How to write the introductory chapter to a thesis or doctoral dissertation

This 2020 is weird in many ways. Several of my students are finishing up their degrees within the context of a global pandemic (COVID-19). But because the world was set up for degree and thesis completion before we knew our world would be changed forever, my students’ degrees have continuex and time passes inexorably. Therefore, I have continued to supervise theses normally.

One of my PhD students is on the road to finishing up her doctoral dissertation. When we sat down to discuss her progress, I realized I did not have a handy resource for her to consult how to write her introductory chapter. So I wrote a Twitter thread from where this blog post derives.

My blog post on the Global Dissertation Narrative (GDN) offers a stepping stone to help doctoral candidates think through what their entire dissertation accomplishes. https://t.co/f4W9Tc6Rq4

IN THEORY, candidates should have already thought about many of these elements.

— Dr Raul Pacheco-Vega (@raulpacheco) May 26, 2020

Over the course of the years I’ve developed resources for graduate and undergraduate students to help them prepare for their dissertation proposal stage and the final defense. These posts are linked in the tweets below.

This blog post (the one shown below) https://t.co/M6W84kxkec offers a list of elements that I think every about-to-defend PhD candidate should have absolute mastery on.

Different supervisors may suggest contrasting elements or tables of contents for the dissertation. pic.twitter.com/wYX6OCcO2n

— Dr Raul Pacheco-Vega (@raulpacheco) May 26, 2020

Based on these posts, I wrote (off-the-cuff, quickly) a draft table of contents for the introductory chapter of a thesis or doctoral dissertation (you can see these below). I want to note that in the case of doctoral candidates, I believe that it is FUNDAMENTAL to emphasize the ORIGINAL theoretical and empirical contributions of the dissertation. Whereas Masters and undergraduate theses aren’t as focused on contributions, for the PhD these are fundamental.

You can find my templates on Google Drive and Dropbox (click on the hyperlinks) or click on the Twitter links below.

I just made a downloadable Dropbox link https://t.co/MhhOyp2MRL

Can you please verify that it works? Thanks! If it does, I will include it in my blog post

— Dr Raul Pacheco-Vega (@raulpacheco) May 26, 2020

Hopefully this template will help students across the board (undergraduate, Masters and PhD, obviously adjusting for specific degrees).

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