As I mentioned earlier on my blog., two of my PhD students are THIS CLOSE to finishing their draft and defending. This week, I sat with one of them to go over her entire doctoral dissertation. I just wrote a Twitter thread on how my (close-to-defending) doctoral students are writing their Global Dissertation Narrative (GDN), and I wanted to keep it for posterity as a blog entry.
I explained to my student that she needed to develop a Global Dissertation Narrative (GDN) that clearly tells the story of her work. As my PhD advisor once told me: “research is telling stories with data”. For me, storytelling is key, and I make sure that my students learn how to do it, and how to do it well.
While we had the conversation in Spanish and I developed the first draft of the Global Dissertation Narrative (GDN) in that language, I have spent the last few days thinking and refining it for an English-language audience. Here it is, downloadable link: https://t.co/uyOR75B70Y pic.twitter.com/5SrZDAhQ3a
— Dr Raul Pacheco-Vega (@raulpacheco) January 17, 2020
To avoid having to click on this thread, you can read the components of the narrative below, and you can download my template here.
So how does a doctoral student fill out their GDN template? Below, I explain in detail.
IN THEORY, as the student progresses through their PhD research, their most refined DTP should be easily transformed into a GDN (say, the last six months?).
2) At which stage can I start developing my GDN?
I always have my doctoral students develop their GDN about 6 months…
— Dr Raul Pacheco-Vega (@raulpacheco) January 17, 2020
I would assume students that have advanced to candidacy could potentially start drafting a rough GDN by the time they’re about to embark in fieldwork (see my post https://t.co/GfcLAHLQlR)
With Rafa (my first Mexican PhD student), we started his GDN about a year-ish before.
— Dr Raul Pacheco-Vega (@raulpacheco) January 17, 2020
So, in summary: a well developed Dissertation Two Pager + a nicely crafted Dissertation Analytical Table should give the student enough material to craft their Global Dissertation Narrative quite easily.
Hopefully the template I shared may be helpful to other PhD students.
— Dr Raul Pacheco-Vega (@raulpacheco) January 17, 2020
Obviously, you could easily tweak my GDN template to apply to STEM dissertations, book-style theses, undergrad and Masters’ theses AND book manuscripts. In fact, strongly believe you could totally use the DTP, the DAT and the GDN to craft your book proposal.
Hopefully many doctoral students and their supervisors will be able to test my GDN to see if it works for them. It certainly works for mine!
If you liked this blog post, you may also be interested in my Resources for Graduate Students page, and on my reading notes of books I’ve read on how to do a doctoral degree.
For me who is in postgraduate level, this article has been very informative and helpful. Thanks much.