TZIGANE

Surviving the thesis

PATRICK McDONAGH | The PhD dissertation: it looms at the end of the doctoral program, a hulking monster that stands between the weary student and freedom.

"Despair!" it snorts. "I cannot be conquered!" And yet, each year, battalions of doctoral candidates -- the eager, the ambitious, the optimistic, the downright stubborn and the deeply deluded -- attempt to subdue the beast, to scale its fearsome hide and ride it to fame, fortune and success.

But, like any good mythical monster, the dissertation is accompanied by a retinue of lesser demons -- funding concerns, job responsibilities, family obligations, conflicts with supervisors, writer's block -- who distract the weary scholars from their quest. How, then, does anyone finish?

"You have to have a passion," asserts Monia Mazigh, midway through wrestling with a dissertation on the structure of interest rates, which will give her a doctorate in finance. "You require very strong nerves and a lot of courage."

The dissertation quest definitely has its highs and lows. "I've been on a roller coaster for the past few weeks," claims Christina Zarowsky, who figures she is less than two months from submitting her dissertation in anthropology (to go with her MD from McMaster) on the representation of Somali refugees in Ethiopia.

"I go from being excited about what I'm writing to thinking that it's trite, simplistic junk." She concedes that anxiety over her work means that she is reluctant to finish. "Until you finish, you haven't committed yourself to one form of analysis. Right now, it's long enough to be finished, but it just doesn't feel complete," she explains. And, of course, the final product, with its definite choices of interpretation, means that Zarowsky may have to defend her work from those with a different theoretical slant.

"There's still something within that says, 'I don't want anyone not to like me,' and I had to call my supervisor to talk about all of these fears." His response, according to her: "Christina, calm down."

In Zarowsky's case, the command to calm down (and an accompanying explanation of why she should relax) was enough to dispel the inevitable bout of dissertation angst. But what about someone with a deeper case of the jitters?

"Different students have different needs," explains Professor Maggie Kilgour, graduate program director in the Department of English. "Basically, the supervisor is there to help, and the first step is getting students to set realistic deadlines for themselves."

But what if they miss those deadlines? "Sometimes you have to wade in and be firm," admits Kilgour. "But no-one wants to play cop at this stage. Plus, it's hard enough to keep on top of ourselves for deadlines. It feels funny to jump on someone else."

According to political science professor Mark Brawley, the most important -- and sometimes the hardest -- part is defining the focus of the dissertation. "It can be very difficult going from an 'issue,' like peace in the Middle East, to an actual question you can examine theoretically and empirically."

Part of the supervisor's job is to help the student formulate this question. "Then," says Brawley, "I give them lots of free rein. Some people can go off on their own for ages, you don't hear from them, and then they appear with a big chunk of work. Others get lost and frustrated in empirical material." If that happens, Brawley takes them back to their original question.

Getting sidetracked may not be terribly unusual. Earth and planetary sciences professor Anthony Williams-Jones, an award-winning teacher of graduate students, identifies a rhythm to dissertation writing.

"Students start with lots of energy. Then, midway through the process, it wanes. It's important to fire them up again somehow, so they can finish." However, re-igniting the flame can be a challenge, and, notes Brawley of supervisory strategies, "there is no magic formula."

Everyone agrees that the process is daunting. Unfortunately, there is always more involved than simply sitting down to write a lot of coherent, intelligent pages. Everyone needs money for food and rent, and some need it simply to carry out research critical to their dissertation.

Says Roger McLean, who is close to finishing a doctorate in agriculture and biosystems engineering, "Funding is simply cut-throat. I was about to leave the program last spring because I had no money and no one was helping me get any." McLean has since found the money to travel to Africa to gather data; without financial support, though, his work would have ended.

When research doesn't consume money, raising a family often does.

McLean has two children, both born after he began in the doctoral program. "They're my studies in progress," he jokes, but having children necessitates contract teaching at McGill, Concordia and John Abbott. That represents major amounts of time and energy spent away from his thesis.

Zarowsky also is raising her daughter, Ifra, whom she adopted during her first field research trip to Ethiopia, and is supporting herself with work at the Douglas Hospital. Mazigh's husband works, so, she observes, money is less of a problem. "But I feel very guilty sometimes," she confesses. "I don't always think I spend enough time with my child."

Beyond these traumas lie the issues of professional interaction and development. The relationship with the supervisor is critical. "There are incredible politics involved in getting a [supervisory] committee together," McLean observes wryly. "A PhD is, in large part, a degree in working the system properly."

Mazigh also notes that the challenge of finding a good supervisor can be as difficult as the writing itself. "I've been fortunate to have a reasonable supervisor," she says with relief, "but so many students have problems. And if you can't work with one person you have to look for another; it can be very stressful."

Indeed, Ted Baker, director of McGill's counselling services, says that most doctoral students visiting him evince "frustration with the bureaucratic process or a conflict in dealing with a supervisor." While he qualifies his observation as being based on "what might be a skewed population," it points to the tremendous impact supervisors have on students.

Of course, supervisors once battled the dissertation themselves. How has the beast changed? "Technologically, it's very different," says Williams-Jones. "When I did my master's degree, we didn't even have Xerox; for my doctorate, we had copiers but we still used typewriters. What students produce today is much better."

He also notes another major change: the growing prominence of the "paper" dissertation. "We encourage students to write the dissertation as a series of publishable papers rather than as one entity. It has the traditional components -- introduction, the conclusion, connections between chapters -- but it is a different way of thinking about it."

Some programs also have a greater emphasis on professional participation than in the past. Brawley and Williams-Jones note that students today spend more time at conferences and publishing papers, in order to develop professional skills. And, says English doctoral candidate Chris Holmes, this push to professionalize also means more work for the student. He teaches courses on contract, even though he has other funding: "It's simply harder to get a job without teaching experience on your CV."

Ah, the job -- the next monster to confront, lurking just behind the dissertation beast. And no less daunting. "The PhD won't get you a job," says McLean. "It will only give you options that you have to exercise." So the struggle continues, and the passion, nerves and courage needed to finish the dissertation will be called on again.