Tag: graduate school

mentor, mentoring, Research

How Were You Mentored as a Doctoral Student? Tell Us About It!

Laura Pasquini

Mentoring of doctoral students is varied and diverse depending on the degree, discipline, and institution. I know that mentoring happens informally and formally from peers, professors, colleagues, and more. Sometimes it is from a faculty advisor or supervisor; however, more often then not we meet professionals, practitioners and other scholars who offer some form of personal/professional mentoring while completing a terminal degree. In thinking back to my graduate school experience, there was definitely a tribe of mentors who supported my professional development, research and career plans. From my departmental ATPI Research/Writing Group and LPQ Journal editing on campus to digital networks like #phdchat, many #edtech colleagues, my @BreakDrink podcasting family, the @AcAdvChat community, and MANY more, who mentored me formally and informally during my Ph.D. journey.

HOW were YOU mentored as a doctoral student or in your terminal degree program?

  • What sort of mentoring experiences did experience in your Ph.D., Ed.D., or M.F.A. program?
  • Who did you seek out to build formal or informal mentoring relationships?
  • How did you “stay in touch” or connect with these mentors from a distance, if they were not on campus?
  • How did these individual, group, or peer-to-peer mentoring experiences impact your own career development and professional growth?
  • OR if you feel like you didn’t really have opportunities to be mentored formally/informally, tell us what you WOULD have liked during and post-graduate degree?

Exploring the Impact of Mentoring for Doctoral Students

If you have some answers to any or all of the above questions, consider helping one of my own doctoral scholars with her research project. We are curious to learn about the nature and dynamics of mentoring relationships, specifically HOW they impact students in terminal degree programs. This might include mentoring experiences outside of the faculty advisor/supervisor role and even beyond campus. Mentoring experiences we know often occur from conference attendance, academic meetings, professional organization involvement and within your own or other disciplines of scholarship/work

The goal of this research is to understand how doctoral students experience mentoring during and after the completion of their terminal graduate degree programs in both face-to-face and distributed environments. There are a variety of campus stakeholders and professionals who form a collective of mentoring experiences for individuals who are pursuing a terminal degree. With a variety of career paths post-degree, we want to know how doctoral students establish, communicate, and sustain mentoring relationships that support their personal and professional development. We want to know more about these mentoring relationships through the shared narratives of doctoral students who are currently in-progress and/or who has recently completed (in the last 2-5 years) a terminal graduate degree (e.g. Ph.D., Ed.D., M.F.A, etc.).

We would love to know how technologies shape and support these mentoring relationships? This might be to stay in touch, communicate, share on social networks, or even exist within digital learning environments. With the opportunity to connect to scholars and practitioners beyond geographic boundaries, it is now possible for graduate students to establish mentoring relationships with other scholars, peers, and professionals from afar. How are these doctoral scholars finding resources, support, and kinship within peers in online networks? What type of mentoring opportunities have doctoral learners found either formally or informally to reach their personal and professional goals? Are there mentoring groups, peer-to-peer, or professional experiences that have guided their early career decisions and/or direction?

To volunteer for a 30-minute interview for this study, please complete this form: https://unt.az1.qualtrics.com/jfe/form/SV_d06SO2d0GL8al6d

To learn more and/or participate in the project, please find further details about this study here: https://ltiwithme.wordpress.com/2018/04/27/exploring-mentoring-relationships/ or contact Laura Pasquini (Laura.Pasquini@unt.edu) or Meranda Roy (Meranda.Roy@unt.edu).

#phdchat

The Dissertation Proposal. #phdchat

Laura Pasquini

For those of you who are not aware, I’ve been grinding away at my dissertation proposal the last couple of months. This (as I am told) is 80% of the work towards the final dissertation product. The plan is to complete and defend this piece of literature prior to March 28, 2014 (so that I can graduate and be finished in May 2014 – YAY!). For my specific doctoral degree program, the faculty in the Department of Learning Technologies provided their doctoral candidates with a rubric to guide the dissertation proposal process. Here it is:

I thought I would share a couple of key pieces of advice I have found to be quite valuable so far in the “proposing” stage from Appendix A: The Dissertation (Gray & Drew, 2008):

#163: PUT A LOT OF EFFORT INTO WRITING YOUR DISSERTATION PROPOSAL. The proposal provides two important payoffs:

  1. It usually provides one or more chapters of your end product, the dissertation.
  2. It is a contract between you and your advisory committee on what you must do to receive the degree. In general, if you do what you promise in the proposal, the committee should sign the final document. If, because of circumstances, you cannot accomplish all you set out to do, you have the basis for negotiation.

#166: IN DOING A LITERATURE SEARCH, use the “chain of references.” Begin with one or two recent articles (a survey article helps!). Look at the references that are cited. Then read those publications that seem apropos and look at their reference lists. Some things will pop out often. These are usually (but not invariably) the classics in the field that you must reference. Proceed from reference to references until the law of diminishing returns takes over.

Lessons to Learn #phdchat

In Gray and Drew’s (2012) 2.0 version of this same advice book for graduate students, they include a whole chapter on The Dissertation. There are a few useful tidbits for those of us who are (what I lovingly call) “dissertating”:

#19: PROBLEM-SOLVING MODE. Don’t assume that if you are having trouble defining a dissertation topic that the entire dissertation process will be that arduous. Once you define the topic, you are in problem-solving mode, and most people do well in solving a problem once they know what the topic is.

#26: MATCH THE LITERATURE SEARCH TO THE DISCUSSION OF RESULTS AND CONCLUSIONS. You may find that as your dissertation progresses, some parts of your literature search are really irrelevant to your research. In this case, you should be ruthless. Despite the brilliance of your pose and the long, tedious hours you put into creating the material, you must delete these pearls. Of course, you should save what you don’t use as part of your file of references so you can use it over and over in future publications.

Right now, I am spending much of my time refining and working on #163 and #19. I just met with my faculty advisor, Dr. Jeff Allen, to review my chapter three research methods and discussed how to develop the recipe for this section. Stay tuned as you will soon learn more about  my topic and direction I am going, and hopefully I will get some input when I crowdsource my data collection in the very near future.

For those who are currently developing your dissertation proposals as well OR those who have successfully defended your dissertation proposals, what sort of advice and tips would you give? Please share!

Reference:

Gray, P., & Drew, D. E. (2008). What they didn’t teach you in graduate school: 199 helpful hints for success in your academic career. Stylus Publishing, LLC.

Gray, P., & Drew, D. E. (2012). What They Didn’t Teach You in Graduate School 2.0. Chronicle of Higher Education.