In the comments sections of Liz Jackson's post on tips for success in graduate school, a current PhD student asked for a thread on dissertation proposal advice. I think this is a great idea. Coming up with a viable dissertation proposal was without a doubt the most difficult part of graduate school for me–and my sense is that something similar is true of a lot of grad students. I actually had to come up with two proposals, as my dissertation committee rejected my first one. I think the tale of my proposals may be helpful to share, as I pursued two very different strategies each time: one that worked well, and one that (obviously) didn't. Allow me to quickly share the story, and then open things up for discussion.
I've always had a tendency to work alone (indeed, it's a relatively bad habit I struggle with to this very day). As I explained a few years ago, believe it or now I'm an extremely shy and introverted person. In graduate school, this meant that once I finished coursework and comprehensive examinations, I initially tried to come up with a viable dissertation proposal all on my lonesome. I retreated into reading books and journal articles, and aside from department colloquia and some social events, mostly worked in an isolated fashion. It did not go well. First, I bounced from idea to idea. At one point, I started developing a proposal defending internalism about moral motivation. Then I got a bit stuck on that, and got enthralled by some stuff on voting and opinion polls (which I returned to many years later in this book chapter). Anyway, I spun my wheels on these two topics for about a year-and-a-half, after which point I drafted up a proposal and three chapter drafts on one of the topics. Mind you, this whole time, no one had seen any of my work. I hadn't shared it with my dissertation supervisor, nor had I shared it with any other faculty or fellow grad students.
Now, I know what you're thinking: bad move, right? Yes, it very much was. However, like many grad students (in my experience, anyway), I lacked self-confidence, and as a shy and introverted person I was basically 'scared to put myself out there.' So that's what I did–and I've seen other grad students do similar things. Of course, at some point I had to show other people my work, so after drafting up the proposal and three chapters I sent them to my committee and arranged a proposal defense. It did not go well. The night before my scheduled defense, my dissertation supervisor called me and said the committee had rejected my proposal and there would be no defense. Suffice it to say, there were a few tears after that phone call. The next day (I believe), I walked into my supervisor's office (and then the office of another faculty member) and asked for help. Much to my surprise, they both expressed confidence in me despite my failure, and gave me some advice. My supervisor invited me to join a dissertation reading group he was in the process of putting together. I started attending, and even though at the time I had nothing viable, it was incredibly useful to see what kinds of things other grads were working on. It helped me to see what a viable proposal might look like! The other faculty member encouraged me to read widely, far outside the topics I had been previously exploring. This too was incredibly helpful. Indeed, it quickly led me to my eventual dissertation topic! Let me explain.
Although I had previous background in political philosophy (ethics was my major area for comp exams, political my minor area), it really wasn't my strength–so the first thing I did was go back and read all of Rawls' work: Rawls' early journal articles, A Theory of Justice (the original and revised editions), Political Liberalism, Justice as Fairness: A Restatement, The Law of Peoples, and so on. As I was reading these works, a light suddenly went off. Rawls spent nearly all of his time working on 'ideal theory'–on defining conditions for a fully just domestic society and international law of peoples–and basically set 'nonideal theory' (how to respond to unjust conditions) aside. Yes, he said a few things about civil disobedience in TOJ and war in LoP, but it was all topical and disconnected, with no systematic nonideal theory whatsoever. In fact, at one point in TOJ, Rawls essentially throws up his hands and writes, "In the more extreme and tangled instances of nonideal theory…we may be able to find no satisfactory answer at all." (TOJ rev., p. 267) I remember reading that passage a lightbulb went off. "This", I thought to myself, "is a very serious problem!" Then I looked at the literature and saw that no one had (at that time) filled in this lacuna in Rawls' theory. I was off and running. I drafted up an initial chapter that eventually became these two articles, shared it in my supervisor's dissertation reading group, shared it with my other committee members, got very positive responses all around, defended my proposal a short time later, got my first chapter accepted for a symposium presentation at the Eastern APA…and nine months later my dissertation was done! In retrospect, it wasn't a great dissertation: there were still a lot of problems in it that I hadn't solved properly. But then again, in my experience few dissertations are very good. Just about everyone I know cringes at the very thought of their dissertation. But, as I was told at one point, the dissertation is not supposed to be an ending: it is supposed to be a beginning–a project that is good enough to develop and publish on for many years to come. As Liz put it, 'a good dissertation is a done dissertation'!
This is just one story of course–but I think the takeaways are pretty clear. Like a lot of grad students I knew, I initially avoided my dissertation committee like the plague (not the best analogy in the COVID era, I know). Don't do this! The closer you work with other people–with other grad students, your committee, etc.–the more likely you are to see what a viable proposal looks like and get vital feedback to come up with a good one of your own. Second, I cannot emphasize enough how useful the "read widely" advice was. You never know where a good dissertation idea will come from. Sure, it may come from stuff you are already immersed in. However, sometimes being deeply immersed in a literature can be stultifying. You can find yourself so 'in deep' with the received ways of thinking about things that it may be hard to come up with something new in the area (which is what happened to me in the motivational internalism project). The wider you read at the dissertation proposal stage, the greater the chances are (I think) that a lightbulb will go off and you'll see something that others haven't. That, at any rate, is what happened to me and it basically saved my career.
But this is just my experience and tips that worked for me. What do you all think? Do you have any dissertation proposal advice or experiences you think would be helpful to share?
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