Ten Suggestions to Help You Choose Your Perfect Dissertation Topic

This is a guest post by Noelle Sterne. Dissertation coach, editor, scholarly and mainstream writing consultant, author, and spiritual counselor, Noelle has published over 300 pieces in print and online venues. Her recently published handbook addresses graduate students’ largely overlooked but equally important nonacademic difficulties: Challenges in Writing Your Dissertation: Coping with the Emotional, Interpersonal, and Spiritual Struggles (Rowman & Littlefield Education, 2015).

If you’re beginning or in the throes of your dissertation, you may know from other long-suffering students that the work engenders a love-hate relationship, with all the exasperations, frustrations, teeth-clenching, and eye-rolling, and occasional affection, elation, and fulfillment (eventually) of a primary human relationship. Therefore, your topic, like your partner, should be one that initially excites you and sustains you throughout the inevitable rages and reconciliations, desires to divorce yourself from it or run back to its scholarly arms, and finally settle into a consistent satisfying relationship.

As a longtime coach of doctoral candidates, I’ve seen many students in their first passion commit to a topic that would take 50 scholars, even with laptops, group writing bootcamps, and resuscitating Netflix subscriptions, 75 years to complete. Other candidates take on topics because their professors suggest them and the students believe the professors will help get articles published. Or students think the topic is “hot” and they’ll have an even better chance of publishing. None of these reasons will support your passion for your topic.

It’s almost axiomatic that many people choose concentrations and careers because of early personal experiences. A woman becomes an oncologist because she couldn’t save her mother from Stage 4 cancer. A man raised in poverty becomes a financial counselor to help businesspeople succeed in neighborhoods like his own.

Such motivations also generally guarantee sustained interest in a dissertation topic. Here I offer you ten suggestions, with questions and examples, to help you narrow down the perfect topic you’ll be living with for a long time.

1. Revisit your childhood dreams. How did you see yourself? What “professions” were your play favorites? Many kids like to play “doctor” (not that kind), and Mary, one of my clients, loved to play “nurse.” She showed me photographs of herself at age five with an impressive collection of play bandages, ointments, even casts, and a doll house she’d made into a “clinic.” Today, with her doctorate, she’s director of a regional hospital.

2. Review your favorite undergraduate and graduate course papers. Which did you really like doing? Which did you get As in? What about your master’s thesis? Would you feel excited expanding it? Lynn was an elementary school reading teacher who really cared about those stuttering, struggling readers. When she leafed through her course papers and reviewed her master’s thesis, she saw that the comparisons of different reading programs were her best work. Her dissertation topic? A comprehensive comparison of two elementary school reading programs for their relative effectiveness. Now a Ph.D., Lynn is a professor who teaches aspiring elementary reading and literacy teachers to help even more struggling readers.

3. Think about troubling experiences you’ve had, as in the examples above. Would you like to help remedy their causes? Negatives can be powerful motivators toward positive actions and activities. And think of all the people you’ll help. Before Philippe immigrated to the United States, he had been a secretary to a government cabinet member in his native Caribbean country. He daily witnessed the poverty, illiteracy, lack of jobs, and suffering of so many of the people. His dissertation topic explored literacy programs that could be implemented throughout the country to help raise the educational standards. With his degree, Phillipe was appointed to a government position in education to institute large-scale national literacy and job training programs.

4. What topic has fascinated you for a long time? What do you want to jump into and explore? Jill, a registered nurse in her 40s at a regional hospital, observed how older nurses were discriminated against. She longed to explore the assumptions and possible myths that administrators held in hiring, making assignments, and firing these nurses. Jill’s dissertation and the article she developed from it became valuable additions to the literature—and helped change hospital policies.

5. What especially meaningful experiences have you had that you want to know more about and know will make a difference? During surgery, Derrick had what he swore was a near-death experience. He delved into the research, interviewed many people who had had similar experiences, and even scored an interview with a major author on the subject. Derrick’s dissertation dealt with near-death experience theories and testimonies. He is now revising his work into a book and has a publisher interested.

