some of my recent obsessions and strategies that have been helping me a long. If you are a fellow dissertation writer and want to share some of your strategies with me (or just commiserate) then I’d love to hear from you.

Save, save, save, save again, email it to yourself, and save one more time:

One of the dirty secrets of getting a PhD is that it makes you a little bit crazy. Those crazy professors you know weren’t always that looney and absent minded - their PhDs made them that way. Its all part of the graduate school process, which reaches its climax during the dissertation writing time. It is during this time that most graduate students develop a few obsessive compulsive habits. The most common OC trait that dissertation writers share would have to be compulsive saving. Everyone knows that you should make back-ups of your work, but how important is it to make sure copies of your data are contained on a multitude of different devices spread across the globe? I currently have copies of all my data living on 1 machine and 1 external hard drive in the lab I work out of at Virginia Tech, 1 external hard drive in my house in Christiansburg, VA, and 1 external hard drive and 1 machine that I have with me in California. I also keep copies of just my dissertation document saved on 2 usb thumb drives: 1 thumb drive I leave in my backpack with my laptop and 1 thumb drive stays in my purse so I can keep it on my person at all times. I also periodically email my dissertation to my gmail account so there is a copy in the cloud, you know, just in case.

I am certainly not alone in the “obsessive compulsive save data in case the zombie apocalypse happens” department. (I don’t care if my committee members are zombies just as long as I can interpret their cries of “brains” as “you pass”.) My friend Mat Grove told me he made sure that his dissertation was saved on servers located on different continents. You can never tell when the whole country will erupt into flames and there is a possible post-doc waiting for you in say, Iceland? Dubai? Australia? Easter Island? Who cares. You get the point.

Keeping track of words:

As the graph above suggests, I keep track of my dissertation word count. After coming this far in my PhD program it would be a damn shame if I didn’t have a love for data and graphs. With this particular graph, I love watching that red line creep steadily upwards as time moves on. (I also reward myself with cookies when I see a positive increase in the slope of the line.)

Accountability Buddy:

Back in the fall my friend Laurian Vega and I started a “300 words a day” accountability club. Every week day we would txt each other with our daily word counts and cheer each other on. Its sorta like having an accountability partner for exercise. You are much more likely to “show up” if you know someone is expecting you to.

Writing Group:

I recently joined the “Shut Up & Write!” meet-up group for the Silicon Valley. The meetings are exactly like the group name suggests - everyone meets at a designated location, we have about 15 minutes of social “get-to-know-you” time, and then we are instructed to shut up and write. Everyone writes for about an hour, then you are free to leave or start socializing again as you like. Through this group I’ve met some very interesting people who love to write. Most of them are writing novels or screen plays, but they are perfectly a-okay with having a dissertation writer in their midst. I find that I actually get an incredible amount of writing done at these meetings.

Knowing I’m not alone....:

Besides having friends who are also going through or have recently gone through the dissertation writing phase, its nice to read some funny blogs and comics about it too. I’m sure most of the people who would read my blog have seen PhD Comics before. Those are always good for a pick-me-up when you have the phd blues. I also recently found the To Do: Dissertation blog, which looks like it has potential to inspire and help with the whole process.

Have any strategies for dissertating you’d like to share? You can find me via email (meg DOT kurdziolek AT gmail DOT com) or twitter (@megak).