The Dissertation Proposal Defense

I wanted to take a moment to explain something about Jen's successful dissertation proposal defense this Monday, largely because people who are not involved in this level of academia or who have never experienced it may not understand the significance of what has happened.

A doctoral program is comprised of several components, and they are more or less linear. First, there is a ton of coursework (anywhere from 45 to 90 credit hours), during which the student is not only taught specific information about their chosen field, but they are also taught how to think critically; this can often lead to some pretty deep self reflection and personal change. This process, depending on the program, can take anywhere from two to four years.

After the completion of the coursework, the student takes comprehensive exams over all of the coursework that has been completed. Think of this as the Mother of all Finals. Those of you who remember final exams in your undergraduate programs may recall the frenzied state of hyper-paranoia that goes along with a comprehensive final - now think about a comprehensive final that covers six or seven core courses, some of which you may have taken as much as two years prior to the comp.

Assuming the student passes the comprehensive exam, they are given the go-ahead to design a study for their dissertation. Once a topic has been selected (a gargantuan task in its own right), they conduct an exhaustive literature review - that is to say, they read hundreds (not an exaggeration) of articles on not only their topic, but on their chosen methodology for the topic and their research philosophy for how they're going to approach the study. All of this information is then collected, organized, and synthesized into a new paper called the dissertation proposal.

The proposal is a labor that can last months, as the student's advisor corrects and changes and alters and suggests over and over and over and over, until finally, it's "right". Once the proposal has been approved by the advisor, the student prepares a copy of the final draft for each member of his or her dissertation committee (comprised of a minimum of 4 PhD holding individuals). The student then has two weeks to prepare a presentation for the official defense of the dissertation proposal.

The proposal defense is a half-hour presentation of the entire study, followed by up to an hour and a half of on-the-spot questions posed by the aforementioned dissertation committee. After the Q&A session, the committee kicks the student out of the room and discusses whether or not the student's proposal is worthy of a doctoral level work. If the proposal is accepted, the student gets the green light to conduct the study, which will then be turned into the final dissertation (which gets to be defended as well).

So when I (and others) express my deepest admiration and pride over Jen's monumental accomplishment, it is from the perspective of understanding that she has taken a great step toward completing a journey she started over two years ago (and has arguably been a lifetime in the making). In a day and age where individual accomplishments are often measured in terms of days or even hours, this should stand out to everyone as something to be particularly admirable.

So again, congratulations, Jen. You have worked very hard to get this far, and I am very proud of you!