You're at the point in your graduate career where you need to pick your dissertation topic, and you might feel a bit overwhelmed because there are so many possible topics available. But, of course, you begin to narrow the options almost immediately because of your preferences and resources. You have taken many courses for your graduate degree, and some of them were more interesting to you than others. Some theories appeal to you because they explain things in ways that make sense to you, and you like working with some kinds of methods more than others. You also chose to develop expertise in particular areas in your comprehensive exams. All of these experiences helped prepare you to choose your dissertation topic, and they are resources on which to draw as you make that decision.

But how do you bring all of your resources to bear to actually choose a topic and then create a plan for your dissertation? This is where a conceptual conversation comes in. This is a conversation you have with someone to work out a pre-proposal for your dissertation. It's a discussion designed to help you conceptualize your project by funneling your knowledge and preferences efficiently and effectively into a dissertation topic and pre-proposal. The conceptual conversation happens before you write your proposal because the decisions you make in this conversation become the key components first of your dissertation pre-proposal and then your proposal. A conceptual conversation gives you a specific time period--usually no more than a week--to make all of the key decisions about your dissertation. Writing your proposal on the basis of these decisions then becomes a very efficient process.

Conversations involve more than one person, so who is your partner in this conversation? Preferably, your advisor. Your advisor will assume the role of your tour guide during the dissertation process, and, ideally, she would be involved in creating the pre-proposal for your study. Sometimes, though, your advisor is not your best conversational partner for any number of reasons. Maybe your advisor is unwilling to take the time required for this kind of conversation, not realizing that spending the time with you now will cut down on the amount of advising she has to do later. Maybe you don't know your advisor well and don't feel you can ask her to have this kind of conversation with you. Or you simply might not feel comfortable with your advisor as your conversational partner.

If you can't have your advisor as your conversational partner, you'll have to find someone else to assume this role for you. Maybe another faculty member with whom you have a good relationship is willing to have this kind of conversation with you--perhaps someone in another department if not your own. Maybe a fellow graduate student will be your partner for a conceptual conversation. If someone in your academic circle is not available, a spouse or partner or other friend will work. Sometimes, in fact, someone who doesn't know a lot about research or your field of study can be a particularly good choice as a partner in a conceptual conversation. These people are often good at asking the naive or "silly" questions during the conversation that can help you design a good study.

After you've identified someone you believe would be a good person with whom to have a conceptual conversation, you probably will have to explain what this kind of conversation is and give him an idea of what happens during it. Here are the key points to include in your invitation to your partner: You need a block of uninterrupted time for the conversation--something in the neighborhood of two to three hours. If you don't get your pre-proposal figured out in this amount of time, you and your conversational partner will want to schedule another session. If possible, this second session should take place within a few days of the first one so you can maintain the momentum you've developed and you remember where you are in the process. Also key is to hold this meeting someplace where you won't be interrupted--in your home or at a coffee shop, for example, rather than in your office if other people are likely to be stopping by to chat. You want uninterrupted time to focus just on creating your dissertation pre-proposal.

What should each of you bring to the conceptual conversation? You want to bring your interests (those resources you have been developing throughout your coursework), your enthusiasm, a tablet to write on, something to write with, and perhaps a tape recorder. Recording the conversation is sometimes useful in helping you identify key ideas later. And your partner? Ask her to bring a commitment to spend a significant amount of time with you, excitement about what she will figure out with you, a tablet to write on, and something to write with. A pot of tea or coffee wouldn't hurt, either.

Now is the time for the conversation to begin. So what exactly goes on in it? What do the two of you do to produce the pre-proposal for your dissertation? Your partner begins by asking you questions designed to help you identify some key pieces or elements you want to include in your dissertation. Here are some of the questions your partner might want to ask:

• What are your major interests in your discipline?

• What personal experiences have you had that were particularly significant or meaningful for you that are relevant to your discipline?

• What coursework did you take that you found most exciting?

• What theories and concepts are most interesting to you?

• Are there some ideas you have studied that you are curious about and want to explore more?

• What bodies of literature have you encountered that intrigue you?

• Are there some theories you want to avoid?

• With what kinds of data do you enjoy working?

• Do you have ideas for specific data, texts, or artifacts you would like to study?

