HOW DOES ONE
CHOOSE A DISSERTATION TOPIC? The excerpt below
examines some of the factors to consider in
choosing a
dissertation topic, particularly in the humanities and
social sciences. It
is from Chapter 4, Writing a Dissertation in:
The Chicago Guide
to Your Academic Career: A Portable Mentor for
scholars from
Graduate School through Tenure. By John A. Goldsmith,
John Komlos, and
Penny Schine Gold. The University of Chicago Press,
Chicago 60037, The
University of Chicago Press, Ltd, London, © 2001
by The University
of Chicago, all rights reserved, Published 2001. John
Komlos: With considerable
care. Never lose sight of the fact that the dissertation should be the
crowing achievement of your graduate education and will influence the
direction of your career for many years to come. It will take years to
write and might well require a couple more years of polishing to make it
publishable. Inasmuch as you are locking yourself into a project that will
occupy a big chunk of your life, this decision should not be made
lightly. Some advisors are
willing to offer a choice of two or threw dissertation topics. This can be
of great advantage, inasmuch as she has a better overview of the field,
knows the sources, and knows if the dissertation is doable within the
allotted time frame, and, in effect, you receive a crucial implicit
promise that you will be closely guided along the way. Of course, some
professors are reluctant to suggest thesis topics, either out of a
philosophical
commitment and
responsibility that go with such advice, but they may also simply want to
limit their involvement with students. Be aware that a reserved
disposition might well signal a reluctance to work with you closely, and
it might be wise to look for alternatives. It is much safer to
your mentor's suggestion of topics if offered. By doing so, you will give
yourself additional time to develop the necessary skills for selecting a
good research project, which are difficult to acquire. To be sure, there
are those who argue for a sink-or-swim approach on the assumption that the
student will learn these skills by being forced on to choose a
dissertation topic. This point of view is surely reasonable, but my own
experience leads me to urge you to err on the side of caution if you have
the opportunity unless you have reason to think that you have already
mastered such skills: the risk of sinking is too great at this stage. As a
third alternative, you may find the choice being made through give and
take with your supervisor. If you have good
reason to be confident in doing research on the topic of your own choice
of if close guidance feels too restrictive to you, then proceed, but at
least be forewarned that you can easily lead yourself on a wild goose
chase. In fact, many students do not finish their dissertation because
their topic turns out to be much too difficult for reasons that were not
immediately obvious to them. In any case, do make sure you have your
mentor's full support before embarking on a project. It is imperative that
both you and your advisor be interested in your thesis topic. It is
important that your mentor be interested in it because otherwise she might
be much less motivated to help you, and it is crucial that you be excited
about it because otherwise you will have enormous difficulties mustering
the momentum to succeed in
completing the
project. Original research is challenging, and even frustrating at times,
in the sense that hundreds of obstacles need to be overcome in the
process. Unless you are truly fascinated by the topic and consider it
intrinsically valuable and rewarding to work on it, you can easily slip
into becoming an ABD instead of a Ph.D.! Make sure that you do
not start a dissertation on an unfamiliar topic. You should prepare some
plans, even if tentative ones, well in advance and have a good overview of
the topic before you commence active research. It will be extremely useful
if you have already made preliminary excursions into various related
issues during the course of your graduate study. Having written one or two
seminar papers on some aspects of the topic, you will enter the
dissertation stage already somewhat knowledgeable about the field. You
will know most of the scholars who are writing in that field. This
knowledge will help you to formulate issues and to write up the thesis
proposal in a convincing manner. Moreover, you should by now have a sense
of how interesting the topic actually is to you. Once you have chosen
your dissertation topic in collaboration with your adviser, you should
seek her active guidance to the utmost degree possible. Every topic has
imperceptible pitfalls, and your advisor can and should help you over
them. Dissertation research is multifaceted; it proceeds in complex, and
unexpected, ways, and the
result is
unpredictable. I have never done research that did not hold some surprises
for me, and at times, I even disapproved my initial hypothesis. The closer
your topic is to the expertise of your mentor, the more direction you can
count on, and the easier it should be for you to avoid making mistakes or
getting stuck along the way. These
issues are less
pertinent in the laboratory sciences because there the graduate student
usually works in a close-knit research team, direction and funded by the
mentor's own research program. In such fields, there is more group
interaction, and perhaps more cooperation and conformity in research
design. In any case, you will
need to learn who the important scholars are in the field. Ask your
advisor who is working in your area, check their respective home pages on
the Internet, and look for their working papers. Consult also the programs
of the meetings of professional organizations in your field for people
interested in related topics. Dissertations in progress are sometimes
announced in the newsletter of discipline's main professional association,
or there is a centralized dissertation registry. Though incomplete, they
are certainly useful. Check also the University of Michigan microfilms of
unpublished dissertations. Because in some
departments and in some disciplines your access to your mentor might be
limited, you may find it advisable to talk over your preliminary ideas
with your peers and even show them your dissertation proposal before you
give it to your mentor. Your dissertation is
your first real research project, and you are not expected to strike out
on your own into completely uncharted territory. That would be premature.
You should restrict the scope of your topic as far as you can. You will be
expected to work within a paradigm; that is, you aren't required to
resolve a major controversy
between two competing
schools of thought in the discipline, although you can explore a pertinent
aspect of a controversy in a case study. Dissertations are similar to the
"masterpieces" that medieval guilds required for full membership in a
craft: you might think of yourself as a journeyman demonstrating her
skills to the members of a
profession. In other
words, the dissertation need not be an earth-shattering contribution, but,
however modest, it must be original and demonstrate your skill in research
and argument. Actually, one of the unstated purposes of the thesis
requirement is to filter out people who will not be able to do original
research in their subsequent career. John
Goldsmith: I think there is
considerable variation here across disciplines and across universities and
departments as well. I can give a lot of reasons why her advisor wants to
be working on, and you've mentioned most of them already. But I would also
say that the stronger a student's intellectual abilities and strength of
will are, the more she should take seriously the notion of setting off in
a radically new direction intellectually. But I mean that only for
students who
are intellectually
mature enough to provide arguments that are cogent within the old paradigm
for why the new approach is superior. That's very tall
order. And in the real world,
the selection of a dissertation topic is often going to be a matter of
negotiation in some respects between advisor and student. I don't think
I've ever had a student come to me with a list of three of four possible
topics to get my take on them, but that seems like a pretty good
idea. Penny Gold: Whether
one takes a topic selected by an advisor or develops one's own, I would
emphasize John Komlos's comment that one has to be excited about the
topic. I think it is more likely that this will happen, if the topic is
developed by the student, and coming from questions that they really want
to pursue. What difference will it make to you if your question is
answered? If the answer is "Not much, it's just a nifty puzzle," you might
want to search further. The interest has to be deep enough to sustain you
over years of difficult work. Your professional identity will be also,
shaped by association with this topic. Is this how you'd like to be known
in the field, at least for the rather long first stage of it, until you do
your next large project? ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- TOMORROW'S PROFESSOR
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