Doing a dissertation is like getting married:

• You probably haven’t done it before.
• It’s exciting and scary at the same time.
• It can cost a lot of money.
• It usually involves a lot of ceremony and pleasing other people.
• It’s very hard to get advice on how to do it, and that advice is often wrong.

That’s why our company exists. People need help with their dissertations because for the vast majority, it’s a complex, unfamiliar journey through a strange place. We’ve observed that the guidance graduate students receive for that journey is sometimes excellent and sometimes…not so much. That includes (sadly) those times when you march right up to a faculty member and ask them how do I do this, or what’s supposed to go here, etc.

Usually, you have a faculty mentor who acts as your dissertation consultant. This can be very helpful; it can also be anti-helpful. That person was hired by your university to teach a particular subject—he may not know diddly-squat about doing research and writing a dissertation, other than his own personal experience from, say, three decades ago. So, consulting a faculty member about how to write your dissertation is like asking your next door neighbor, the auto mechanic, if he can fix your plumbing. He might be able to; his skill set might be transferable to the new job. Or…you might wind up with a flooded house.

This is where we come in! (drum roll, please) We know the ins and outs of the arcane arts and eldritch rituals of the dissertation process. We can be your actual dissertation coach, working from experience. Our analysts have worked on hundreds of client dissertations, on a myriad of subjects. We’ve also served clients from dozens of universities. We know the quirks and pitfalls attendant to doing your dissertation. You don’t. That’s why you need us.

You also need us because at this point in your academic career, you’re heavily invested in yourself. You have things you want to accomplish after you get your degree. Can you afford to crash and burn, get your dissertation rejected, and have to repeat an academic year? That would be a disaster—a huge waste of time and money. We’ll make sure that won’t happen.

I’ve been talking about our expertise and experience in the dissertation process. One signal aspect of that is that we realize that there is a “dissertation story” told by most universities and that like most stories, there is a varying degree of truth within them. Furthermore, there are some things they just flat-out won’t tell you. So, what I’d like to do now is tell you:

The Five Things They Don’t Tell You About Doing Your Dissertation

1. Dissertation chairs occasionally disappoint. That faculty member who will be your Obi-Wan and teach you the ways of the Force might actually be Jar Jar Binks (if you don’t get the reference, clearly, you haven’t been keeping up with your pop culture). That is to say, faculty advisors vary in quality. As I mentioned above, it isn’t their primary job to act as your dissertation coach. They will probably be sincere and enthusiastic about helping you. (Probably.) However, they might be only kinda sorta familiar with the process.

What’s even more confounding, though, is that they’ll have biases and opinions (Swetnam & Swetnam, 2000). At every stage of the process, you’ll submit a draft of what you’ve done so far, and they’ll return it with comments, either about the writing itself or the research planning and design contained within it. This happens over and over. One of our primary functions as dissertation consultants is to assist you in this iterative process—which is why we include revisions with our dissertation assistance (we know they’ll be needed!). This help is extremely valuable, as many of our clients learn when they try to go it alone. One aspect of that help is recognizing and adjusting for your faculty advisor’s biases and quirks.

But wait! you say. Isn’t this process supposed to be rigorous and objective? Whaddya mean, biases? Well, first of all, no one is completely objective, no matter how hard they try to be (and by the way, don’t assume that your prof is even trying to be objective). When they review your dissertation, some things will be of outsized importance to them, while some things won’t matter at all (Roberts, 2010). You can’t really tell in advance what those will be.

This is a point of frustration for so many of our dissertation consulting clients, which is why we have a system for handling these types of situations. When you, our client, forward your draft to us with all the comments on it, we will help not only by addressing those comments but also by figuring out what it is your prof wants. This often entails quite a bit of reading between the lines. As what we do for you includes going through this process again and again until you’re done, it’s vital for us to realize what it will take to please, placate, and satisfy your professor. We are, in short, custom tailors.

There’s another aspect of our service that our clients often find especially valuable. Sometimes, you get your draft back from your prof with so many red marks and strikeouts that it looks like a chicken walked through a puddle of blood and wandered all over your paper. If you have ever found yourself on the receiving end of such a critique of your work, you know that this is as horrifying as it sounds. But keep in mind that we are dissertation editors as well as dissertation consultants. That means that not only is our grammar, punctuation, spelling, syntax, etc. perfect, but we also know proper formatting and style and are well-versed in the standard academic writing styles, such as APA, Chicago, etc. I promise, if your prof is a stickler for writing, your life will be hell if you’re not very strong in that area. At this level of discourse, unfortunately, there aren’t really any effective resources offered by your university to help you. You usually can’t find, for example, an APA editor who will go over your dissertation with a fine-toothed comb.

