Writing Like a Doctor with Dr. Seth François
Dr. Seth François [00:20:03]
Yes. And it’s kind of. When you stop and you go. I want to talk about that, if that’s OK. Yeah, again, we you’re you in the zone and you’re trying to complete the project, do not stop try to finish it. Because it’s so hard to restart and get back on to the place that you were before. And I know that was very difficult for me. And so if I ended up doing an extra hour or whatever, I went on an extra hour because it was just so difficult trying to pick up from I mean, like, if you can do a section, complete a section every time you you sit down. I mean, of course, the background information and the research section of the dissertation, I mean, you can’t do that in a setting, but you can you can always say, OK, well, today I’m going to get ten new references. I’m going to go through and sort them out.
Dr. Russell Strickland [00:21:07]
That’s exactly right. It’s important. I have a goal for each session. Each time I’m going to sit down and work on your dissertation. What do you plan on getting done? And occasionally you can learn to to adjust your goals as you’re going. So you get better at it. And hopefully you get to the point pretty soon where you hit every goal every day. And and that’s that that really helps with focus, with getting in the zone. I think I’ll let you sit down. You know, I got to do these three things and then I’m done. And if you are in that zone, then if you know what the next three things are, maybe you can get one or two of those done to, like you said, as long as you’ve got some time on the back end of your schedule, time to keep going. That could be productive as well.
Dr. Seth François [00:21:49]
Right. And the other thing is, is is picking the right method or quantitative, qualitative or mix method. I mean, it mixed methods, I mean, for me personally, it is real difficult because it’s like doing two dissertations, pretty much because you have to cover both sides.
Dr. Russell Strickland [00:22:10]
Folks, I didn’t say it. You heard it, Dr. François said it. Mixed methods is like doing two dissertations. I didn’t say it. He did.
Dr. Seth François [00:22:20]
Yeah. Is it this is a little bit more challenging. Do you have to use two different techniques, two different evaluation tools.
Dr. Russell Strickland [00:22:29]
For the students that work with me, their goal needs to be I want to get my dissertation done as quickly as possible because that’s what we do here.
Dr. Seth François [00:22:35]
Right.
Dr. Russell Strickland [00:22:35]
I want to if you want to spend a long time working on your dissertation because you want to study all the ins and outs, that’s fine. You’re an adult. You decide what’s important to you. I work with those who are like, listen, I want to use this doctoral degree and I can’t use it until I get this dissertation done. That’s who I work with. All right. So if you come to me and say that’s what you want and you also say you want to do a mixed-methods study, it’s the answer is just no.
Dr. Seth François [00:22:58]
Just just double just one one a year, extra year or two years. It’s, I mean, just for me, I, I used a quantitative method when I, when I did my dissertation and for me I just. After looking at it because I’m not really a quantitative type of person, I don’t think in numbers at all that. And I think I would have probably been better served on a qualitative method, and I think my study could have justified that, it probably would have justified using it. But I was told that quantitative method would get me through the process faster. But it really doesn’t help you if you really have to struggle to learn.
Dr. Russell Strickland [00:23:56]
So it is important to have some of that, you know, I don’t know what I’m doing. To get some operational guidance is really helpful.
Dr. Seth François [00:24:03]
That’s right.
Dr. Russell Strickland [00:24:05]
Because you don’t have to be a quant expert to do a quantitative project. But I agree. One hundred percent. It’s a lot faster. Things are a little bit easier right now as we’re we’re recording this episode. We’re still during in this COVID crisis situation. It’s it’s late in 2020 right now and in this environment, qualitative studies are a little bit easier to do than normal because everybody is doing in this way. We’re doing a Zoom call right now and that’s the way everybody does their interviews. So that makes it a lot easier. Traditionally, when when we’re not in this kind of social distancing lockdown kind of environment, we’re expecting those interviews to be face to face because you tend to get better commitment, better trust and just better responses when you’re sitting down somebody across the table or something of that sort. But that helps a little bit with some of the logistics. Still, though, you’re doing a qualitative project. You got to sit down with these folks and talk to every one of them and spend like an hour or more with each one of them, as opposed to a quantitative study. You just tell people, hey, click this link, fill out this form and hit submit. And there’s all my data, much, much easier from an execution standpoint. And then you just have to understand what the analysis means. It’s gonna be a lot faster and easier to do because you get some help with it. But just wrap your head around. It takes a little bit of time, but I’d argue much less time than going over all of those hundreds of pages of transcripts and making sense out of those.
Dr. Seth François [00:25:43]
Yeah, it is, yeah. Wow. And also, you have to know your population that you’re going to be researching. I, I my dissertation was extended a little bit because of the population I. Let me show you real quick. This is my my my dissertation right here.
Dr. Russell Strickland [00:26:09]
Within arm’s reach. Huh?
Dr. Seth François [00:26:11]
If you can, if you can see it, there is the. Is a trust in your leaders and a decline in union membership. And so I felt being I being in a union for about 15 years, that it was going to be such an easy population for me to tap into. Little did I know every time I wrote a letter or contacted someone and said, well, you know, is it OK that I can interview or contact the members and send them a survey? And the answer was no, no, we can’t do it. We can’t do it. So it made it really difficult. So what I had to do is I had to go through social media to get the individuals to fill out the questionnaire.
