Reflections of PhD Thesis Writing – Dr. Vivien W.Y. Chow

Dr. Vivien W.Y. Chow

Hello everyone! My name is Vivien, and I was a PhD Candidate at the Department of Real Estate and Construction from 2012-2016. I passed my viva in November 2016 and moved to the UK to start a lectureship at Loughborough University in June 2017.

I was asked to write something on the CIB Student Chapter website about my PhD experience. This got me thinking: what do I want to write about? Overall, I had a great PhD experience. I was appreciative of the fact that this may be the only time in my life where I can spend an extended amount of time pursuing a project of my choice, and to push myself intellectually towards this singular goal. The things that stick out in my mind, more than 12 months on, were the major goalposts of my PhD. I considered writing about the application of theory, or about research methods, both topics I am deeply passionate about. In the end, I decided to write about writing. Specifically, what to expect during the final write-up stage of the PhD. Here are four items of reflections – distillations of my experience. I hope you will find them useful.

  • Writing takes longer than you think it will (so plan a healthy contingency in your schedule)

I started my final write up in September 2015 with the intention of submitting a full first draft by February 2016 and a final draft by end of May 2016. I ended up submitting on 31 August 2016 and that was only because my studentship ran out at the end of that day. I was re-writing chapters as I go, which meant I never had a full draft at any given stage – everything was in a constant state of flux. The Conclusion chapter was my weakest chapter when I submitted because it was written in the final 2-3 weeks before submission and I was mentally exhausted by that point. In hindsight I think it was helpful to have set a May 2016 deadline, and that I really tried to stick to it. Having a hard deadline to work toward, and some room for the schedule to slip, meant that in the end I was able to submit on time.

  • A good dissertation is a done dissertation. A great dissertation is a published dissertation. A perfect dissertation is neither.

I read this quote somewhere on the net, and I wrote it out on a post-it note and stuck it on the wall next to my computer screen. The fact is, the thesis is never finished; it is only cropped and bound when you finally have to submit. So I strategically started to think of the thesis in terms of “blocks” rather than as a single, mammoth tomb. How many “blocks” makes a threadbare thesis? How many extra “blocks” elevate this to a decent thesis? How many extra “blocks” on top of this makes it an outstanding thesis? Conceptualising the thesis in this way made me more aware of what “blocks” to put more effort into, and what to leave out if I ran out of time or energy. It was also helpful to remind myself that I will have time after my viva to fix things if I needed to. Some of the ideas that I couldn’t fit into the thesis ended up in subsequent papers I wrote. Some other ideas that didn’t get developed enough are now being tabled as potential future research proposals. So you see, the PhD is an ongoing process, and the thesis just represents a logistical cut-off date where we have to wrap up. I had to learn to not be too precious about it.

  • You will get writer’s block at some stage. Find strategies to deal with it.

Having good time management skills is very important and having the self-discipline to sit down and write is paramount to success. But you will still find days where you sit in front of the computer and nothing happens. No words come out, you stare at the blank screen and the blank screen just stares back at you. This happens to everyone. And since the last stretch of the PhD is all about writing, writer’s block can become a huge problem. You sit down to write, can’t write, and then stress out over the fact that you haven’t written. So, you need to find ways of dealing with it. It’s a very personal thing and everyone will have a different strategy, but I can share some of mine.

I found that at the embryonic stage of the thesis it was difficult to pin down even a single cohesive thought on paper. So, I walked around the room and staged an argument with myself out loud until I started to find myself making sense. Then I pulled out my phone and started recording what I was saying. I drew diagrams and wrote notes on post-it pads. Basically, I tried to get words into sentences, and when the computer screen became too intimidating, I turned to anything else I could find.

Later on, when I started to form cohesive thoughts, I found it was important to set small goals for myself. For example, “500 words per day”, or “2 new paragraphs this afternoon”. Breaking things down into manageable chucks made the task less daunting. Some days, even 2 new paragraphs was too much. So I had to be kind to myself, and just say, “Fix these two problem sentences by the end of today”. Compared to writing nothing, 2 sentences was a lot. If I was really stuck, then I would try to move on to another section, to see if a “change in scenery” would help untie some of the knots in my brain.

  • “A thesis is like a chess game that requires a player to plan in advance all the moves he will make to checkmate his opponent.” – Umberto Eco

I tried to be very strategic about how I structured my thesis. After all, the thesis is a piece of assessment. I did not just write things that I knew about because I wanted to write about them. Instead, I was selective, and I wrote with the intention of persuading the reader that I knew what I needed to know about my topic and the arguments I was advancing. This also meant having to leave out things that might have seemed interesting or clever, but did not fit in with the overarching argument I was trying to make. I am not talking about omitting relevant data, of course. I am talking about framing the argument so that it makes sense to the reader and so that it has a logical progression. I knew I had made personal choices throughout the research, regarding my philosophical stance, my choice of theory, and my methodology and research design. Each of these choices needed to be justified. When I wrote about them, I made sure I sign posted the reader so that they could follow my logic. For example, I explained my methodological approach (qualitative methods using ethnographic techniques) in detail in Chapter 4, but I made tangential references about the virtues of using an ethnographic approach in Chapters 1 – 3. It was like laying bread crumbs in a forest for the reader to follow. My intention was that by the time the reader got to Chapter 4 where I announced that I was going to use ethnographic techniques, their reaction should be “oh, yeah. That makes sense” rather than “hmm, why has she done that?”

So as you can see, the thesis writing process involves a lot of hard work, but having a strategy in mind will help provide you with more clarity over the process, and in the long run should lead to a better outcome. I wish you the best of luck with your work. — Vivien

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