Speaker 1: Ever wonder why it takes some of your peers so long to get their dissertation written and others it doesn't seem to be a problem? We're going to talk about that right now. Hey everybody, I'm Leigh Hall from teachingacademia.com and I'm all about giving you the tools you need to navigate academia and make your best impact. Today we're talking about a question that I was recently asked by a viewer and I'm not quoting her directly but The gist of the question is, why does it take some of my peers so long to finish their dissertation, okay? And so this is grounded in someone who is getting ready to start a dissertation, right, and we've all been there, or you're gonna be there, where we're getting ready to start a dissertation and we look at the people that have come before us, or we look at the people that are sort of in the throes of it now, and some of them are doing really well, and some of them are really struggling and they're taking a really long time to finish and we just can't seem to understand why. And then we start to worry. We internalize that and we think, oh, well, these are really smart people and it's taking them a while to finish. What does that mean for me? Should I be concerned? So the first thing that I wanna remind you of is don't compare yourself to others, all right? So you might see somebody that you know, you may or may not know them really well, but you may know that, hey, this is a really smart person who's done really well in this PhD program, and look, they can't, they're struggling to finish. If that person's struggling to finish, how am I gonna finish? That's not gonna help you, okay? So don't compare yourself to others. We can learn from others, and we're gonna talk about that in a minute, but we don't wanna make comparisons about how fast or how slow someone's going and what that means in terms of how fast or slow we will go to finish in terms of finishing our dissertation. So there's basically a few types of people here when we think about people that take a long time to finish. And I mean longer than average. I don't mean like if your PhD program, let's say takes five years and somebody took five and a half. But if somebody's taking six, seven, eight, what's going on here with that? Or if they don't even finish at all, what's going on here with that? So there's a number of things. First of all, for some people, life got in the way. They've had personal emergencies, family emergency. I mean, something could have happened with their project that's beyond their control, right? Something happened, right? They are not the kind of person who would normally take extraneous amounts of time to finish, but they had some things that were beyond their control that are slowing them down. Okay, that could happen to you. That can happen to any of us, all right? So don't let that get in the way. If that happens, you just deal with it as it happens. For others, okay, and you know who these people are in your program, there are others who they've always had a hard time meeting deadlines, right? These are the people that you might have seen in your classes writing their papers at the last minute, or they are people who have multiple incompletes, and it's not, like, it's one thing to take an incompletes because you had a personal emergency, but, and that's not what I'm talking about, right? There are people that have a hard time managing deadlines, managing multiple deadlines, they end up taking a lot of incompletes in their courses, right, this stuff piles up. You know who these people are. You know who in your program the more unreliable people are when it comes to deadlines. Those people are going to have a very difficult time with the dissertation process because you've gotta work on your own and you kinda have to set your own deadlines, okay? So if you're not good with time management, setting deadlines, then you're gonna struggle when you get to the dissertation phase. So some of the people that you're seeing, that's gonna be some of the reason why you see them doing that. Now, some people, right, and this sort of bleeds into that, right, some people just don't do well when they're left to their own devices, okay? So that's sort of following up on what I just said before. Some people have difficulty meeting deadlines for any number of reasons. It can be they're in a course or not. Some people do really well with courses, they do really well with that structure, they meet those deadlines, they get their papers turned in, but when it transitions to you kind of have to be in charge of yourself, and you have to set your own goals and your own deadlines, and you can do that in conjunction with your advisor, of course, but it really falls to you to get it done, then some people just don't do well with that. So it's not a condition of am I smart enough to do this, Am I a good enough writer to do this, right? What a lot of this comes down to is some people had personal emergencies, some people had life events come up. When you set those people aside, then it becomes about managing deadlines and being able to structure yourself in a way that allows you to get done in a timely manner. So don't let the timelines of others throw you. Make your own timeline, okay? Talk to your advisor, do what's necessary so that you are functioning well. And don't worry. Do not worry and do not compare yourself to these other people that aren't seeming to get done, okay? And when you do see people that are successful in your program or they look like they're doing really well, they look like they're making really great progress on their dissertation, talk to them. Ask them about what's working for them because it might be that you can take some of those approaches that they're using and then they may work for you as well. So if you like this video and you want to see more, click right here and I will see you over in the next one.