The Dissertation

The most distinctive aspect of graduate school, is of course the dissertation. The ordeal of entering the community of scholars by producing your own original research and then defending it against your own hoped-to-be peers. Anyone who has been through it knows how grueling of a process it can be. But unlike law school or medical school, which one can graduate from in a set time simply by taking a series of courses, there are no guarantees with a dissertation. If your experiments don’t happen to work out, or someone publishes your idea before you, then too bad. This uncertainty and doubt can be an emotional killer. No one who’s done it will ever forget it. And no one who’s finished would wish to go back. Therefore, I found it fascinating to hear it described in William Deresiewicz’s semi-autobiographical book A Jane Austen Education. He writes:

     I spent most of my time slaving away at, procrastinating on, whimpering about, and otherwise slogging through my dissertation. There’s nothing quite like writing a dissertation. You’ve gone through almost twenty years of school, including your first few years as a graduate student, and you’ve always had someone there to tell you what to do: take these courses, do this reading, answer these questions. You’ve also always had other people around to share the experience with – sit next to in class, bitch to about your teachers, study with for exams.

     Then, all of a sudden, you’re on your own. It’s like being left in the woods without a map. Good luck, sucker. Drop us a line if you make it out alive. All you know is that you have to go off by yourself for four or five or six years and write what amounts to a book. You’ve never written a book, you have no idea how to write one, and no one, you quickly realize, is going to teach you, because the only way to learn is just to do it. Plus, you have to make up your own topic. And, oh yes, it has to be completely original.