Fabio’s Grad Skool Rulz over at orgtheory.net always provides great reading, and the points raised in his latest post on ‘dissertating’ strike me for the most part as absolutely correct. Based on my first and current attempts at my doctorate, I’ve seen so many talented students move away and study part-time in order to teach and work. They justify the teaching and working as ‘necessary’ to build credentials, get work experience, meet financial needs, and so on. All legitimate reasons easily rationalizable by the well-intentioned grad student, perhaps…but for many the end result is that they are still in the program, years later, having made little discernable progress on their dissertations. And, the faculty ends up essentially writing them off as “indifferent” and “uncommitted.” Of course, this doesn’t always happen – we all know people who can miraculously juggle half a dozen things while writing their dissertations, getting published, attending conferences, and so on.
The validity of Fabio’s rules notwithstanding, the most successful recent dissertation I know was by a graduate student who had the good fortune of being whisked away to a another university where they allowed him to ‘just write.’ This was good for him because it permitted him to escape a program that had become toxic or at the very least unconducive to scholarship (he ended up getting his degree from the other university). So, while it’s generally a good idea to stick around, it may be better to find another environment to work in you suffer the misfortune of finding yourself in a department that’s poisonous, as *does happen* on rare occasion in academia.
