Working ABD's Coping with Faculty
by Fred Mael, Ph.D.

Previous Page

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THE ALL-BUT-DISSERTATION SURVIVAL GUIDE(tm)
Devoted to practical steps for completing
your doctoral dissertation.
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INDEX
1. Ben's Note
2. Working with Faculty by Fred Mael, Ph.D.
3. Words of Wisdom

SUMMARY
In this issue, Dr. Fred Mael shares some
" DO's" and "DON'T's" for successfully working
with faculty members, especially for those of
you who already hold full-time employment.

We round it out with Words of Wisdom.
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Ben's Note

July 24, 2003

Dear ABD Survival Guide Reader,

Wow. It's hard to believe it's just past
mid-summer already. We're gearing up for
back to school, and imagine that some of
you are doing the same thing.

It's easy, during the dissertation process,
to keep putting off fun and relaxation
almost indefinitely. My note for you, this
week, is to take a few days off and rest
and relax so you can be prepared for
the next academic year.

It's amazing what even just a few hours
off will do to improve your outlook and
mental clarity.

Before you take off, though, take a few
minutes to read this issue. Fred Mael, Ph.D.
shares some tips for working successfully your
faculty members, especially for those of you who
are currently employed in full-time positions.

We round it out with Words of Wisdom.

See you in two weeks- hope you'll be well
rested and relaxed.

Warmly,
Ben

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Working ABDS Coping With Faculty
By Fred Mael, Ph.D.
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Like many ABDs, you may find that you are completing
your dissertation while working fulltime, perhaps in a
different city than your university. The potential for
work-family-dissertation time conflicts are obvious.
This article deals with another common problem directly
related to the dissertation: your changed relationship
with your advisor, committee members, and graduate
school administrators. How you manage these relationship
so that these people remain allies rather than
adversaries can play in a big part in timely completion
of your dissertation. If your job and/or salary depend
on completing your degree, you have an even greater
incentive to make it work

What are some of the possible pitfalls of this changed
relationship?

You get the implicit message from faculty that you (a) have
betrayed their hopes for you by not going into academia
or that (b) you have disregarded their advice and wisdom
by not staying on campus until you finished your
dissertation. They may also feel that by taking a job
you have increased the chance that you won't finish,
which makes the department look bad.

You complain to faculty about graduate school rules that
you now view as petty bureaucratic nitpicking that someone
with a "real job" needn't be bothered with. This puts them
in the position of either feeling bad that they work for
small-minded organizations or resenting you for looking
down at them.

Your faculty members become aware that you now earn more
than they do even pre-PhD. You detect envy and
passive-aggressive attempts to put you in your place with
new demands for novel analyses or inclusion of obscure
literature. When you object, especially because you now
have less time (which they see as your fault) they tell
you that it will make your work more publishable, even
though you both know that you may not care if it's
publishable.

When you try to schedule meetings, your committee members
Seem to have an impossible array of classes, office hours,
meetings, conferences, or car pools that make it impossible
for them to find a common meeting time - plus, at least
one will be completely inaccessible while in Finland or
Fiji for a six-month sabbatical. Because your work
colleagues attend inconvenient meetings, or use email
and teleconferencing, you suspect that your finishing isn't a
priority for them.

For these and other reasons, you start to see your faculty
as petty, mean-spirited and an obstacle to your finishing.
Yet you need these people. How do you avoid becoming
disheartened and delaying your progress? The advice
of those who successfully finished despite facing these
hurdles falls into three categories: Avoid "out of sight"
syndrome, be respectful, and keep perspective.

To avoid the "out of sight out of mind" syndrome, follow
these steps:

1.Keep up regular communication - send copies of your
own weekly "to do" checklist to your advisor so that
he/she will stay on top of your progress and will know
that you are still engaged.

2.To avoid receiving contradictory directives from
your committee or from the same faculty member, save all
emails and notes that document your advisor's or
others' decisions.

3.When sending revisions, show explicitly where changes
were made and at whose behest.

You can avoid seeming disrespectful or threatening by
doing the following:

1.Minimize whining about college or departmental
bureaucracy

2.Minimize touting how important your "real" job is,
especially by (implicit) comparison to what the faculty
or other students do

3.Stress how your job uses the graduate training you
received and enables you to perform in a professional
manner.

You can maintain perspective by keeping the following
in mind:

1.Realize that once you finish and the power
differential is gone, you will likely revert to the
positive relationship you used to have with your advisor
(or begin a new improved one). This is because you will
then be professional colleagues and your employment and
professional success may actually be helpful to your faculty.

2.Remember that no matter what resentments and misgivings
your faculty may have about your short-term and long-term
career choices, they want and need you to finish for their
own sake and for that of the department.

These strategies and perspectives could enable you to ride
out this period with grace and help you in dealing with
your own conflicted emotions, thus allowing you to better
persevere to completion.

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About Fred Mael, Ph.D.
=======================================

Fred is an organizational psychologist who does work-life
coaching as well as consulting and research in the areas
of work attitudes and organizational performance. The
author of numerous journal articles and book chapters,
he has been quoted in popular publications such as the
Washington Post, the San Jose Mercury News, and Athletic
Monthly Magazine, and has served on the editorial boards
of Career Development Quarterly and Personnel Psychology.

He can be reached:

By Email: fmael@air.org
By Phone: (202) 342-5059 or (410) 764-0768.

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Words of Wisdom from New Ph.D.'s.
=======================================
**Look at the literature review as a series
of research papers. We've all prepared
research papers with great success and
relatively low frustration, yet we tend to
look at the dissertation literature review as
something completely different--a single,
large, and complicated document. Transitions,
if needed, can always be developed later to
connect the individual sections. Keeping
the focus on individual themes keeps our
efforts at a manageable mental level,
helps keep the topic focused, and provides
milestones of accomplishment worthy of
celebration (which we deserve).

**Don't overblow your dissertation's
importance. You've probably chosen a topic
you care a lot about. This can lead you to be
a perfectionist and to thinking that you still
haven't done justice to the topic. You will
over emotionalize what is really just a pro-forma
exercise. What you do with it later is another
matter. As soon as I started to see it like that
(lamentably, at the end of the project) it was
like I grew wings. Somebody once said that
most professors regard their dissertation as
their worst work. Even friends who have finished
ahead of me say the same thing. I wish I had
focused on that advice.

===================
Your Own Coach
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If you are considering whether to get your own coach
to help you reach your academic goals, send any email
to: ben16-76471@autocontactor.com
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BEN DEAN, Publisher, ABDSG
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Ben holds a Ph.D. in psychology from the University of
Texas at Austin. He is the founder of MentorCoach
(www.MentorCoach.com), a virtual university
training accomplished mental health professionals
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Martin E. P. Seligman, Ph.D., Ben is also the founder of
Authentic Happiness Coaching
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children. Ben lives in suburban Maryland with
his wife and two young children, Walnut, their
hamster, and Rubin, their cocker spaniel.
==================================
RACHNA D. JAIN, Editor, ABDSG
==================================
I'm a dissertation coach and licensed psychologist
based in Maryland, with a doctorate from the
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ABDSG, as well as the Author of "Get It Done!
A Coach's Guide to Dissertation Success"
If you'd like to learn more about me or my book, please
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I'm excited to be working with you to meet your academic
goals. You can do it!
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(c) Copyright 2003 Ben J. Dean. All rights reserved.
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