2. Doing your dissertation is mostly about learning to do research, and not so much about saving the world. You might think, or might have been told, that the research you will perform in the process of writing your dissertation needs to be or will be on something earthshaking and profound. You might also ask yourself: if I don’t discover something significant, what’s the point? Certainly, when you have that vision of hundreds of $100 bills with little wings attached, flying away forever as you pay your tuition, you want to get some bang for your buck. Surely, you think, I can discover unified field theory, or at least the perfect salsa?

Sorry, that’s not going to happen (jalapeno and tomatillo with onions and cilantro, by the way). The most you should hope for is to put a tiny pebble at the base of the towering pyramid of human knowledge. This is fine. First of all, overly ambitious research usually falls on its face. There’s a very rigorous set of standards in academic research and literature about what you actually found and proved. It’s often called academic humility (Glatthorn & Joyner, 2005).

You may, for instance, want to perform qualitative research on how people feel about losing their parents. You think, I’ll interview a bunch of people (should be easy to find participants) about it, write it up, and boom! PhD. But what kind of people? Old people? Young people? Rich? Poor? Urban? Rural? White? Black? One head? Two heads? And what about their parents who died? Were they young or old? What kind of jobs did they have…etc. etc. So, you come to realize, you asked a question that you couldn’t really answer, given that you’re just one person and don’t have unlimited time. So eventually, you narrow it WAY down, to something like this: “The purpose of this qualitative phenomenological study is to better understand the experiences of Hispanic women in the United States who lose a parent before they attain the age of thirty.” Something with that kind of focus is within your capabilities.

But there’s something else you should know. You might think that the purpose of the research you’ll be doing is, well, to find out something. That consideration is purely secondary. There’s an entirely different reason why you perform your research and write your dissertation: to demonstrate to the powers that be at your university that you can do those things. The idea is that a person with a doctorate must demonstrate the ability to do research and write about it; otherwise, the investments made in you, by yourself, your university, your parents, society, etc. are wasted. In other words, your degree will be in (whatever), but you’re also training to be a researcher.

Therefore, what you’re going to study and find out can be pretty much anything, and does NOT have to be earth-shattering; what it does have to be is something that (a) can potentially address (not necessarily solve) a significant societal problem; (b) has not been researched to any significant degree; and (c) is within your resources and ability to study. Choosing your research topic is, in fact, a major element of the dissertation help we offer. Let’s talk about that.

3. Choices on dissertation design and structure are all up to you. It’s probably a good idea to research a topic you are interested in, and most universities would like that topic to relate fairly closely to your field of study. What they won’t tell you is that you have, within those guidelines, a fair amount of freedom. Now, as I stated above, your ambitions for research should be modest—very modest. You aren’t going to find out more than one specific thing or things about a fairly narrowly defined situation or group in a particular setting or area. This is something you’ll come to understand as you design your study—and as we assist you as part of our dissertation coaching process.

There are many, many choices regarding how to perform your research, once you’ve decided on your topic. Where most universities fall flat, we’ve discovered, is in teaching you how to make such choices. There are basically two influences on your research design—I’ll call them “push” and “pull.” The “push” is the nature of the topic, your area of study, and the prior literature on the subject. The “pull” is your personal preferences, the practical constraints you operate under, and your available time and resources.

Let’s say, for example, that you like talking to people. You might consider doing qualitative interview-based research. Or maybe you really like numbers. A quantitative causal or correlational study might be in order. Perhaps you like teasing out data (polls do this a lot). You could design a survey to be administered to a given population of your choosing in order to discover X about Y, with X and Y being entirely up to you.

We’ve found that one of the most valued aspects of our dissertation assistance is that we can help you with those choices. The path you choose will pretty much dictate the course of your life for the better part of a year. Therefore, you want to get it right the first time. Some universities offer relatively little help in this area; others may offer an online dissertation manual that if printed out, could sink an ocean liner. But even those manuals aren’t all that useful in showing you the reasons why you should choose a given topic and research approach and method.

I’d like to give you another uncomfortable truth at this point—one that is rarely mentioned. You may not, in fact, find out anything significant. Or…your findings could be essentially negative, in that “I found that X had no significant influence on Y.” This is cool, though! Finding that something is not can be as valuable as finding that something is. That is not sexy. But it can guide future research, which is essentially the point of all research. To beat the pebble-on-the-pyramid analogy to death, maybe what you found out is: this pebble doesn’t fit there. That can be just as valuable.

4. Finding a topic that hasn’t been researched before can be kind of brutal. Now, I’m talking about something significant, which is generally taken to mean societally meaningful (Rudestam & Newton, 2014). There has to be a problem, which you state the existence of and support with recent literature. As dissertation coaches, we help you to craft a good problem statement, which is the embryo of your entire dissertation. One facetious-sounding test of whether you have a good problem statement is: “Who cares?” If you can’t really answer that, it’s back to square one.

