Dissertation Defense Prep: A 4-part POWER series. The good news has finally arrived! You’ve spent hundreds of hours (but what probably has felt like millions of hours) working on your dissertation. You’ve been planning, brainstorming, proposing, outlining, drafting, researching, writing, screaming, kicking, crying, celebrating, and everything in between, in order to finally get your initial draft completed. You’ve submitted this draft to your adviser and other committee members and, finally, … [Read more...]
Seeking Professional Help for Your Dissertation
Help for your dissertation can be found in many places. You can find help on the internet, from your dissertation advisor, and even from your own friends and colleagues. But you may need intense and focused guidance offered by experts such as professional dissertation consultants. However, finding the right professional help can be as challenging as writing the dissertation itself. Since your dissertation is the final task before earning your doctorate degree, running into serious challenges … [Read more...]
Developing a Research Question
In the beginning of your dissertation journey, you are asked to submit your dissertation research proposal to your adviser, who will most likely request modifications to your first proposal and then forward your revised proposal to your dissertation committee for approval. In your proposal, you must have a valid and appropriate research question which allows you to investigate gaps in research related to your research topic and also help you get close to solving some sort of problem you’re … [Read more...]
12 Must-Follow Tips for Writing your Dissertation
Most doctoral students know what it takes to write. They would not have reached the doctorate level if they didn’t. However, too many students get stuck at certain points. This is absolutely normal and, in fact, this is the case with just about all professional writers. Whether you’re stuck in certain places or just want solid advice to get ahead, this article gives 12 valuable tips gathered over the course of two decades in the dissertation consulting and PhD field. I hope you enjoy the … [Read more...]
The Six Laws of PhD Failure
To give you a dose of reality, the attrition rate at any PhD school is very high. Anywhere from a third to half of those that enroll at a PhD university will not end up graduating and finishing their dissertation. In fact, the figure of 40%-50% of failing PhD students has been fairly stable over the past three decades. In 1990, Baird reported that PhD completion rates in most disciplines hover around 50% and are even lower in the arts and humanities. In 2003, Elgar conducted a detailed study of … [Read more...]
How to Write an Effective Dissertation Proposal: Part I
Not every dissertation proposal will have the same structure since the specific structure for a proposal varies according to guidelines stipulated from each university department. However, the basic compositions of a proposal (things like theme, audience, purpose, etc.) are one and the same. In addition, the general structure is always similar. To help guide you in writing a winning proposal, this article introduces to you several important concepts. These include the dissertation proposal’s … [Read more...]
How to Write an Effective Dissertation Proposal: Part II
In part one of this article, we discussed the main aspects of what makes a winning proposal. In particular, we talked about a dissertation proposal’s main ingredients as well as the purpose, the audience, and the first five elements of its structure (title, abstract, introduction, problem statement, and purpose/research questions). This second part talks about the rest of the structural elements (literature review, methodology, significance, structural overview, workplan, and … [Read more...]
Tips for Surviving Your Dissertation: Dissertation Help
As most doctoral students know firsthand, keeping up with your dissertation, let alone completing it, is a major challenge. However, if a few principles are followed, no matter at which stage of the dissertation process you apply them, you can make it much easier on yourself. You can always seek dissertation help. The following are some principles that any doctoral student should take seriously when writing his or her dissertation and, in the end, following them will help you immensely in … [Read more...]
SPSS Help: A Brief Tutorial
What is SPSS? Do you need SPSS help? SPSS is an IBM creation and stands for the Statistical Package for the Social Sciences. It is an effective yet simple software for analyzing data inputs. This data can come from just about any source you can imagine: dissertation research, a customer resource management database, in-house marketing research, or even the server log data of a website. SPSS is also able to open numerous file formats, usually those related to structured data such as Microsoft … [Read more...]
A Dissertation Checklist: 5 Questions to Check Your Progress
A Dissertation Checklist: 5 Questions to Check Your Progress How hard do you work? How hard do you study? As a student who has reached the doctorate level, no doubt you’ve worked very hard to get to this point. With that being said, do you feel like no matter how hard you work, you are still behind on the dissertation goals you set for the coming months or year? If this is the case, you probably think to yourself that you simply must work harder and longer. Or maybe you are questioning … [Read more...]
