In this series of posts, I'm talking about my experiences getting a Ph.D. in philosophy. One goal is to offer some advice to people who might be considering whether or not grad school is for them. The other is target audience is those that are already neck deep in their studies and wondering how they're ever going to finish. These posts are organized according to the following questions.
1. Should you even go to grad school? 2. How do I get into grad school? 3. How do I finish grad school? After seminary I enrolled in the MA in Philosophy program at UMSL and we moved to St. Louis. Two weeks after we moved to a new city, not knowing a soul, we found out that we were having a baby. 'Life-changing' is an understatement. Cannan was born during the middle of my second semester. That semester, I had to change the way that I approached school. I had to become even more of a planner. From day one in my spring classes, I was immediately thinking about paper topics. Once I had decent ones, I started writing right away and had completed multiple drafts of my work weeks before the papers were due. Having a child taught me the next lesson: Doing this allowed me not just to complete my work during the end of the semester when I wasn't sleeping much because of a new baby, but I made decent grades too. In fact, one of the papers I wrote that semester ended up being the writing sample I used when applying to Ph.D. programs. The main task you must complete, of course, is the dissertation. Many students drop out of Ph.D. programs during the dissertation writing process. Many others take several years to write their dissertation. One of my professors, David McNaughton, gave me the best advice about writing dissertations. (I don't think it was original with him but I'll give him credit anyway!) Once you've sufficiently narrowed down your topic, write every day. It is simple advice. But it works. All you have to do is set a goal: a number of pages, words, or amount of time actually writing. My goal was to write for two hours a day. I've heard of other people setting the goal of writing one page a day. Then set a time. The best time to do this is first thing in the morning (even if you're not a morning person). By the time that I wrote my dissertation, I had three kids. So I decided that if I was going to get any writing done, it had to be while they were asleep. The time that I chose was the two hours before they usually woke up: from 5am to 7am, every day except weekends. I did this every day for a year and by then my dissertation was mostly finished. The beauty of this method is that first thing in the morning you've already accomplished a lot. You don't have to write any more, but I found that this method built momentum so that I wrote at other times too. But because I had already written, I didn't feel like I had to. It was liberating. So this concludes my series of posts on reverse engineering grad school. Let me know if you have any questions! Comments are closed.
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