• Are there resources to which you have access that could provide participants or data for your study? Does your job offer any of these resources? How about your volunteer activities? Is there someone you know who could give you access to these kinds of resources? Is there an archive, organization, or upcoming event in your community that is ripe for analysis?

• What kinds of methods do you like to use when you do research?

• What are your career goals when you finish your degree?

As you answer the questions, your partner should encourage you to continue talking by asking exploratory, open-ended, follow-up questions. These questions are not intended to intimidate or bully you in particular directions or show you what you don't know. Their purpose is to get you to articulate the key pieces you want in your dissertation. The point is less to provide a precise and correct answer to a question and more to use the questions to stimulate your thinking.

Your partner should be doing other things in this conversation besides asking questions. You want him to listen closely and carefully. Encourage your partner to take notes as completely as possible so that you have a record of your ideas in the order in which they came to you. He is taking the notes so that you are free to think and talk. You can also record this conversation so that neither one of you has to take detailed notes. We often find, however, that note taking is one more technique for making connections among ideas that you are articulating. Regardless of how you are documenting the session, your partner should note in some way the ideas that seem most important to you to include in your study. He should not be telling you what he is noting as he does it because his goal is to keep you talking. But you want him, in effect, to do a meta-analysis of your talk, transcending the details of it to try to see the larger picture that is emerging for you and that will form the basis for your dissertation. If he has ideas about possibilities for your dissertation that incorporate some of the ideas you are talking about, he'll want to note those, too, so he can share them with you later in the conversation.

The two of you don't want to be doing any evaluating or sorting of ideas at this stage of the conversation. None of the ideas that you or your partner articulate should be dismissed. Even the ideas that seem the silliest and the most irrelevant should be written down. Silly ideas can lead you to new places and to significant new ideas.

When you begin to repeat yourself frequently, with no new additions--when you can't think of anything else you want to add--that's an indication that all of the pieces that you know at this moment that you want to have in your dissertation have come out. Repetition without any new pieces means you are ready to formalize those key pieces. Now is the time for you and your partner to use the information produced in your conceptual conversation to identify the key pieces that you want to be part of your dissertation study.

What are key pieces? They are elements that will be used to form the pre-proposal for your dissertation--they have to do with the key components of a study:

• A research question to guide your study

• Some data you will analyze

• A method of data collection

• A method of data analysis

• The areas of your literature review

One piece you might identify for your dissertation is that you are interested in discovering something about a particular concept or phenomenon. For example, you might know that you want to figure out something about how gender affects social movements. Another piece might be that you want to work with a certain set of data--perhaps an archive of land-ownership records that exists in your community or popular artifacts such as the Harry Potter books. Maybe you have access to a particular group of individuals such as clergy wives and want to make use of that group as participants. Perhaps you really like a particular theory such as chaos theory and want to be sure you get to work with it in your dissertation. These are all the kinds of pieces that turn into key components of your dissertation. The point here is to identify the key pieces of which you are certain--those things you know you really want in your dissertation. You'll fill in the missing pieces later as you create your dissertation pre-proposal.

What you want to be able to do at this moment is to answer "yes" to this question when your conversational partner asks it: "Are these key pieces you want in your dissertation?" All of the key components of your study probably won't have been identified yet, but your partner's statement of the key elements you know so far will look something like this: "From what I understand, you want to use grounded theory as the method of analysis in your dissertation, you want to analyze the conversation among participants in your online classes for your data, and you are interested in dealing somehow with Paolo Freire's ideas. Are these key pieces you want in your dissertation?" Another example is: "You want to do something with organizations that only exist online, you are interested in Anthony Giddens's idea of structuration and want to use it somehow, and you don't want to use statistical methods to analyze your data. Are these key pieces you want in your dissertation?"

If you can't answer "yes" to your partner's articulation of the key pieces of your dissertation, what you need to do is to articulate what is missing from the key pieces that your conversational partner proposed. What was not included in the key pieces your partner articulated? What was included that you don't want to be there? Together, sculpt and whittle at the key pieces to get them closer to your interests.

With the help of your conversational partner, you've identified some of the key pieces you want your dissertation to include, articulated them, and written them down. You have made the first decision about where you want to go on the trip that is your dissertation. You're well on your way to planning your itinerary, and the next step is to build on these key pieces to create your pre-proposal by filling in the missing pieces.

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