Selecting a Dissertation Advisor

The doctoral completion literature suggests that choosing a dissertation advisor is perhaps the most important decision a graduate student can make; having the right mentor/chair can spell the difference between timely completion and endless ABD (All But Dissertation). I write this from the perspective of the US doctoral education system, where students undertake 2-3 years of coursework, engage in some kind of qualifying examination, then proceed to the dissertation phase. However, its possible that the advise below would be relevant to those in the European model that does not include taking courses, where the advisor one chooses during the admissions process is the primary/dissertation advisor throughout the process. So, how to choose? Carefully, I say...

Choose a professor who is enthusiastic about guiding your thesis/dissertation, one who is invested in your success and completion.

Choose a professor who has an interest in your topic. If he/she is an expert on your topic, even better.

Choose an advisor who works well with others, especially the others in your committee. Having committee members fighting while you are trying to get done can derail you. In most cases, your chair can help you in selecting other committee members, ensuring that you have people who can work well together (i.e. chemistry) and who bring complementary skills. 

If your chair is not a methods expert in your particular research approach, ensure that someone else in your committee brings that expertise to the table. In most cases, you most often still need to do extra work on your own to become an expert in the research methods that you choose to employ for your dissertation.

It is best to choose a dissertation advisor who has experience playing this role. Granted, in newer programs, there might not be any faculty who has played that role before. In that case, your choice would be guided by the other factors above, and off course by your experience with various faculty during the coursework phase.

Choose a professor who is willing and available to work with your time deadlines/time to completion. There is no point in choosing a chair who would be on sabbatical when you most need him/her, for example. Sometimes faculty believe that the process should take a certain length of time, based mostly on how long it took them to complete, which may be much longer or shorter than your own time to completion desires. Have that conversation about time to completion early, so that you are fully informed before making that choice.

Talk to other students in your program, especially those further along because they can give you 'the down low' on who amongst the faculty is time conscious, guides enthusiastically, provides critical and timely feedback, is collegial and generally works well with others (students included).

This may not be a comprehensive list of all the points to take into consideration in choosing a dissertation advisor/chair, but should serve as a starting point.  I strongly believe that the doctoral journey is a relational journey; therefore, I would urge you to choose your chair/advisor carefully, ensuring that it is someone with whom you share chemistry/ability to work well together. Your chair/advisor will serve as your mentor, will/should introduce you to the discipline (including appropriate academic conferences), most likely will write your recommendation letters, and, in many cases, his/her networks may be the starting point to developing your own (particularly for those who intend to join academe after doctoral completion).  

For those who are either in the dissertation phase, or who have long completed the process, what other factors are important in selecting the adviser? Kindly add those through the comment box below. Other feedback welcome too.

Turning your Dissertation into a Book - Some Lessons Learned

Turning your dissertation into a book - some lessons learned

Before this resurgence into blogging, my last post was in February 2009 just after I completed and submitted the manuscript for my book  Women's Spiritual Leadership in Africa and I thought its time to talk about some of the lessons I learned working on it. You see, this book is based on my dissertation research Tempered Radicals and Servant Leaders: Portraits of Spirited Leadership amongst African Women Leaders. Here follows a few of the lessons I learned from this experience.

First of all, plan with the end in mind.

If you know you would like to turn your dissertation into a book, then the topic selection, sample/population, even methods ought to help you prepare a study that will have an audience wider than your three or four committee members.

Granted, my topic selection was based more on my positionality as an African woman in the US, my past experiences with/of leadership and my personal/political goal of telling a more positive and celebratory story about African women. But in the end, to be able to find a publisher willing to take a risk on a 'untested', 'junior', emerging scholar, the topic has to be of interest to a sufficiently wide audience. Imagine my surprise when I noticed on Ohiolink Electronic Thesis and Dissertations yesterday that my dissertation has been downloaded 2080 times (upto 9/2011)! That number does not include any downloads through Proquest. It probably helps that it is freely available on the web through Ohiolink...meeting another of my goals, to provide materials to African students and readers who do not have access to Proquest and other subscription databases.

Second lesson I learned in turning the dissertation into a book was to realize that, very few publishers would be willing to publish the dissertation in its normal form. As such, it took a couple of years to rewrite a lot of the material for a wider audience. You see, dissertations tend to have a form and structure that is aimed specifically at academic audiences. There are a lot of redundancies, the format aims at demonstrating a certain logic to research design (i.e. how the study was conceptualized, what literature supported it, the methods utilized, the results found, and their implications). Even though in certain respects, my dissertation was slightly different from most traditional dissertations (such as, chapter 4 - results - was actually several chapters, some focusing on individual portraits of women leaders, others describing the common themes that emerged from the data), I still needed to reconstruct it, remove the redundancies, expand some of the chapters, and completely remove some chapters to appeal to a wider audience.

Finally, on the advise of my mentor Professor Judy A Alston (Ashland University), I milked that dissertation for all it was worth before publishing the book.

For those whose trajectory includes joining the academy as professors, where 'publish or perish' will be a reality, the dissertation needs to serve as your research agenda, at least for the first few years. As such, you want to publish as much from it before it turns into a book. Otherwise, once the book is published, it becomes more difficult to derive journal articles from the same material. When constructing the dissertation, as mentioned above, chapter 4 (results) was split into several chapters. Some of those - on servant leadership, tempered radicalism and spiritual leadership - were turned into articles with some editing and rewriting, but the heart of each chapter was left intact.

For those whose trajectory is the practitioner world, you may want to publish your dissertation into a book and also, write articles for practitioner journals or magazines for your particular guild. Either way, after spending all that time working on a dissertation, milk it for all its worth!

Comments, feedback and questions welcome!