126: How to Create a Dissertation Writing Timeline

Dra. Yvette Martinez-Vu

Welcome back to the Grad School Femtoring podcast. This is Dra. Yvette, ad today I have a solo episode all about how to create a dissertation writing timeline. I've been wanting to record on this topic for a while because this is actually one of the first steps that I assign my clients when they work with me one on one if they are grad students seeking support with their writing and time management.

Dra. Yvette Martinez-Vu

Before I get started on the topic, I actually want to share a few updates. By the time you're listening to this episode, I will also have been featured as a guest on two separate podcasts. I am a guest in the Here Comes the Sun podcast with Marisol Ibarra, and I am also a guest on The Millennial PhD podcast with Carmela- who goes by Mela- Muzio Dormani. I'm going to add the links to my shownotes for those episodes, if you want to hear more about what I talk about. On one of them, I talk a little bit more about my journey pivoting in my life and in my career. That's Here Comes the Sun. And then for The Millennial PhD, I talk a little bit more about what it's like to be a business owner and an edupreneurs. If you want to hear more about that, definitely check it out.

Dra. Yvette Martinez-Vu

Another thing I wanted to mention is that I recently published a blog post on The Professor Is In blog. The Professor Is In is a company and resource that provides services to grad students to help them navigate their careers within and outside academia. And so I wrote a blog post all about why I left higher ed and how I started a business abroad. Again, if you want to hear more about my journey, my reasons for leaving academia, and leaving my academic job, go ahead and read that blog post. It will also be in the show notes.

Dra. Yvette Martinez-Vu

Then one last update is that I'm actually providing workshops. I do this on the side when it's an opportunity through programs, through folks that reach out to me, schedule consultations so that I can speak to their groups and their students. But now I'm offering them publicly to anyone who wants to sign up. My next upcoming workshop is actually all about financial literacy and budgeting. It's called Making Money Movidas, all about financial literacy and budgeting 101. If you're curious, want to learn more about it, if you're interested in signing up, I will also link that in the show notes. And I'm going to try to offer a workshop one to two times a month. If you're curious what topics I cover, you can go to my website- gradschoolfemtoring.com/services to learn more.

Dra. Yvette Martinez-Vu

And if you would like for me to be a speaker for your university or for a center near you, let me know. Send me an email. I'm happy to pitch myself to whichever program or department you think that would be interested in hearing more about me. Whether it's a grad school preparation workshop, financial literacy workshop, organizational systems workshop, a workshop on how to create and grow a podcast, workshop all about careers outside of academia, definitely hit me up. Send me an email. Send me a DM. I'm happy to reach out to your contacts.

Dra. Yvette Martinez-Vu

Now let's get to the topic of the episode. Let's talk about dissertation writing timelines. Why is it important to create a dissertation writing timeline? Why do you even need one? The reason I think it's imperative that you have a timeline is because it will serve as your anchor. It will allow you to have something to ground you and to follow when you get lost in the dissertation writing and revising process. Writing a dissertation- just like writing a book- it's a big project, and it can feel unwieldy. It can feel like this big monster if you don't break it up into small, manageable steps. It's really easy actually to get derailed, to get distracted, to lose focus on your writing if you don't actually have a timeline and an end date in sight.

Dra. Yvette Martinez-Vu

I think it's important to have one so that you can, like I said, break down the process into small, manageable steps. It's always easier to get something done if you start small so that you don't overwhelm yourself. Okay, so how do you actually get started on the dissertation timeline? Well, the first thing that I recommend that you do is to have, excuse me, is to have a deadline, you want to have a specific filing deadline. And from that filing deadline, you can work your way backwards.

Dra. Yvette Martinez-Vu

The next thing that you need to know is, how many chapters are you actually expected to write? Do you need an introduction? Do you need a conclusion? All of this is discipline specific. And you can find this out pretty easily by asking your advisor committee members, students in your programs, reviewing downloading and reviewing different dissertations on ProQuest. So you can find out is, you know, does my discipline, include a conclusion or not? You know, for instance, in my program, that was not a requirement. And you know, how long are each of the chapters, how many do you need Is it is it three, four or five more.