One possible reason why your university won’t be that helpful in designing your research might be because at this point, you’re expected to be sufficiently versed in your field of study that you’ve already perceived many problems that could be addressed by research. Well, you might be—and you might not be. For one thing, some disciplines are more society-oriented than others. It might be a wee bit easier, for example, to craft a problem statement if your field of study is child psychology or economics than it might be if you were studying astronomy or burrowing rodents (and no, I don’t know what that might be called). The key question is always: how is society affected by this problem (as in, is it a real problem), and can it be addressed by research?

By the way, if you want to do statistical or mathematical-oriented research, or if you want to do quantitative research that will require extensive analysis of the data, we have your back. We have a very experienced team of statistical consultants who can help you crunch the numbers after you collect your data. You might shy away from research designs that will require much statistical analysis because you’re not sure you’ll be able to do it. Maybe equations look to you like they’re written in Chinese (or if you’re Chinese, like they’re written in English). If so, you’re not alone.

I am continually amazed that students who do not have backgrounds in statistics and mathematical analysis nonetheless choose quantitative designs for their studies. That choice adds drastically to one’s workload. If you’re comfortable with numbers, fine; but if you’re not, consider a different design, OR…talk to us, your dissertation coaches! We’ve done it all, and whatever design you choose, we’ll have someone who is very familiar with it.

5. You will have to learn a new language. Finally, I’d like to talk about what I consider the most annoying aspect of academic writing. We’re all familiar with sublanguages like lawyerspeak, teenspeak, militaryspeak, etc. Academicspeak is a sublanguage all its own, particularly in its written form. You have to know academicspeak in order to write a dissertation.

There are many, many, many rules attendant to writing your dissertation. Most of those rules make sense—they’re attempts to standardize content and make it readable by people worldwide, not all of whom are proficient in English (Bolker, 1998). Some of those rules make less sense—they are arbitrary and we obey them because, well, we obey them. Others make little or no sense and can be, frankly, asinine—but you have to obey them all.

The fact of the matter is that the rules are worthwhile but often seem kind of anal-retentive. Writing a dissertation is as structured and ritualized as a Japanese tea ceremony. Everything has to be done just so, with the entire ceremony ostensibly ruined if you deviate just one little bit. This can be very stressful—especially if your prof or dissertation coach considers those rules to be sacrosanct, even if they seem to you to be completely arbitrary (and they often are).

When looking at the Sacred Book of Rules (or whatever a given university calls its dissertation manual), I am often reminded of a short story by Shirley Jackson called “The Lottery.” A fictional small town in America holds an annual lottery. The “winner” of the lottery is stoned to death. It is never stated why this is done, and the implied explanation is that “we do it because we’ve always done it.” You, writing your dissertation, may feel like you’ve won the lottery, and I don’t mean Powerball. You get taken to task for not properly italicizing this or incorrectly abbreviating that, and you want to set fire to your computer, quit school, and join an ashram and spend the rest of your life cultivating “happy peas.” OK, maybe you won’t go that far. But the process can be both tedious and frustrating.

This is where (and if you’ve read this far, you know what I’m about to say) we come in! Our dissertation help service includes pouring the tea just right for you (that ceremony analogy I made earlier, in case you forgot). Our analysts have done this a zillion times. I, personally, have been known to screech to a stop on the street, climb out of my car, and rearrange a message board so that it is properly APA formatted. OK, maybe not. But I’m intimately familiar with the entire tea ceremony, as I’ve been a dissertation consultant and analyst for the better part of a decade, and I often ask myself: “How the bleepity blankity bleep can anyone be expected to learn all these rules in a short period of time?” The answer is: with much blood, sweat, and tears—or by hiring us.

You will probably need help with your dissertation at some point, and ideally, you’ll seek that help before you lose your mind. My opinion is that no one can write a dissertation and perform the attendant research without receiving substantial help. I hope I’ve explained to you why that help might not be as forthcoming from your school and advisors as you might expect, and therefore, you should (poke, poke) hire us.

References

• Bolker, J. (1998). Writing your dissertation in fifteen minutes a day: A guide to starting, revising, and finishing your doctoral thesis. Holt Paperbacks.
• Glatthorn, A. A., & Joyner, R. L. (2005). Writing the winning thesis or dissertation: A step-by-step guide. Corwin Press.
• Roberts, C. M. (2010). The dissertation journey: A practical and comprehensive guide to planning, writing, and defending your dissertation. Corwin Press.
• Rudestam, K. E., & Newton, R. R. (2014). Surviving your dissertation: A comprehensive guide to content and process. Sage Publications.
• Swetnam, D., & Swetnam, R. (2000). Writing your dissertation: The bestselling guide to planning, preparing and presenting first-class work. Hachette UK.