The Ultimate Guide to Writing a Harvard Dissertation: Key Steps, Tips, and Secrets for Success
A couple of weeks ago, I saw a meme on social media along the lines of “My mother keeps telling everyone that I [a doctoral candidate] just have to finish up one more paper then I’m all set to graduate. That paper, ladies and gentlemen, is my 300-page dissertation.” (If anyone finds this original meme, please let me know 😂 )
This week we’re pulling back the curtain and delving into what it takes to write a dissertation!
What is a dissertation?
A dissertation is an academic paper or a series of papers (chapters or essay collections) based on original research in your field of study. It is often the final requirement a student has to fulfill to earn their doctoral degree.
Over the past century, the length of the dissertation has increased. For example, when Dr. Georgiana Simpson, the first black woman to earn a doctorate in the United States, graduated in 1921, her dissertation was about 132 pages (you can see it here)!
Today, dissertations, specifically humanities and social science dissertations completed at American universities, have nearly doubled in length to about 300 pages. In the past 100 years, the volume of research has also grown exponentially. Amid all this growth, Ph.D. students are required to review what scholars before them have said or researched on a particular topic and make original contributions to the topic.
So why do people decide to pursue a PhD? Usually, it’s because they care deeply about a topic and wish to contribute to society’s collective understanding of it. I fell in love with history as an undergraduate student stumbling through my university’s archives trying to understand Dr. Georgiana Simpson’s experience as a black woman at an elite university (you can read more about this here). Archives are where I found my intellectual spark.
So what does it take to write a dissertation? Below are my observations and experiences of what it takes at an American Ivy League institution.
Before Graduate School
Before I even applied for graduate programs, I did research on which universities had professors who worked on topics I was broadly interested in. I was looking for faculty doing cutting-edge research, presenting bold and new ideas, and advising stellar scholarship. I narrowed down my list of programs to apply to based on the number of these types of faculty available to train me and oversee my doctoral work.
Requirements Before the Dissertation
Before I could begin work on my dissertation there were four major qualifications I had to meet:
General coursework (graduate school courses in and around my field of study)
Passing my comprehensive exams (This is where Professors conduct an oral examination of your knowledge on a particular field of study. For example, I had an exam field for British Imperial history. Some of you may be thinking “Wow that’s a lot of history and scholarship to cover!”, but that’s exactly the point! These exams can take years to prepare for and hours to complete).
Teaching requirements (Being a Teaching Assistant or Fellow in the college).
Submitting and getting approval on a dissertation proposal (This is a 10-20 page document outlining your research topic, research agenda, potential sources, etc. ).
Once all of this was completed, my status changed from a “doctoral student” to a “doctoral candidate” 🥳 This slight name change just means I am now a serious candidate for obtaining a doctoral degree.
Research Begins
After selecting a dissertation committee, which comprises anywhere from 3 to 5 professors, the final years of the doctoral program are spent doing archival research, collecting data, or dissecting texts– depending on your field of study).
For example, I am spending months in archives around the world trying to understand one particular aspect of the British empire. As I begin drafting dissertation chapters, I send them to my committee to begin reviewing and receiving feedback.
As most people in academia will tell you, here is where things get interesting! In writing traditional trade press books, an author writes a manuscript by themselves. The author may send it to a few friends to read. Some publishing houses pay for independent fact checkers or reviewers. Editors help provide stylistic, grammatical, and other types of feedback. Then it continues through the publishing/marketing pipeline.
A dissertation or an academic piece of writing is a bit different. You can spend anywhere from a few months to a few years writing based on the months to years-long research you’ve done. As you’re doing your research, you send draft chapters to your dissertation committee of 3-5 people. Each person is an expert in their respective field of study and will provide feedback on the content of your writing and the substance of your ideas. Each committee member will make their comments, track changes, etc on the entire dissertation, a chapter, or even just a specific section of your work.
Graduate students often go to academic conferences to present this research in a room of anywhere from 10 to 100 people. At the end of your presentation, you will receive a wide range of feedback from scholars in your field on how to improve your paper.
At any one time, a doctoral student can have anywhere between 3-7 concurrent drafts of one piece of writing! It’s common to receive conflicting advice– take this paragraph out, move this sentence around, elaborate more on this concept, cite this scholar instead of this one, introduce this topic you had 3 drafts ago since it works in this new draft, etc.)
Sometimes, the title of a saved Word document can look like this:
“Last name_ch3_With AJ revisions_DR Feedback_8.18.23_Final Draft”
“AJ” and “DR” represent the initials of the person whose comments or feedback you are referring to. The hard part is revising your writing to meet the standards of every one of your committee members while staying true to the original research findings you have ( remember, the graduate student is the one who spent years looking at the original data or archives). It can truly be overwhelming!
How long does it take to complete a dissertation?
Given this rigorous process, completing a dissertation can take anywhere from 5-10 years. The final product is a 300-page document reviewed and scrutinized by scores of scholars in the field. It is a substantial intellectual, emotional, and physical undertaking. So why do we, graduate students, do this to ourselves?
For me, it’s really simple– the very act of creating new knowledge, making new connections, and providing more clarity is nothing short of magical. It’s a privilege to do what I do.
So hopefully this provides a bit more clarity on what it takes to write a dissertation!