6. What would you like to be known for? The answer to this question is likely inherent in your choice. In the examples above, the students’ passion for their choices drove their ambitions. Don’t be modest. Think about what you really know you can contribute—like Lynn and Phillipe.

7. Don’t be deterred or discouraged if the topic has been “done.” Even if you discover that many scholarly articles have been published on your topic, your slant will be different. You can use those articles to show how your study is better, different, and worth not only the doctorate but publication.

8. Dream: Imagine how the topic can be used in your dream job and how you look forward to devoting your professional life to your interest. Sandra was a geriatric care counselor advising adults on the placement of their elderly parents in appropriate care facilities. She felt needed and fulfilled, knowing she was helping both generations toward the best choices. Imagining her dissertation topic, Sandra saw how she could identify and discuss the many elements involved in placement. Exploration of this topic would help her professionally to broaden her knowledge, enhance her abilities, and open her mind to new counseling techniques. After obtaining her degree, Sandra gave several presentations, published her findings in an elder care journal, and established a private consulting practice.

9. If you’re not in your dream job or career, paint mental pictures of the one you are aiming for. Observe and talk to others in this or a related career. What topic did they write on? How did it help their careers? What pointers can they give you about topic choice? Have they successfully transitioned from the dissertation results to real-world application? Do they seem happy and enthusiastic? You’ll learn a lot about the “right” and “less-than-wonderful” choices others made, what they learned, and how you can use their experiences to help make your own best topic decisions.

10. Finally, listen inside for the topic that’s right for you. If you meditate, in your sessions silently ask the question about topics. You may be “led” to certain people, scholarly literature, movies, or magazines that clarify or confirm your choices. If you don’t meditate, keep asking yourself the topic question and stay aware and open. Several possible topics may occur to you. Test them against the suggestions here and keep listening to your intuition.

Choose one or two of these recommendations to explore each day. Don’t push or strain but relax. Let your unconscious lead you. Remember how important the choice is and how it will influence and direct your career and life. You deserve the perfect dissertation topic, and you will reach your answer.

© 2016 Noelle Sterne
Adapted from Noelle Sterne, Challenges in Writing Your Dissertation: Coping With the Emotional, Interpersonal, and Spiritual Struggles (Rowman & Littlefield Education, 2015).

How Long Can You Rely on Your Dissertation Adviser?

As you wrote your dissertation and searched for your first faculty job, your dissertation adviser was (I hope) there for you. He read countless drafts of your chapters. She helped you get published. He wrote scores of letters on your behalf. She may have even made phone calls for you. Now that you’re no longer a doctoral student, your adviser still may be the person who knows you best.

But how long can you keep turning to the same person to write you a letter of recommendation?


There is no definitive answer to that question. The good news is you can probably rely on your adviser until you’ve developed a new network of recommenders who don’t see you, first and foremost, as their student. The bad news is, at some point after completing the Ph.D., you’ll need to step out of your comfort zone and cultivate a network of people -- beyond your former professors -- who can write letters on your behalf. The sooner you cultivate that network, the better. It doesn’t need to happen in your first year on the tenure track, but it should happen before you submit your tenure application.

So where do you find these letter-writers?

The first place to look is in your new department. Start by fostering a letter-writing relationship with the department chair, who likely will have to write something on your behalf at some point anyway.

Next look for a departmental colleague whose research interests are close to your own. Believe it or not, you also may end up writing letters for that person, too. So while you’re reaching out to that colleague for advice on your own work, familiarize yourself with his or her work, too. The more familiar you both are with each other’s work, the more useful your mutual feedback and letters of recommendation will be.

Finally, try to connect with a faculty member in your department who is particularly interested in pedagogy, so that person can write teaching-related letters on your behalf. Talk to each other about teaching. Ask for advice on how to succeed in your university’s teaching-evaluation process. In my previous position, for example, we were required to have peer reviews of our teaching each year and the person who conducted the review had to write a letter to the chair evaluating us in the classroom. By the time I went up for tenure, I had five of these letters to include in my tenure case.

