Suspense and Dissertations

August 13th is Alfred Hitchcock’s Birthday. Here are a few lessons from the Master of Suspense for dissertation students…

To make a great film you need three things – the script, the script, and the script.
—Alfred Hitchcock

I often hear from students like Dez. She enrolled in her Psychology Ph.D. program nearly seven years ago. She has been ABD for over two years. In that time she had lost her dissertation chair and found herself so mired in her dissertation that she abandoned her topic and started over.

Although she did not recognize it at the time, her greatest problem was not knowing what to do…literally. She had no script, no plan, which meant she had no way forward.

Don’t wait until you’ve been ABD for years to develop a plan for your dissertation. Don’t wait until you’ve been ABD for months, or weeks, or at all. Get to work on your plan now!

Self-plagiarism is style.
—Alfred Hitchcock

Although many of the students I help are like Dez, some are like Alice. Alice started her doctoral program in management just last month, but she is already thinking about her dissertation. She wants to develop a plan, and she wants to begin working on it right away.

If you’re like Alice, you should leverage the term papers in your courses for re-use in your dissertation project. For most courses, the fit is obvious. For some it’s a bit more tricky. But, with a little creativity, you can have a significant amount of work on your dissertation project banked by the time you complete your coursework.

Mystery is an intellectual process… But suspense is essentially an emotional process.
—Alfred Hitchcock

This is why doctoral students need both academic and emotional support. What to do is a mystery, and not knowing what to do is stressful.

In fact, one of our former students completed her dissertation on the types of support a student requires to complete their dissertation remotely. She found that students need academic support in order to understand what to do and how to do it. But they also need emotional support to stay motivated and persevere with things get tough.

Hitchcock was famously insecure about his movies as he was creating them. How do you feel about your dissertation?

Is your “script” in need of a rewrite?

Do you want to leverage your coursework into your eventual dissertation?

Do you need an academic Sherpa to guide you through the process?

Could you use emotional support to regain your confidence?