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Last week, it finally happened. I submitted my dissertation to the institution for publication on their scholar work site. I believe a round of formatting edits is probably in order, but I've done the thing that will allow me to participate in the late May graduation. To say that it's a tremendous relief is an understatement.
As this website tag shows, I have been in this program for a decade, and during that time, I’ve written close to 100 posts. And now, I am done.
I think readers of this blog will find a few more posts forthcoming in this series. I have been meaning to write these and took notes on them, but never finished. I think they would be additionally helpful as other insights gathered in this journey. For instance, I want to do a post about the media kit I created when I was looking for participants because it proved successful and I had some templated material that others might benefit from. There’s definitely a post where I talk about what's next and what I want to do with the dissertation (e.g. publishing) and other tangetially informed projects. There's definitely a post-PhD bucket list entry that I want to share or discuss, probably even a post about the time it took to do it. So, I've got a few more things in this series before it fully concludes.
Meanwhile, I've taken everything that I've written and exported it into a Google doc, which looks is over 150 single-spaced pages. Perhaps, I'll get two books out of my dissertation: the study itself and this other piece about the journey and what others can learn from it.
Over on my substack, I'll probably do a series about where and how I would use generative AI usefully if I had to start my dissertation today. I want to consider ways that wouldn't disrupt or undermine my work, but just support it better. I've been thinking about that a lot since it came out on the tail end of my work. By and large, I stayed away from it. I mentioned in a previous post how I used it to help shape the outline of chapters four and five, but I didn't use it in any more integrated ways than that. Now that I'm done, I want to highlight what I think the path would have been.
That's forward looking but if I'm thinking about this moment--the moment of submission, I still got all the feels. When I submitted it this week, I was teary-eyed. It was a solemn moment between me and the computer, to think about the work this represented and the ways it made me think and appreciate what I and lots of people do when they're doing the dissertation.
I know everybody's journey is different and has different complications and challenges, but I really appreciate sitting with the numerous ways this pushed and frustrated me; I feel like they were things I needed and valuable to experience in this process. Also, I am definitely looking forward to not having it frustrate me anymore.
I'm so appreciative of the work it has led me toward. Even now, it's fascinating to see how the work connects or intertwines with generative AI and this idea of academic fracking that I've talked about elsewhere. It makes me think about what methodologies I use to explore and make sense of the world, the variety of experience of scholars, and the known and unknown challenges harming higher education. I also think about how some aspects of learning and research are often unrealized, unacknowledged, and not thoroughly understood, even by people deep within academia.
I can't say that I will miss the work. Though it has helped me create my own sense of work ethic and evolve in how I do my work and find workflows that make sense to me.
This was such a solitary experience, and I continued to try to find ways to make it social, like hosting an 8:00 A.M. working group for people working on big projects. Most mornings, it was just me, but a couple of folks regularly joined me in the co-working and navigating our way through things. I also leaned heavily on FocusMate (so much so that it was in my acknowledgements).
What's really fascinating is that when I look at all my current academic and educational projects, they're almost all collaborative. I find that really fun, and there's another post—I don't know if it's a PhD Chronicles post or not—about the power of collaboration and how compelling, moving, and insightful it is and how enriched I am by it. In some ways, collaboration is akin to what one does when working on a dissertation and bringing in different voices to talk about their views and whatnot. But this is more of a live version where I'm collaborating directly with other people to make it happen. I find it much more rewarding, particularly in the context of also working on a very solitary dissertation.
But, I have to say again, it feels incredibly wonderful to be done with it. I think I'll probably print it, so I have that version. I don't know if I'm going to publish it; I'm going to give it a few months and get a little breathing room, so I don't know if publishing is in my future.
But there are other pieces I plan on writing. In fact, the piece I really want to write as an addendum is about the sources I have access to. So much of my dissertation was about access: what people can and can't access and how it impacts their work as scholars.
During my time in my doctoral program, I was at five different institutions with very different levels of access. I’d love to take my dissertation's reference list and code it for what I had access to depending on the institution. I'd like to calculate that as a thoughtful exploration of where and when I could have done this work seamlessly. I want to use that as an interesting reflection and exploration of this invisible structure of knowledge and information. It really matters what you can get access to.
I think there's something really powerful about explicitly doing that with my dissertation to show, for example, that I've been in institutions that have no library and then an Ivy League institution where you can get pretty much anything. It really demonstrates that tangibly for folks to understand.
As I said, there's more to say but this is definitely one of the highwater maters. Given that I've been blogging about this for almost 10 years, I know that some of y'all have been here for most or some of the journey. Thanks for continuing to read as well as share your support and insight.
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