Speaker 1: Hi, everyone. Welcome to TidyTV, where I bring the classroom to you. I'm Hannah Jeon, and today I'm going to talk about my own experience about being a PhD dissertation chair and some tips for students who are preparing for the dissertation and dissertation defense. Stay tuned. So this is the first time that I actually had the chance to be a dissertation chair for a PhD student. In the past, I've had several students where I was the advisor to the PhD dissertations, but I think that this was a very new and kind of fresh experience for me. And based on my experience, I wanted to share some of that with you, especially to those who are preparing for your dissertation and your defense. I mentioned in my last video some of the theoretical differences between some of the committee members, especially between the thesis advisor as well as the thesis chair. Now, normally, the thesis advisor is essentially the primary person in charge of things like big picture research question type of. Yes, contents where the thesis chair is more heavily involved in the kind of administrative burden. So making sure all of the feedback is collected on time as well as providing his or her own feedback and evaluation. But I think my prior experience, especially this time around, showed me that oftentimes that line is very blurred between the different members of the committee. And I say this not to not as a slight to anyone, any particular person, because I think every committee member contributed so much to the thesis and kind of to the final product. But again, I do want to share some of my own experiences and observations that will hopefully be helpful for you. In terms of actual contact with the student, I think I might have had just as much, if not more, contact with this person, either through email, Kakao message or meeting to talk about the thesis compared with her thesis advisor. Part of this was I actually knew the student. We were students together and she had come back later to finish up the dissertation process. So we had a pretty good working relationship to begin with. And also I was, of course, very interested in her area of expertise and so made the time and she also made the effort to reach out to me. What this meant was I was able to provide more timely and perhaps frequent and maybe specific feedback with regards to especially her methodological framework. So data and methods that were utilized to answer the research question. Well, a lot of the discussions about methodological framework, so appropriate data and methods are actually kind of decided amongst kind of just the student as well as the thesis advisor level. I think I was able to provide some additional feedback that she was actually able to reflect in her dissertation and hopefully this improved the quality of her work as well. She also let me know that prior to her dissertation defense, she had actually Googled or searched on YouTube dissertation defense and apparently one of my videos had actually come up on her feed pretty high up. And so she was looking at that for kind of motivation, information, but I think also a little bit of encouragement prior to the defense. And she did great. So. Kudos to her. Now, she had actually looked at the videos, I think, a couple of days before the dissertation defense. But hopefully if you're preparing for the defense and you have a little bit of time, please do take a look at the videos and hopefully they'll give you some important tips. And the one important tip, again, because I'm talking about my experience as committee chair, is that not just in terms of the administrative duties, but I have additional burdens on the day of the defense. So I'm the person who starts the defense, who makes sure that the student presents on time, that each of the committee members is able to provide feedback and ask questions, not to grill the student necessarily, but to have a really kind of productive dialogue about the dissertation and perhaps introduce some insights or some steps on how to make it even better. Then, of course, we would ask the student to exit and then I would kind of facilitate the discussion among the committee members about the kind of final evaluation. And then we would wrap up after that decision was made and take care of administrative duties afterwards. So what I found as committee member that I thought would be helpful in terms of advice for our students is, first, once you know who your committee chair is, and so again, once you've decided based on mutual agreement, who will be acting as your committee chair, please try to provide him or her with things like short bios or biographies about each committee member. This is actually very helpful because as committee chair, I'm the one who, or that person will be the one who, facilitates the meeting and wants to make sure that every member there feels welcome and kind of creates a very lively and hopefully happy and positive atmosphere for that day. I also talked a lot with the student about things like relative seniority among the committee members. And so that would give me an idea about how best to kind of frame the discussion, especially when it came to order in terms of asking questions. And also later when it came to providing the overall evaluation when the committee members meet separately. And since the committee chair is kind of the one who starts, facilitates and also ends the dissertation defence, you might also want to consider who might be able to carry that out well. And by well, of course, we're starting on time, we're ending on time, but also you're creating, again, a very nice atmosphere that's beneficial for everyone who is there, that values everyone's time, but also wants to make sure that the thesis results are even better than perhaps when they are presented. So the final moral of the story is, yes, your committee members, all of them, are there for you to reach out to. And they're all there for a specific reason, whether it's their expertise in this field, whether it's their expertise in terms of data methodology analysis, whether it's just, you know, constructive feedback with regards to your research. Please do reach out to them, keep them in the loop about your progress with your thesis. And yes, you'll be fine. You'll be just fine. I think this might be also encouraging to those who, I don't know if I should say this, might not be able to find all of that support and encouragement from the thesis advisor, him or herself. And again, that's not meant to be a slight to any one person. But yes, we're all there to support you and hope you do well to the very end. So I hope you found this video helpful. Best wishes on your thesis. And until next time here on Tati TV, bye.