Dr. Russell Strickland [00:27:08]
So when I talked about planning ahead of time before you start writing that problem statement or whatever it might be, that’s one of the crucial bits, is how are you going to get access to these folks? And I don’t just mean I know them. I’m sure I can get access to them. No, you’ve got you know exactly how you’re going to get access to them. If you’re going to talk to Bob down at the at the the lodge and get Bob to send out a bunch of emails for you or something like that. Well, go talk to Bob and make sure he’s going to do it, because if he comes back and says no, then what do you do with your study? And like you said, found out it takes some time to recover, to come up with alternate plans.
Dr. Seth François [00:27:46]
It was a rude awakening. I just I could not believe I worked hand in hand with a population and I actually wrote the dissertation. You know, I chose to write it because of the decline in unions. And it it really was something that I wanted to do to assist and to help in finding out and understanding why unions were declining at that. But. I like I said, I have to use other methods to get the information or get access to the population.
Dr. Russell Strickland [00:28:31]
And luckily that worked out. So that was really it’s a really good thing because we’ve we’ve had students that have come to us before just completely stuck. We have a proposal that’s been approved and then they’re trying to figure out how to actually do what they proposed. And either they didn’t check to make sure that they could actually get the data that they were thinking they could get or they didn’t even have really a plan in place. And unfortunately, sometimes committees will just approve a proposal. And if I got to take it and. I want to go execute this proposal for someone I have no clue how to do it because there’s not actually a plan laid out there. Now, keep in mind, I’m not saying I am going to execute anybody’s dissertation for them. But it’s important for the student to have like a recipe, like a baker. You want to know how to make a chocolate cake a baker can write down on a card. Here’s what you’re going to need. Here’s what you do with it. Here’s how long it’s going to take. And then you’ve got a chocolate cake. And you need to be able do that with your dissertation as well. Here’s who I’m going to deal with. Here’s how I’m going to get in touch with them. Here’s what I’m going to do to them. And then when I get the answers, this is what I’m going to do to make sense of it. And if you can’t do all of that, you’re really not ready to move forward, even on writing your proposal, much less trying to defend it and execute a dissertation.
Dr. Seth François [00:29:48]
Right. Because there is a section and a dissertation that that you have to explain how you’re going to get into the population and what methods are you going to use to get to this.
Dr. Russell Strickland [00:30:02]
That’s true.
Dr. Seth François [00:30:02]
And so and even before you start the research of actual research, that section has to be filled out.
Dr. Russell Strickland [00:30:10]
So you have and it would be nice if all committees would insist that the students feel that it is there for your own benefit. It’s really there so that someone else could really produce your results if they want to. That’s very important in science. We want to be able to if someone says this is the way it works, someone else is going to say, well, I don’t believe you. I’m going to go do it and see if that’s the way it works. And so you have to tell them exactly what you did. Or in the case of the dissertation, you start off with a proposal. What are you going to do in order for them to be able to to replicate what you did? And, yes, you’re right. It would be great if all committees would tell students you have to do that first. But even though it is a section in every dissertation, unfortunately, I’ve seen lots of proposals that you could not execute on what a person wrote down there, just what there are no instructions that that recipe card, so to speak, just is not even they are really.
Dr. Seth François [00:31:04]
Yeah, it’s all I can say is you have to go into this understanding that it’s like going into the gym is you going to have to work out because you can’t just walk into the gym and just sit around and watch everybody else workout. You got, the dissertation is going to require you to really not only just work, but think logically and to say and to put things in the proper order. And I think that’s again, I have to applaud Walden for their work in building the DBA program and some of the other programs that they have because. It they have it in a logical manner of how you should just put things together, and it worked for me. I was a legacy student because I had I had surgeries and some other things. So I you know, it took me took me about, I think about like five and a half years to finish up my dissertation. Some of those were rewrites. I think I rewrote my dissertation at least 30 times, at least. At least. And so if you’re not a person that do not like writing over and over again, you got to get used to it.
Dr. Russell Strickland [00:32:40]
Yeah, there’s two things there: Number one is I have never met a dissertation committee that’s approved the first draft ever. So it doesn’t matter how good you are, who you are, what you are, that’s not going to happen. But the second thing is. Having someone knowing having some experience with this is what committees are looking for or when they give you feedback, this is what that feedback actually means, can short circuit that process? Because, you know, if you told me that you rewrote your dissertation two, three, four or five times, I would say, yeah, that’s kind of the way it is. 30 times is a little much.
Dr. Seth François [00:33:14]
Yes. Yes. Well, I’m not saying the whole dissertation. I’m talking about sections of it.
Dr. Russell Strickland [00:33:19]
OK, different sections. OK. That’s true.
Dr. Seth François [00:33:22]
And and yeah, I just going through the different section and trying to get the problem statement right. You have to rewrite that multiple times that that’s true.
