FAYETTEVILLE — Taking notes on a yellow legal pad, Kathryn Sloan posed a question to the three doctoral students sitting around her.
“Is anybody ready to distill their research into one sentence?” asked Sloan, an associate professor of history at the University of Arkansas.
Jake Edwards said he was willing to try.
“I would like to show that students are more inclined to think and read critically by using digital media,” said Edwards, who is in the English department’s rhetoric and composition program.
Sloan nodded in approval. She was one of three UA professors who met with students Wednesday morning during Dissertation Kick Start, a one-week, on-campus workshop designed to help doctoral students tackle the dissertation writing process.
A dissertation is the written explanation of a doctoral student’s research or analysis of a topic. It is typically book-length, written in chapters, and chock full of footnotes.
Professor Robert Wiedenmann said the goal of the workshop is to emphasize the importance of completing a dissertation, which usually takes a year or more.
“The best dissertation is the dissertation that’s completed,” said Wiedenmann, head of the university’s entomology department.
UA’s Graduate School initiated the Doctoral Completion Project in 2008 as a proposal for a grant to begin a program that would focus on doctoral student retention and completion, said Diane Cook, director of graduate student activities.
The Graduate School didn’t get the grant but decided to start the completion project anyway, Cook said. There are 12 university programs whose faculty and students participate, ranging from anthropology to food science to public policy.
Over the past four years, a 12-member committee has planned and implemented one program each year to support doctoral student retention and completion, she said.
Wiedenmann said other universities have started similar programs, which theyusually call “dissertation boot camps.” He said UA wanted to use a more positive term for its writing workshop.
“Rather than this is grinding you down, this is a way to get you going,” he said. “It’s not always obvious what needs to be done in order to complete a dissertation. We’re taking wherever they are in the process and finding ways to help them along efficiently and effectively.
“We tell them the ‘D’ in Ph.D. can also count as ‘done.’”
About a dozen students were nominated for the workshop by their advisers. They paid $50 to take part, $25 of which will be refunded if they attend all five days.
Intensive writing sessionshave been interspersed with short seminars on topics related to the dissertation, from plagiarism and copyright to outlining and formatting the document.
Sloan, in her session with doctoral students in the humanities, recommended they keep dissertation journals. She also suggested they avoid specialized language.
“There’s nothing wrong with writing a jargon-free dissertation,” she said.
By the end of the week the students will receive feedback from reviewers at UA’s Quality Writing Center.
Felicia Smith, who is working on her doctorate in education, said she’s written much of her dissertation since she passed her comprehensiveexams in 2009. But she’s been stuck on her final chapter and has benefited from working with Wiedenmann and reviewers from the writing center.
Now, she has “a blueprint to follow,” said Smith, a supervisor of instructional services for the Fort Smith School District.
“It really has helped me,” she said.
Smith and Edwards are like many doctoral students who call themselves “ABD.”
The acronym stands for “all but dissertation,” meaning the only thing keeping them from graduating is finishing their dissertation.
“I’ve done more hard core writing over the last two days than I have over the last month,” Edwards said. “These exercises kind of help you focus, help you find a starting point.
“I really can’t say enough about the program.” To contact this reporter:
Northwest Arkansas, Pages 7 on 06/21/2012