Dra. Yvette Martinez-Vu

And then, after you have an idea of your end, date, and sight, and how many chapters you have to write, you want to make sure that you break these chapters down even further. And for each of the steps required, you want to create monthly goals, it can be, you know, you can have a Word doc, you can have a spreadsheet, but you have each month listed from now until that filing deadline, and all of the sub steps of what you're going to do to reach that deadline or to meet that deadline.

Dra. Yvette Martinez-Vu

I recommend monthly goals technically, you could make them weekly, you can make them annually. But if you've been applying to dissertation your fellowships, odds are you probably already have created some sort of timeline, sometimes they expect you to create a timeline based off each quarter or semester what you're going to accomplish, you know, for each term, but again, I recommend monthly, just because it'll, it's just easier to see as you start every new month to check and assess.

Dra. Yvette Martinez-Vu

So just like in one of my former episodes, where I talked about budgeting, how it's useful to have a monthly meeting, where you're reviewing and assessing your expenses. The same goes with your dissertation at the start of every month, review your dissertation timeline, see what goals did you meet? What goals didn't you meet, move those over to the next month? And that will kind of give you an idea of your pacing. So how long did it take you to write your first chapter? How long does it take you to do the notes, the outlining, the drafting, the revising, all of that will help you then plan.

Dra. Yvette Martinez-Vu

And just because you create a dissertation writing timeline doesn't mean that everything is exactly set in stone, and that you're going to do it precisely how it's indicated in the timeline, you may move some things around, you know, plans change, things change, sometimes entire experiments fail, and so you have to plan for that. But at least it'll give you an idea of kind of where to get started and how to keep going. And it'll also give you a sense of whether or not your timeline is going to need to be modified, maybe something takes longer than expected and it turns out that you need to stay an extra year.

Dra. Yvette Martinez-Vu

It's better to know this in advance thanks to your timeline than to just try to focus on getting by every day without having an idea of the larger picture and the long term goal. All right. So when you're breaking down your sub steps, you like I said earlier, you want to think about what it takes for you to write each of your chapters. And then you want to estimate how long it'll take you. I've seen people be really ambitious and try and they say that they're going to write a chapter in a month. Maybe you can do that.

Dra. Yvette Martinez-Vu

But I've also seen folks who have taken a quarter or a semester to write a chapter, sometimes even a whole year to write their first chapter. And if that happens, you know, I mean, ideally, you don't want to take an entire year to write a chapter but, in my case actually my first chapter took the longest to draft. And after you get an idea of what you need to do to write one chapter, it should get easier. Each subsequent chapter that you write should get easier to write and should take you less time to write.

Dra. Yvette Martinez-Vu

And now in your timeline, you also want to include things like reading that you have to do, note taking, outlining that you may be doing, are you gathering data? Are you close reading? Are you going to the archives? Are you conducting interviews? Are you including the time that you need to work on revisions? So you may want to include this step of sending your first draft to your advisor, you also want to get an idea of how involved your committee members are going to be? Are they going to be offering feedback per chapter? Or do they want to see your dissertation when it's fully drafted, and then only offer you feedback once near the end, shortly before you're filing.

Dra. Yvette Martinez-Vu

And so it's useful to to get this in to add these steps because it's easy to forget that writing is a multi step process that writing doesn't just require, oh, you write it, you write a chapter once, and then you're done. I've seen a lot of graduate students make this mistake where they write their dissertation timeline, both for dissertation fellowships, and also for themselves, where they say, Okay, I'm gonna write chapter 1, 2, 3, 4. And then I'm going to format it, and then I'm going to send it to my adviser, my committee members, and then I'm going to have my defense, and then I'm done.

