Navigating the Dissertation Journey: Insights from a Clinical Psychology PhD Student (Full Transcript)

Speaker 1: Welcome to Grad Life Grind. This video is all about the dissertation process. I'm a third year clinical psychology PhD student now and that means I need to start working on my dissertation. And if you don't know what that is, it's basically the culminating project for a doctorate degree and it's independent research. You collect data, write up your results, and submit your dissertation and then you defend it. So I'm in the early early stages of that and I just wanted to kind of document the dissertation process as I'm going through it. Grad Life Grind is all about sharing my experiences with you through graduate school so that hopefully it can be an easier process for you when you're going through that. So right now I'm, like I said, in the early stages of my dissertation trying to figure out what is it that I want to actually study. Welcome to Grad Life Grind. If you're new to this channel thank you for checking it out and if you're already a subscriber thanks for being back again. My name is Arielle and I'm a PhD student in clinical psychology and in this channel I bring you information about the mental health field and talk about my journey as a PhD student. You may know from some of my other content that my interest in research is on domestic violence within the Latino community and that's what I hope to study for my dissertation but there's a lot that goes into running a study. If you've ever done research before then you know that it's a multi-step process not just to write up your research study but to actually conduct it. So what I'm currently doing in this phase of my dissertation process is thinking. It's a lot of reading, a lot of thinking about what I could possibly do, a lot of talking to my advisor about here are some of my ideas, is this feasible, do we have enough time to conduct this project, is it too big, is it too small, who do I want to have as a participant for the study, who's my ideal participant, what's the population that I want to look at, what are the phenomena that I want to study and I'm really excited to share about this process with you because nobody really tells you what a dissertation is or how to dissertate and I'm learning as I go and what I've discussed with my research advisor is that this is sort of the brainstorming phase that I'm currently in. It's gathering what's all the literature on the topic or the population that I'm interested in and where can I find a gap, where can I integrate my interests. So there's a ton of research on domestic violence or intimate partner violence. There's already a good amount of research on how IPV or DV looks within minority populations or for women in minoritized groups but there are always going to be gaps in research, things that haven't been done before or perspectives that haven't been taken before. So what I'm really doing is trying to figure out what's going on, what's been done and then what hasn't been done and how can I add to the literature, how can I add to the knowledge base through my dissertation study and that's the case with all research. You want to figure out how can I add to the conversation about this topic or this research area. So that's what I've been doing so far. Dissertating looks like reading a lot, thinking a lot, writing down random ideas that I have, brainstorming, highlighting, post-its and talking to my advisor and to other students about this process and then just planning long term, creating benchmarks for myself about what are the next steps and how can I develop my proposal in time, how can I develop my proposal as quickly as possible and defend that proposal so that I can get going on the data collection process. So in another video I will go over what the process should look like. Obviously nothing ever goes according to plan but I can cover what I hope my dissertation timeline will look like. Let me know if you want to see that in the comments. If you are currently applying to graduate school, I have tons of resources for you here on my YouTube channel. I also have tons of resources for you on my other platforms, Instagram, TikTok, etc. and I also have gradlifegrind.com where you can find tons of information on my blog. If you took the time to check out this video, thank you so much. Let me know what else you want to see about the dissertation process. Let me know what questions you have. I'll be sharing everything that I can as I go through this process. I appreciate your time. Thanks for spending some of it with me. Again, my name is Arielle. My goal is to inform you, to inspire you, to spark an interest in you, and hopefully also entertain you. Have a great day.