Those of you readers who are going or went through a PhD program know what a maize the process can be. At the beginning, while we are taking classes, the path is clear. We need to choose a supervisor, a project, and pass our exams. Once all that is done, however, the "hard" part begins. For most students, the journey to the PhD degree is not a paved road. It is not clear what we need to do to get there simply because research, by nature, is unpredictable.

For many years in graduate school, I wondered whether it was possible for me to get a doctorate. I had done many experiments, but somehow the story was not coming together. The results were irreproducible, and the pieces of the puzzle I gathered did not fit together. Around my fourth year, I remember walking down the hallway and suddenly I had a vision of the most important part of my doctoral thesis: the table of contents (TOC). It had 4 chapters with clear titles, and I even imagined a few of the subtitles. I really believe this was the turning point for me in graduate school, where I moved from "I don't know what I need to do to graduate" to "I know where I am going, and I am really motivated to get there."

While the table of contents is only a few pages out of hundreds, it is the roadmap to your dissertation. By visualizing the final product of research, I had a blueprint to work with, and I was quite excited about it. I wrote down the TOC soon after my epiphany and kept it in a safe place. Clearly, the plan changed along the way and the final TOC was only vaguely similar to the original. Every time I revised the course of my research I rewrote the document (eventually in Word format, easy to edit), and visualized how I would feel holding my final thesis in my hand. One of the notable advantages of having a written table of contents was that I saw where the gaps of my research were. I had done some earlier work where I still needed to confirm hypotheses with further experiments, and also look in the literature for supporting data.

One of the frequent complaints of graduate students is that they don't know what steps they need to take to finish their theses. Or, even if they know what to do, they don't know in what order to take the steps and how to structure a doctoral thesis. Once you have a TOC, you will have a defined plan, and you can even include some timelines to get you motivated. (A rule of thumb is that in research everything takes about 3 times as long as you would predict). While you are working and updating your TOC, keep checking in with your supervisor to make sure the two of you are in agreement about what you need to do to earn your degree.

Wishing you the best,

Dora Farkas, PhD, Founder, PhDNet

Author: "The Smart Way To Your PhD:200 Secrets From 100 Graduates."

www.phdnet.org

dora@phdnet.org

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