Today at Brown

ABD: It sounds like a virus, doesn’t it?

Shorthand for “all but dissertation,” ABD is a common affliction among graduate students, who can become so engulfed in research that they can’t write their required capstone thesis. Its cause is logical: Those who pursue graduate degrees are excited by the act of research – the exploring, interviewing, laboratory work, reading, and interpreting. Leaving behind that heady process in order to write can be like slamming into a brick wall.

Bonde: Dedicated support for dissertation writers. With funding and impetus from the Graduate School, Brown’s Writing Center has developed a cure – or at least a palliative – for ABD. The Dissertation Writing Project is a pilot program to guide graduate students through the fraught transition from research to writing. The program, new this year, provides a writing workshop each semester and three mentors who meet individually with students. Forty-two students turned out for last semester’s first workshop.

“When I hold office hours, I hear things,” says Dean of the Graduate School Sheila Bonde. “[Students find it] hard to go to an advisor and say, ‘I’m stuck.’’ By providing dedicated writing resources for the dissertation process, Bonde adds, “the Graduate School is saying, ‘We value this.’”

Writing Center director Douglas Brown agrees. “While the Writing Center has always been available to those seeking help,” he says, “I think Sheila Bonde and Valerie Wilson” – the Graduate School’s associate dean for recruiting and professional development – “wisely recognized that some graduate students who very much needed this kind of help were not seeking it out.”

One major challenge, says dissertation mentor and Writing Center associate Sophia Beal, is to impart this pearl of wisdom: “At some point you need to stop researching and start writing.

Writing Center director Doug Brown: Reaching out. “Graduate students often feel that they need to keep researching to gather more knowledge,” says Beal, herself a Ph.D candidate in Portuguese and Brazilian studies, “when they could actually start writing. The research can become a form of procrastination.”

Beal starts a typical hour-long workshop by asking students what they'd like to work on. “We might just brainstorm about how to articulate an argument and break it into sub-arguments. Or, a student might bring a draft, which we read together.”

“At the start of each session, I emphasize that I'm reading as a colleague would,” says dissertation mentor Daniel Block. “That is, I don't have ‘the answers.’ Rather, I hope to serve as an intelligent non-expert and a sounding board for their ideas.”

Graduate students often benefit just from talking through their ideas, says Block, a Ph.D candidate in English. “Because research is often an individual activity, talking can help to get ideas flowing and overcome the psychological hurdles that stand in the way of ‘just’ writing.”

Margaret Stevens, a graduate student in American civilization, found the dissertation workshop she attended first semester to be “very welcoming and supportive.” The other students she encountered were “mostly unfamiliar faces and departments, which I liked,” adds Stevens, whose doctoral research explores the relationship between Bolshevik organizations and black radicals in New York City and the Caribbean between World War I and World War II.

Stevens had heard positive feedback from colleagues who had tried the program, so she investigated it for herself. “I thought it could help me give more form to the process of writing the dissertation,” she said.

“I also expected to feel some sense of a scholarly community where openness and honesty was encouraged. This way people could feel vulnerable enough and comfortable enough to share something so personal as one's earliest ‘life’s work’ with others while in the gestation period. And that's where I was, [the] gestation period,” she says. “Sorry, but the birthing analogies are hackneyed for a reason.”

Block and Beal: Teaching time management. Writing Center associate Sophia Beal hopes that students embarking on their dissertations take away the following skills from the workshops:

• Learn to manage time in a productive way that meshes with your lifestyle.

• Maintain confidence in your writing talents and the worth of your topic.

• Set short-term deadlines and stick to them.

• Be proactive about finishing sections and meeting self-made deadlines, as opposed to waiting for an advisor to provide a deadline.