Speaker 1: Thanks for checking out this video. My name is Arielle and I'm the founder of Grind Life Grind. In this video I'm going to be talking about my dissertation timeline and specifically the timeline for my proposal and I'm super excited to be documenting the dissertation process because honestly prior to starting my program I knew little to nothing about the dissertation. I knew that when I got a PhD I was going to have to do a dissertation and that it was going to be this big long project with a lot of writing but the specifics I'm really learning now as I go through the journey. Even students who are already in graduate school might not get that much information about the process until it's their turn to actually start preparing their proposal and that's definitely been the case for me. In the first two years of my program I've been focusing on coursework, clinical work since I'm training under the supervision of a licensed psychologist as a student therapist. I've been focusing on getting TA opportunities, applying for funding opportunities. I've also been working as a graduate research assistant in my lab and kind of helping my advisor on the projects that we already have and starting to think little by little about my dissertation but not really understanding the requirements until now. So this is what I hope to document here and I hope that it'll be useful for you if you are a current or future graduate student. So let's get into the dissertation timeline. As I'm recording this it's the summer after my second year and I'm about to start my third year of my doctoral program. So I set my dissertation timeline a few months back and it was provided to me by my research advisor. She basically has a timeline for third year students because that's when you normally start working on your dissertation proposal at least in my program. So based on the timeline that she gave I kind of started modifying it in my second year because I wanted to start brainstorming pretty early on. So we started talking about my dissertation and what I could potentially do for my dissertation in the middle of my second year in the program and I basically moved up everything on the third year timeline so that I can get it done earlier. Hopefully that makes sense. So normally in my program students start working on their proposal at the beginning of the third year and then they propose their dissertation in the spring of the third year but they have up until the beginning of their fourth year to do it. I wanted to propose as early as possible which is why I started working on brainstorming and preparing my proposal in the summer and honestly brainstorming even earlier. So I'm going to start with sharing the timeline that I have for my dissertation basically from the summer of 2020 which was really the summer before my third year and through my third year which is about to start. So this is my little dissertation binder and I have my timeline here. So my goals for the summer leading up to now because the third year is about to start were to define my dissertation study by the end of the summer. What am I going to do for my dissertation? What's the study going to be like? Two draft preliminary research questions. So what are the aims of my study? What am I aiming to answer? What am I aiming to look at? What are the themes that I think might come up or what is the theory behind the project that I'm going to do? Kind of laying the groundwork for what is the point of my dissertation basically. Identify potential dissertation committee members and their expected contributions and then a general outline of the introduction for my dissertation proposal. So these four goals came straight from the dissertation timeline for proposals that my advisor gave me but I like I said I modified it a little bit. I broke things down into more specific tasks. I also moved the timeline up because I want to get this done quickly. So I did a video about how I spent my summer this year not too long ago and you can check that out if you haven't already seen it but I spent the summer enjoying myself living my best life resting but also working on these goals and I have had to modify them a little bit because I realized towards the end of the summer that I didn't accomplish all of these or get as far as I wanted to but it's okay because I was moving things pretty quickly along and I won't be behind or anything. So I did define my dissertation study and I don't want to share too much about it yet but I found a study that I would like to replicate and once things are more solid I'll share more about that. I have to do the preliminary research questions in the next couple of days before the fall quarter starts. I have some things in my mind but I haven't written them down on paper. I already explained how the brainstorming process is a lot of things just floating around in your mind in my first dissertation video so definitely go back and see that and I did identify potential dissertation committee members and I will explain in another video what a dissertation committee is, why that's important, etc. etc. and the outline of my introduction. So at the beginning of the summer I wanted to have a detailed outline of the introduction for my proposal but as things have gone along I realized that I didn't get as much done as I thought I would, didn't have as much time to dedicate to work as I thought I would because I was busy resting and having fun and doing other things. So I do have a general outline of my introduction but it's not a detailed outline. So that's what I had for summer 2021. I'm kind of two for four or like three for four because some of these are half done and I'm hoping that the majority of these will be completed in the next couple of days before the fall semester starts because I have other goals for the fall and those fall goals are to come up with a detailed outline of my introduction, to have a polished draft of my introduction, so obviously these have different deadlines within the fall quarter, secure my committee members towards the end of the fall quarter, potentially submit my IRB sometime in the fall quarter. This is a maybe because it really depends on how involved my study is going to be and how much time I expect it to take to do data collection. Normally in my program, and I think in other programs, students don't do an IRB until after they've proposed what their dissertation study is and defended it. However, my advisor and I are talking about the potential for starting the IRB process earlier depending on whether the study I'm doing is going to need more time. So the goal to submit my IRB is a maybe. It depends what the study entails. Once I have a more detailed outline of what it's going to look like, it depends what my advisor thinks and it also depends what my other committee members feel that I should do. The other goal I have for the fall is to start working on the draft of my method section by the end of the quarter and that I'm not too worried about. So that's a lot to get done in the fall and what I'm planning to do is meet bi-weekly with my dissertation advisor and I'm going to create kind of like a syllabus so that I know what I'm going to submit to her every two weeks and what I'm going to be working on every week because I'm sitting aside about five hours a week to work on my dissertation throughout the quarter. And then in the winter I have complete the draft of my introduction and methods, consult with the stats center if I need to. So once I'm fleshing out the methods I do have to not only explain the procedures that I'm going to do for the study but also how I'm going to analyze the data and I might need some help. I'll send the final draft to my committee for edits. I'll start the powerpoint presentation for my proposal meeting which is going to be in the spring but I just want to get it ready to go. Potentially collect data if I end up submitting the IRB early and complete any required documents that I have to complete that the university may ask me to do in preparation for a proposal defense. So I should probably do a video about what is a dissertation proposal, what is a default, what is a dissertation proposal defense, so let me know in the comments if I should do that. I most likely will anyways. And then in the spring the only goals are really for me to propose my dissertation. The reason why I moved everything up kind of one quarter is because in the spring of my program in the third year we have to do clinical orals which is this oral examination. It's kind of a comprehensive exam so that we can obtain our master's and move and move forward in the program. So I want to spend spring studying for that and not worrying about my dissertation proposal or preparing for my defense. So this timeline is what my my advisor gave me but I moved everything back a quarter because I wanted to make sure that I could just have my proposal defense presentation just sitting ready to go approved by everyone on my committee and then I could focus on orals and then just you know go through and practice my presentation a couple times in the spring and then go for it. And I'm trying to propose as early as possible so that I can have as much time as possible to work on the IRB if that needs to happen and also collect us collect data for as long as I possibly can. And I'm trying to do that because one of the more difficult parts of research in my opinion is recruiting participants. So I want as much time as possible to do recruitment and to do data collection. So the later I propose the less time I'm going to have to collect data and whatnot. So yeah so that's my so far dissertation timeline for my proposal. My timeline for actually running my dissertation study and writing my dissertation up is going to be later on. I'm not there yet in my process but this is what I have so far. I'm really excited to be sharing this with you. I hope that recording this video is going to help me stay accountable with these goals but I'm also aware that these things are going to have to shift as I move forward the way that it did for the summer. I may not reach all these goals but I'm going to try and break it down as I usually do with big projects. My goal is to break it down into small tasks that I can do week by week or day by day and hopefully chip away at these goals because the dissertation really is something that you have to chip away at and it's something that I'm realizing is going to take some serious discipline because it's not always going to be fun. It's also super unstructured. I don't have a class where I go and sit down or where I have assignments. It's really autonomous. So I hope to be recording more as I move along in this process. Let me know what else you want to see or know or hear about about the dissertation process. Thanks for watching.