Dra. Yvette Martinez-Vu

And they don't account for revisions. They don't account for edits. They don't account for formatting, they don't account for proofreading. All of these are steps, all of these take time, they should all go on your dissertation writing timeline. When it comes to, for instance, going through revisions, it might not even just be one revision, it might take multiple revisions, and you won't know that until you get through your first chapter. So maybe your first chapter takes multiple revisions. 2, 3, 4 revisions, you don't know. It depends also on your advisor, and you know how stringent they are with the quality of writing that they expect from you for your dissertation.

Dra. Yvette Martinez-Vu

And so again, keep that in mind, how many revisions is is it going to take you because that is going to prolong your timeline? With editing, are you going to do it all by yourself? Or are you going to hire an academic editor to review your dissertation? Some of them provide developmental edits, which is going to require more revisions. Some of them do line edits and proofreading, some of them do formatting. Are you going to do all of that by yourself? These are things to ask yourself and to think, think through as you're working on your dissertation timeline. Yeah, so those are some of the steps.

Dra. Yvette Martinez-Vu

I know that if you like look it up online, they're actually sample dissertation timelines that you can take a look, if you do a quick googling. Another thing you can do is ask recent alumni or more advanced grad students, if they're comfortable sharing their dissertation timelines with you that way, you get a sense of how other people are structuring their time and planning for how they're going to do the work. It's helpful to get insight from folks in your department. That way, you have a more realistic expectation of how long it's going to take to do everything so that ultimately you can finish file and be done with your PhD move on to the next thing in your life. Yeah, so that's actually that's it.

Dra. Yvette Martinez-Vu

That's how you write a dissertation writing timeline is you think about every single chapter that you need to write, what are the steps involved in completing each of the chapters. And then you know, what you're going to do near the end to finish and file. So having that end goal in sight is going to be really helpful. I recommend having samples when you work on yours. Like I said, there's no right or wrong way to create a dissertation timeline so long as it helps you. You don't want it to hurt you. You want it to help you want it to be something that when you feel lost when you feel like you don't know what to do, you can go back to that timeline and it tells you precisely what you need to do that month.

Dra. Yvette Martinez-Vu

You're like, Ah, I don't know. I don't know, I'm lost. Go back to your timeline. What does it say that you're supposed to be doing this month. And if there's a step there that confuses you, or you get stuck, ask for help with regard to that stuff, modify your timeline, clarify what you meant when you wrote it. And then keep going. The timeline is supposed to be a tool, it's supposed to be a resource is supposed to help you keep your long term goal in sight.

Dra. Yvette Martinez-Vu

Because it's really easy to get stuck on a thing that you're working on right then and there, whatever that thing is, it could be getting IRB approval, you know, you're trying to work with human subjects and get approval to be able to do it, and a safe way. Or maybe you're stuck with the data analysis process. And you're struggling with some some method that that you're supposed to use. Or maybe you're struggling with your primary sources that you need to close read. Maybe they're not the primary, maybe you thought you wanted to close read them, but you don't anymore, you want to change them.

Dra. Yvette Martinez-Vu

It's okay to modify things to change things. But don't forget to keep the long term goal in sight. And that anything that you change now is going to impact your timeline. So if you are really serious about finishing, you know, according to a certain, you know, let's say you're a doctoral candidate right now, and you want to finish in June 2023. It may feel like it's a long time. But it's actually only a year from now, because a year from now, you'll want to have almost your entire dissertation drafted and only working on revisions or edits at this point. So it's not that much time. Keep that in mind.

Dra. Yvette Martinez-Vu

Work on a dissertation timeline for yourself if you don't have one, ask others for samples, if you're really stuck on getting started. And yeah, and then follow it and keep going. That's it. That's my solo episode for today. I hope you all check out some of the links that I include in the show notes. I hope you found this helpful. And if you have any other suggestions, as always, contact me send me an email or a message on social media. And I am happy to add your topic request to my queue of recordings. I hope you all have a wonderful rest of your week.