Dissertation Writing - Preparing The Way

1. Beginning

"If I'd known he'd be too busy to be of much help, I would have tried to find a better advisor."

At the outset of your project, it is well to identify potential sources of help and to recognize the advantages and limitations of each. Those sources of most value are usually academic advisors, fellow graduate students, experts outside of your own department or institution, you yourself, and the professional literature.

ACADEMIC ADVISORS

Policies for assigning faculty members to supervise students' thesis and dissertation projects can vary from one institution to another and even across departments within the same institution.

In some cases, the advisor who guides a student's general academic progress automatically becomes the supervisor of the candidate's work on the thesis or dissertation. Under such a policy, students are relieved of the responsibility of choosing a mentor, but they may unfortunately end up with less than optimal help. In other cases, an academic advisor will not automatically be assigned, but he or she will be only one of a group of several faculty members from whom a student can choose a guide. Under these circumstances, before students announce their choice of a mentor they can profitably collect several kinds of information about the professors who form the pool of potential advisors. Included among the sources of information are fellow students, the professors within the pool, other faculty members, secretaries, research assistants, and the professors' publications.

Institutions and departments can also differ in the number of faculty members assigned to supervise and evaluate a student's research. One common pattern at the master's level is to have a three-member committee for each thesis, with the committee chairperson acting as the candidate's principal supervisor. However, in colleges and universities with large numbers of master's degree students, the entire master's project may be directed and assessed by a single faculty member. At the doctoral level, the supervising committee often consists of three to five professors.

In the following paragraphs, we describe kinds of information to seek about potential advisers. We then suggest useful sources of each kind.

Kinds of Information to Collect

In learning about the professors in your pool of potential mentors, you will likely find it helpful to discover their (a) fields of interest and expertise, (b) style of advising, and (c) attitudes about appropriate research topics and methods of research.

Fields of interest and expertise

Obviously, the closer an advisor's area of expertise is to your research problem, the better equipped she or he will be to identify difficulties you may encounter, recommend sources of information pertinent to your topic, and guide your choice of methods for gathering and interpreting data. There are several ways to learn about faculty members' specializations--the titles and contents of classes they teach, their published books and articles, the topics of theses and dissertations produced under their guidance, other staff members' opinions, and other students' experiences with those faculty members.

The task of deciding how well a potential advisor's interests and skills suit your needs is likely easiest if you already have a specific research problem in mind, or at least if you have identified the general realm you hope to explore. If you have no inkling of the kind of topic on which your study will focus, then the next of our selection criteria - style of advising - may become your primary concern.

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