Dissertation Advice from the Best

This PowerPoint presentation was forwarded onto our graduate student e-mail list. I thought that others who are in the process of thinking or writing about their dissertations might find it useful.

It looks like these slides were adapted from a presentation that Charles Tilly gave. There are five slides with content, and I pulled the one that I found the most helpful. It shows the relationship between the risks and rewards of choosing dissertation topics. Basically, he recommends picking a topic that is somewhere in the middle, though closer to the bottom-left than the top-right (he suggests saving that for your post-doc).

Also, for those who might have missed other really helpful dissertation advice check out Fabio's Grad Skool Rulz number 10 that also describes picking a topic and numbers 12 & 13 on actually writing your $^#@@ dissertation (his words, not mine). And, for what it's worth, I really wish that I had listened to perchesk's sage advice a while back to "try to write a lot of the dissertation this summer before ASA, since it is hard to make research and writing progress once the job market is in full swing."

Now, back to my prospectus...