Oscar Wilde and Dissertations
October 16th is Oscar Wilde’s birthday. Here are a few words of wisdom from Oscar Wilde for dissertation students…
Success is a science; if you have the conditions, you get the result.
— Oscar Wilde
Doctoral students enjoy only a 50% success rate. After so many years of course work, why are so many doctoral students unable to make it to graduation? Put simply, it’s the dissertation!
If you’ve never completed a dissertation before, it can be pretty hard to figure out how to do it. But, if you have a plan, if you create milestones, if you set deadlines, then you have set up the conditions for success.
Then you get the result.
Then you graduate.
Whenever people agree with me I always feel I must be wrong.
— Oscar Wilde
It’s important for dissertation students to truly understand their goals. For my students, the goal is to graduate. For other students, the goal is something inherent in the dissertation, it’s the study itself. If that’s you, fine.
But, if you know that your dissertation is simply a means to an end, own that decision. Don’t try to make your dissertation into more than it needs to be in order for you to graduate.
I talk with students every week who are having trouble giving themselves permission to finish. When their committee members are fine with a draft, they want to tweak to make it a little better.
You have to be willing to take, “Yes,” for an answer!
I am not young enough to know everything.
— Oscar Wilde
When I was a graduate student at the University of Chicago, I TA’ed for a professor teaching a freshman-level science survey course. He used to tell the class that everything he told them was a lie. “But,” he would say, “There’s enough truth to it to be useful.”
You see, he couldn’t very well tell these freshman everything he had learned over a thirty-plus year career; they simply wouldn’t understand.
One day we were talking about teaching after class. He said that when an undergraduate graduates, they think they know everything. Later when the graduate student graduates he realizes that he knows nothing!
You have enough experience at this point in your academic career, at this point in your life, to know that you don’t know everything. To know that you can’t know everything.
Don’t forget that knowing everything isn’t a prerequisite for completing your dissertation. So, make sure that you don’t try to bring those expectations into your dissertation.
Your dissertation won’t solve all of the world’s problems. It likely won’t solve any of the world’s problems. What it will do is get you to graduation.
Embrace that.
Celebrate that.
A thing is not necessarily true because a man dies for it.
— Oscar Wilde
I don’t know if this one specifically has anything to do with the dissertation process, but it is my favorite Oscar Wilde quote.
It’s an important observation about the power of objectivity. And, about the dangers of bias. Something we could all benefit from remembering in these increasingly divisive times.