You will need letters from colleagues for a variety of purposes, including internal grant competitions, teaching awards, and future job applications. So now is the time to think about who in your new department might write letters for you.

The second place to look for recommenders is within your field. If your institution requires external letters for tenure review, it’s in your interest to build a list of a dozen senior scholars who have a favorable opinion of your work. The very idea of approaching the bigwigs in your field sounds frightening to a junior scholar, but, trust me, you’ll need that list of names when you go up for tenure. Here’s why: Most institutions let you pick some of your external reviewers, so you’ll want to have a clear idea about whom to suggest.

Start making that list now. Take out a sheet of paper and write down the names of the 12 people you most admire in your field. Don’t contact all of them immediately. But do start thinking of ways to reach out to them over time.

Pick the one that seems most approachable and ask him or her to have coffee with you at the next conference. Send a copy of your latest publication to the one whose work you recently cited. When your department is discussing whom to invite to the next colloquium series, suggest someone on your list whose work you think has the broadest appeal. One of my most well-known letter-writers is a person my department invited to campus to deliver a public lecture. If you are organizing a panel at a major conference, ask one or two of these senior scholars to participate as a panelist, chair, or discussant. If you edit a special issue of a journal, invite them to contribute.

There are many ways to reach out to scholars in your field. Once you have done so and developed a relationship with them, you can ask them to write you a letter of recommendation -- for a job, for an award, or for a fellowship.

Start building these essential relationships now and, eventually, you will be able to stop asking your dissertation adviser to write you yet another letter.

- Originally posted at: https://chroniclevitae.com/news/799-how-long-can-you-rely-on-your-dissertation-adviser#sthash.PVlbhFln.dpuf

How to choose a dissertation topic

Note: This week, I am sharing with you a great post by Vilna Bashi Treitler, which has been posted over at the SREM Mentoring blog.

Are you struggling with choosing a dissertation topic?

Choosing a topic can be one of the most important choices you will make in your professional career because it determines the first major piece of research for which you’ll be known, provides a focus for the group of professors you wish to solicit for your dissertation committee, and it is the first thing (along with the text of your letters of recommendation) that future colleagues will scrutinize when considering you for a job in their department.

The bad news is that all this can make choosing a dissertation topic pretty overwhelming. The good news is that I try to make the process somewhat easier by explaining to you how you might get started and avoid certain pitfalls. I have four pieces of advice to offer that I hope you follow, plus a tidbit that is not mandatory.

First, “push the envelope.”

You’ve probably heard a gazillion times that new research should “push the envelope,” but I’d bet that the likelihood that you had a clear explanation of what that means has not been given to you. Well, I’m going to explain it, right here, right now.

It is a phrase with a mathematical reference. An envelope is a term for the curve that encloses all other curves in a family of curves. When the term was used in aeronautics, it referred to the outer curve describing the limit of an aircraft’s performance. Test pilots were encouraged to push the envelope in order to test the aircraft, and the phrase made it to the common lexicon in Tom Wolfe’s 1979 book about test pilots, The Right Stuff. (Thanks, for the info, Michael Quinion, at http://www.worldwidewords.org/qa/qa-pus1.htm!)

Envision the whole of sociological knowledge as contained in one big dataset, complete with keywords and subject headings. Surely, you would contribute something to the dataset that would ostensibly fit under a subject heading, and possibly a set of existing keywords, but to push the envelope your topic should meet meet three criteria.

• It doesn’t repeat something that’s already in that dataset.
• It is something that sociologists interested in the topic will want to read when searching on information on the topic. That is, your research is not just different from the other work on the issue, but also has an interesting take.
• It is research that actually teaches researchers in your area of interest new information and will be useful to them when they are framing their own research projects. That is, not only is your research interesting, it shouldn’t be ignored if other sociologists want to do research in the same areas.

Honestly, you need only come up with a question that, when answered, would shed new light on what others have done before – but the idea is for that new light to truly have us look at things in a whole new way.

Read the remainder of the advice here: http://srem-mentoring.blogspot.com/2012/06/how-to-choose-dissertation-topic-four.html