I’ve spent prior posts in this series recapping various aspects of writing the dissertation that can make the process difficult. Since these have been scattered across posts over the past few months, it’s worth recapping them: The dissertation is a different kind of project than most anything else one does in graduate school. The dissertation…

I ended the last part of the series on a cliffhanger. Here’s an abbreviated recap: after a series of starts and stops on the dissertation, January arrived, and it still wasn’t done. In fact, there was still quite a bit of unwritten material. After returning from the APA Eastern meeting, I faced the fact that…

As I said in the previous entry in this series, I believe there were two moments where I came close to not completing the dissertation. The first occurred in Summer 2016 when the tedium of dissertation work stifled my enjoyment of writing. As I noted in Part 5, I eventually snapped out of that spell…

In the last few parts of this series, I have discussed several major factors that make the dissertation difficult to complete. Since it’s taken several weeks to get to this point, let’s recap what I’ve highlighted thus far: The dissertation stage of graduate school lacks a rigid structure and concrete deadlines. The dissertation is a…