"A dissertation should be done in 9 months"--realistic advice?

[RTFirefly]

@Chronos

9 months is reasonable, or perhaps a bit long, for the writing itself. For the research that goes into the writing, though, I’d say that 2 years is probably the absolute minimum.

That was pretty much my experience, when I was working towards my doctorate in mathematics a couple of decades back.

[statsman1982]

@Hippy_Hollow

The statement is fairly ridiculous because there are a multitude of factors to be considered. My doctorate in education took six years, and the time from my diss proposal being accepted to turning the sucker in was about a year. Data collection took a lot of my time (it was a qualitative interview study), then analysis. Writing was actually the quickest and easiest part.

I have told students that I wrote a chapter in two days. Granted, I had spent months thinking about what I wanted to write, and memoing. But once I said, “Right, that’s it - this is going to be completed,” it was incredibly fast. Of course I had to make edits and the committee gave comments, etc.

At the same time, there were days where I would literally write one page. Of crap.

Dissertation writing is funny because no two days are the same. Sometimes it pours out of you, other days the well is dry, and you try to stay productive by making sure your margins are correct, laying out tables and figures, and the like.

Ultimately, though, it doesn’t fucking matter what this guy thinks unless he is your chair/advisor or on your committee! Make sure you’re on the same page with him/her.

Yes, I know his opinion doesn’t matter much for me, since he’s not my chair or even on my committee. But the proximity of my office to the men’s room gives people a lot of opportunity to offer me unsolicited advice:)

What about the comment that taking less than 9 months makes it easier to publish for tenure? I can see a grain of truth in that comment, since tenure requires pubs, pubs, pubs, and taking too long to write them means fewer of them by the time tenure review arrives.

[Stranger_On_A_Train]

@Voyager

Most importantly, I had learned how to manage my adviser,

Which has probably turned out to be as valuable as any technical skill set that you learned.

Stranger

[Voyager]

@ZenBeam

It absolutely is relevant. You can estimate or find out how much coursework is required, some of which may just be “Doctoral Dissertation Research”. In my case:
(999 is “Doctoral Dissertation Research”). 36 credits is, what, two years? But taken in conjunction with research, so maybe count it as one.

You can also estimate what the teaching load is, which I’m sure varies greatly among programs (I taught one class, and that may have been when I was getting my Masters). The OP may already know what this is in his case.

You got some other way of estimating the answer?

Everyone takes the x99 class. I don’t count that is relevant, since the university needs it to show you have the appropriate course load when what you are actually doing is research, often for your grant. I took it when I was doing my literature survey, when I was thinking about my dissertation, when I was working on someone else’s dissertation, and when I was actually writing mine.
I do agree that teaching would slow you down. I got mine out of they way before I did my final push.

The time it takes to do research is pretty variable, but unless you have writer’s block, or want to create a masterpiece of literature, the time to actually write a dissertation should be reasonably short.

[Voyager]

@Stranger_On_A_Train

Which has probably turned out to be as valuable as any technical skill set that you learned.

Stranger

More valuable. I switched subfields immediately afterwards, since I correctly predicted mine was dyng.

[Hippy_Hollow]

@statsman1982

Yes, I know his opinion doesn’t matter much for me, since he’s not my chair or even on my committee. But the proximity of my office to the men’s room gives people a lot of opportunity to offer me unsolicited advice:)

What about the comment that taking less than 9 months makes it easier to publish for tenure? I can see a grain of truth in that comment, since tenure requires pubs, pubs, pubs, and taking too long to write them means fewer of them by the time tenure review arrives.

Again, I think that’s a little glib. Post-graduate research is a lot different. You might have significant assistance via grants and grad student support. So it’s managing people on a project, which is a completely different animal (says the guy who is a PI on a project two years in).

I’ve partnered with some senior colleagues and I see how fast they are. It’s helpful and instructive. Being that my diss was my own work (not an offshoot of a prof’s big project) this is a little new to me. I am learning though.

I think the important thing is to keep busy. In my field, peer review is king, but I still do chapters, op eds, even books. I am sure there are people cranking out crazy articles but I am trying to speak to a multitude of audiences, and peer review ain’t the only group I’m trying to reach. (But I know I need to reach them early and often…)

[Voyager]

@Joe Frickin Friday

It was surprising how much of my time was spent preparing illustrations and plots.