Dr. Russell Strickland [00:33:35]
That, that makes a lot of sense. But you said another important point here, which was some of it was rewrite, but some of it was also you mentioned surgeries. And there’s other things like life doesn’t stop when you enroll in a doctoral degree program. And it’s important that you understand. When you have difficulties or unexpected things happening in your life, how to keep going in the dissertation process, not to ignore these other things are happening in life because those are important. I mean, we’ve had folks that had to deal with the death of a spouse and things of that sort. It’s just it’s horrible. And you have to respect those things and give those time and and attention. But if you also are are determined and disciplined to keep moving forward with the dissertation process, you can finish it despite the fact that life keeps throwing you curveballs.
Dr. Seth François [00:34:22]
Oh, absolutely. And, you know, the other tool that that I even embrace today is the use of Grammarly. Grammarly is an excellent tool because a dissertation. Let me just tell you, you have some committee members. If that period is not in that right space, if you if you choose to use a single space or the double space or whatever it is and one, you use it one time, one way or another, they will call you on that. You’re right. And they will have you rewrite it over again, which may take you to another, you know, cycle to get your dissertation reviewed.
Dr. Russell Strickland [00:35:04]
Just that review is. Yeah. And I wish that all committee members would. Pay attention to content first and then we’ll make it look good. You have to write well enough to be understood, but it doesn’t have to be APA-perfect when you’re putting drafts together. But unfortunately, some committee members don’t share that view. So tools like Grammarly can can certainly help bridge the gap. Grammarly is not going to give you a perfect. But it’ll get you pretty close.
Dr. Seth François [00:35:34]
Oh, absolutely. Is this at all that like I said, I still use today and and I encourage, you know, the students that I do teach to to look at it at least and see if there’s something that that is good for now and because. The things that you can solve immediately is better than having a whole lot of unresolved issues in your dissertation. That’s for sure.
Dr. Russell Strickland [00:36:10]
That’s true. Tell me what, as you went through the dissertation process, what about the dissertation itself did you find challenging? Was there any point at which you felt like you were really stuck? And how did you overcome that?
Dr. Seth François [00:36:28]
To be honest, was it was it was truly it was the the problem statement that was the most challenging, just trying to figure out where I was going to go. And then I think it was Section Three for Walden, which is the methodology section, because it was challenging because I had to learn about all this information and run it running things through and understanding what I was running through, all these different formulas. And so so that that that was a challenge. It took me, because I had to pause and learn and then actually do the work. So that’s why I kind of if I was looking back, I probably a qualitative method would have probably been a little bit easier for me. I mean, personally for me. But a lot of people like the quantitative. Yeah.
Dr. Russell Strickland [00:37:33]
I’ll still contend that the qualitative what happens with that is it’s it might seem easier to people. People look at it, think about their statistics class and say, I hated that class. I don’t ever want to do that again. And and so you think I’m not going to do a quantitative project. And then you look at qualitative and you’re thinking less basically talking to folks. I’m good at talking to folks, but the problem is that it’s a lot of work and it’s a lot of very specific ways of looking at those conversations and and making sure those conversations go where you need them to go to get your questions answered. And so there’s some skill in that, but there’s also some time commitment there. And then the real time commitment comes later. When you take an hour long conversation with somebody and you write it out longhand, in a transcript, it’s like 20 pages. And then you do that 20 times, and now you’ve got like this four hundred page book that you have to analyze to pull out themes and everything. And it’s a it’s a very long, labor intensive process. It might seem a little simpler, but it’s a lot more… I’ll say difficult it just the amount of work you have to do.
Dr. Seth François [00:38:42]
Yeah, well, it’s always good to have, like, an organization like yours, you know, to get some coaching and want to get to that section. I think that if you really don’t you know, you have to know what you don’t know. Yeah, you have to. And don’t. Don’t be afraid or don’t be prideful to to not ask for help.
Dr. Russell Strickland [00:39:09]
I don’t know what I’m doing yet is very, very important. I don’t know what I’m doing yet. Don’t be embarrassed that you don’t know what you’re doing yet because you’re out there learning how to do it. So, yeah, really, really important. Well, Dr. François , let’s switch gears a little bit, because I’m super interested in this thing you’re doing now, Imaginetainment. Tell us tell us about that. Just the name is so cool.
Dr. Seth François [00:39:35]
What I can say, I can tell you about the name I was sitting with are we are in a company to actually do the image of Imaginetainment. And so I was sitting down at a breakfast meeting and we were trying to and I said, wait a minute. And we went through a whole bunch of different. I was so, well you know, you kind of have to come up with a name and all that. So I was in and I said. Imagine — and I said — Entertainment. And I said no. So why not Imaginetainment? So that’s how the name came out. But the challenge with that is that the Grazer and Ron Howard have a production company called Imagine Entertainment. And so when we went to get the name trademarked, the trade attorney said, well, you may have a problem with this may or may not work. It may not work. You may want to have a substitute name. And it was filed because they had to go through they have to go through a newspaper or public notice and all that. And nobody responded back to it, so we kept the name, Imaginetainment.
