The Plan to Finish Chapter One

After meeting with my director last Thursday, I have a new deadline for chapter one: May 1st. Although I already have 21 pages written, it still feels like a daunting task as chapter one involves the literature review. Half of my scholars write in German, a couple in French and a few in English. So I'm committing to translating some German for the chapter 30 minutes a day for the next month. The plan to complete the rest of the chapter in a month involves a daily focus on either a scholar or theme. The first two weeks will be primarily on the scholars. So yesterday, I wrote on Ephrem A. Davids' Das Bild vom Neuen Menschen which I discovered will offer some helpful material for my dissertation. He deals with some of my favorite subtopics such as the image of God and sanctification. Today, I'll be delving into one of the 'biggies', Hermann Dörries, who wrote Die Theologie des Makarios/Symeon, one of the longest works devoted to Macarius: 459 pages of text! Tomorrow will be a French scholar, Vincent Desprez, and later in the week, three Anglophones (Marcus Plested, Alexander Golitzin - my director!, and Columba Stewart). Getting some of the challenging German work done early in the week is a better idea than leaving them until the end of the week!

I've requisitioned a number of books from Marquette and Inter-Library Loan this past weekend. One is a major work on Macarius written in the late 90's by Klaus Fitschen. Then there are the SEVEN Finnish-German conferences on Macarius. I've looked at five of them before, but discovered this weekend that two more conferences took place in 2003 and 2007. (More reason to finish soon, so the 2011 conference doesn't become part of my reading requirements...Or maybe I'll have the opportunity to present at the 2011 conference if I finish my dissertation!) There are occasional papers given at the conference in English (or at least published in English - so maybe they'd let an American sneak in...)

The reward for a month of solid work will be a trip to Pittsburgh for the PTS alumni days! The travel arrangements are already in place, but it will feel wonderful to get on the plane knowing that chapter one has been turned in!! Stranger things have happened.

The Dissertation Expedition

Sarah has a book called 'The Shopping Expedition' in which a mom takes her children and dog to buy groceries. They make the list, wave goodbye to dad, and then off they go. The car breaks down. They walk through the desert, a jungle, mountains, and eventually end up as seafaring grocery seekers. Throughout the book, with each new challenge, the little girl as narrator says "But we kept going." She also saves her family from the cheeky monkeys. They eventually arrive at the shop on the shore, buy the groceries, and head home to tell dad about their incredible journey.

The last time I read the book to Sarah, I pondered it as a metaphor for my dissertation project. No one has a straight-forward dissertation experience, at least that I've met. It's at least a nine month project and for some a decade. The work is largely done in isolation, requiring much perseverance and motivation. Every person who 'dissertates' has most likely never tried to write a 200 to 300 page book, especially on an arcane topic, knowing that no one will probably ever read the product. If a marriage and parenthood are intertwined with the dissertation stage, life becomes a juggling act of dangerous proportions. I cannot imagine writing my dissertation without Tom journeying with me or Sarah telling me that 'she needs to write her dissertation too'. My mother-in-law queried my sister-in-law when I started the doctoral program as to whether I liked to write, 'because she better'. It seemed like such a silly question at the time, but now that I've been working on the project for a number of years now, I have to say that this kind of writing is far less invigorating than I had experienced with term papers or even preparing for a presentation. There is no immediacy to this kind of project whereas I always had a fixed deadline prior to this. Now I have a fixed deadline for my dissertation, 31 December 2009. I'm not sure how many days I have left, but I recognize that I must 'keep going' whether through storm, drought, sea, or jungle. Eventually I will reach the shop on the shore, return home, and share my unbelievable adventures with anyone who cares to listen.

Organizing my Dissertation

This morning, Sarah woke up just before 6 am, ate some string cheese, and then we went back to bed. I couldn't sleep as thoughts of my dissertation spiraled through my head. One of my goals for the immediate future is to improve my outline. I started with an outline that was approved by my dissertation committee. After the first two chapters were written, my director recommended that I base the entire dissertation on an expanded version of the second chapter. This fall then I fleshed out the original chapter, forging a new document of five chapters, bringing the page total just on 'Macarius' view of Rest' to about 50 pages. Then I attended a dissertation seminar that encouraged me to take all of the data I've compiled so far and try to look at it from a fresh perspective in the hopes that a more original thesis might emerge. I worked hard at this approach and decided the dissertation would be more meaningful if I looked at 'the place of Rest in the theology of Macarius'. Once I made that decision, I started writing again using a new outline. Now I have about 20 pages of writing from the new outline and 50 pages from the old outline. This morning, I worked at integrating the two outlines. I didn't get very far, but I did see that while it will be take time to integrate all of this material, it will be possible and it will make the project more organized. I found a quote online saying that we're in a world of information overload and unless the material being presented is in a logical, coherent form, it will not be helpful. I'm convinced that the topic is worthwhile, so now I need to take the time to make the details of the topic more approachable. Professor Corliss, from Marquette's Engineering Department, has a webpage that discusses about the dissertation outline as an engineering specification. I found his remarks about 'scope creep and schedule slip' very helpful:

If you are writing an MS thesis or a PhD dissertation, the Graduate School requires an outline. For a dissertation, EECE Graduate Student Handbook requires a proposal. You might be able to get away with doing these near the end of your project, by I strongly recommend you complete them early and that you complete them well.
Why?
#1 Project management. A dissertation is an engineering project, and it benefits from being managed like one. The risk of scope creep and schedule slip is VERY high. No one would consider undertaking a 1-2 year engineering project with a two page Statement of Work, but that is what you are doing. The cost to you of a loose plan is surely AT LEAST an extra semester of lost income, and probably more.
#2 Specification. Related to #1. No good engineer would undertake a 1-2 year project without a clearly specified acceptance test. How will you and your client (your committee) know you are done? Without a tight specification for the output, it is likely that you do work that turns out to be unnecessary, and it is likely that the committee will add scope (work) beyond what was originally intended. The cost to you of a loose project specification is the possibility of committee members continuing to ask, "Yes, that's good, but now you need to do this too."
#3 Protection. You may know colleagues who thought they were done, but one committee member or another kept insisting that they add one chapter after another, resulting in MAJOR delay in graduating. If you have a tight specification, and everyone on the committee agrees in advance that if you do what your plan says, we'll call it a degree; and you DO what your plan says; then it is a little harder for a committee member to demand more. A good Statement of Work protects engineers from unreasonably demanding clients. The time to agree on a Statement of Work is before the project begins.
The above is borrowed from this website: http://www.eng.mu.edu/corlissg/Advice/thesis_outline.html

One of my high school friends who finished his Ph.D. recently believes that one of the keys to finishing is good project management skills. He developed these skills in part through a consulting job. This will be my focus in the next few weeks, developing a clearer, more logical outline, writing a detailed work plan, and writing five days a week, 15 minutes or more on Mondays and Fridays, and longer stretches on Tuesday through Thursday when Sarah's in daycare. The fruit will come!