I did mine in 1980, before laser printers. One professor in our department had just finished the final draft of his, which required running his dissertation through an IBM selectric printer twice to get the superscripts right. After looking at that, I resolved that none of my diagrams and equations (I didn’t have a lot) would require anything more than a line printer to print.

Since this was before PCs, I wrote mine out by hand and then had my wife type it into a Multiics terminal for later formatting with runoff. While this was slower for me than typing, I also did not have the urge to play solitaire between paragraphs, so I might have come out ahead.

I did mine in that short interval between having a grad student wife type it for so much for page and laser printers.

[Voyager]

@Hippy_Hollow

Again, I think that’s a little glib. Post-graduate research is a lot different. You might have significant assistance via grants and grad student support. So it’s managing people on a project, which is a completely different animal (says the guy who is a PI on a project two years in).

I suspect that writing speed is an input to the process, not an output, though we all write faster after we internalize the structure of a paper in our fields. I’m in industry, but I have lots of papers, and a column, and I also help colleagues write papers. They are a lot slower since they make the usual mistakes the first time through, and thus need more drafts.

My record is 45 minutes for a 550 word column. Deadlines are wonderful things. Even better, my editor made hardly any changes to it.

[Machine_Elf]

@statsman1982

I see that there is a bit of confusion on what I mean by finishing in 9 months. I don’t really know what this person meant either, but I know him a little, and I have a feeling he meant: time between finishing quals and writing the last word of the dissertation = 9 months, which includes data collection and analysis.

Ah. Well that took me a solid two years, with the writing of my dissertation taking up the final few months of that period.

Seems to me that the time required will be highly variable, depending on the specifics of one’s research. If you’re the latest in a string of grad students to come along and utilize a long-running research program that employs time-tested equipment and minor variations on well-established methodologies, then nine months seems feasible. If you’re poking around in entirely uncharted territory and dealing with fussy/prototype hardware (in my case a Bowditch-piston engine and copper-vapor laser) that’s held together with duct tape and chewing gum, it may take longer than nine months to gather the data you need.

[nivlac]

Nine months? Not impossible since that was about how long it took for me in applied math. Of course I’ve thought about the dissertation topic before actually “working” on it. Then it was a pretty intense six months of research (no courses, no teaching, a few colloquia, very long days) and about two months of writing before about a month of revisions based on feedback. Without a doubt it was relief to get that last signature on the cover sheet. Felt like a ton of bricks got taken off my shoulder. It really helped that I had a very accessible and supportive advisor through the process.

[statsman1982]

Has anyone ever used this book ,Writing the Doctoral Dissertation by Gordon B. Davis and Clyde A. Parker? A colleague gave it to me a while ago, and although published in 1997, it seems to have some good advice. I’ve never been very good about writing the way books tell me to write, but should I give this a shot.

I should probably mention that my master’s degree had no thesis option, just a comprehensive written exam, so I don’t have experience with thesis writing.

[Ruken]

@Ruken

I took about 8 weeks, and I suck at writing. The boss said it should take less than two weeks. It’s just shy of 200 pages. Keep in mind that I’d already published half of it, and those 200 pages include spectra and references.
Some folks in my lab started months ahead of time, but they were still putting in a full week of work (70 h minimum) and just writing a bit at home each night. I didn’t do much in lab while I was writing, and I took a week off to move.

I’m not really sure how it could take much longer. I felt incredibly slow and stupid while I was writing mine, and the boss was annoyed that I wasn’t doing more in lab.

I’m a chemist. I took 5.25 years from start to submission.

If we’re talking about time between quals (or whatever you called them, just “orals” in my case), then it was a lot longer than the 8 months I mentioned. I had my exam for Ph.D candidacy 18 months after I started grad school, so subtract that from the 5.25 years I mentioned.

The thing is, I really never thought of my work during that time as “working on my dissertation.” It wasn’t any different from the work I had been doing before my exam, and it wasn’t done with a dissertation as the end goal. It was just work. When it was time to go, I wrote it up and left.

In some departments, it’s possible to have your candidacy exam very late, effectively just a few months before you’re ready to defend your dissertation. Others require that you do it before a certain amount of time has passed.