Hi there, and welcome to the last part of this series!

If you didn’t read the previous post, check it out here. I am summarizing tips I would give myself before starting the dissertation, explaining my good and bad decisions along the way.

Before, a heads up: the content of this blog post is highly subjective and related to my dissertation experience, so don’t take it as the ground truth. But do think critically about my advice and, whether you agree with them or not, comment on what you think about it

This post is divided into four parts:

• I - 3 tips for before starting the writing of the dissertation;
• II - 4 tips for during the writing of the dissertation;
• III - more 4 tips for during the writing of the dissertation;
• IV - 3 tips for after the writing of the dissertation.

In this post, I will give pieces of advice on what to do after the writing of the dissertation is done. Let’s start!

After the dissertation

12 - Review it more than once!

You have FINALLY written your dissertation. It’s finally over! But… is it? Every time you read a paragraph of your dissertation you change something. And now you receive the reviewed version of your supervisor, full of changes, and you have to rewrite everything. How many times do you need to review it until it’s done?

My Experience

After the dissertation was written, I reviewed it once before sending it to my supervisor. In that review, besides syntax changes, the major changes done were to the introductions and conclusions of each chapter, that were changed to reflect the chapters’ content. It was also done many changes in the text to make it more clear and objective. After that, I send it to my supervisor. I got a little worried because the final reviewed version was only delivered to me days before the final date to send the final version, but I had the luck of my supervisor making all the minor changes in the document itself. So, when it was delivered to me, I only needed to perform a quick second revision and to make one or two major changes, mainly in the organization of the chapters.

My Advice

After having everything written, I think you should review it at least two times. The first time is a coherency check. Check if the paragraphs and the chapters are coherent between each other. Check if the references are correct. Check if your introduction chapter mentions correctly all chapters and that it provides an overview of your entire work. Check if the introductions and conclusions of each chapter are coherent with what is in each chapter. And more importantly, check if what you write is what you mean, and make an effort to understand if another person would understand what you have written. After the first review is done, you can send it to your supervisor.

Your supervisor will send you a revised dissertation/thesis (hopefully). Now you’re ready for the second review. In the second review, you will mainly apply the changes that your supervisor advised you to (if you want, obviously; do not forget that it is your work, you have the last word!), and you will perform the grammar and syntax check. I advise you to use Grammarly: it gives you good tips on how to improve your writing.

Overall, leave at least three weeks for this process. One week for your first review, one week for your supervisors’ review and one week for your second review. Further revisions can be made, but you will probably only perform minor changes, and it is not needed to review the whole document since you have already done it two times.

13 - Save one week for presentation training

Let’s face it: your grade will be set because of your dissertation, not because of your presentation. At most, the presentation will be used to decide between two grades, if the jury is uncertain. However, because it is a public presentation, we all get nervous and anxious before it happens. How much should we focus on presentation training? What should we do to prepare ourselves for that moment?

My Experience

Before the presentation, I was scared of this moment. What if the jury did not like my work? What if they discovered that the work that I have done was simple, and everyone could do it, and what I had done was of no use? To avoid that, I trained hard for the presentation the week before. I made the first version of the presentation and I asked a lot of people for opinions and improvements. Then, I started focusing on what I was going to say. I trained for more than 20 times. For every training, I would adjust just a little bit the presentation - for me to remember what I was going to say; to explain information in graphical form and more explicitly; to be easier for non-experts to understand, etc.

Because I knew possible flaws, omissions or questions about my work, I wrote them and I also wrote the answer that I would give if they were answered to me. That gave me more confidence about my work because I knew that I was probably not going to be surprised with questions that I did not know how to answer (spoiler: none of the questions that were asked was on the list; all the questions were easier to answer).

On the day of the presentation, I knew everything that I was going to say. Curiously, I was not nervous. I was very confident that my presentation was going to good. And looking back, it went so much better than what I have always expected.

My Advice

Leave one week for presentation training. Use the first day for creating the presentation. Then, the technique is the same as the writing of the dissertation/thesis: iterate. Present to your supervisors, friends, family, colleagues, … And train, train, train. Ask them to take notes of things they thought are wrong, things that they do not understand or just things that they do not like. If you make 3 presentations per day on the other days of the week, and you make the changes that were told you to by your audience, you will find yourself with a better presentation and with more confidence in your presentation. In this phase, training is really important for you to memorize what you will say, and to create mechanisms to present better - you will do that almost automatically with more training.

In the end, you will notice that the training is of no use anymore: you always say the same things, take more or less the same time and there not many critiques to improve your presentation. That’s when you know you are ready to present with confidence, with no anxiety whatsoever. You have rehearsed so many times that you just need to present one more and say the same things you did in the presentations before.

If you want, you can write down the questions that you are expecting to hear from the jury. In my case, none of them was asked, but it gave me more confidence in the presentation.

14 - You are the master of your own work!

I have written 11 books but each time I think ‘Uh-oh, they’re going to find out now. I’ve run a game on everybody, and they’re going to find me out.’

—Maya Angelou

Impostor syndrome. Do you know what it is? It’s that feeling you get when you think that you are not worthy of what you achieved - someone was wrong in choosing you, you are clearly not good enough, and all your success was just a lucky sequence of events. Don’t worry: 70% of people feel this way, according to a study in the International Journal of Behavioral Science.

In that study, it is said that those with imposter syndrome tend to be perfectionists and to spend more time in their work just to make things perfect. Congratulations: if you have the imposter syndrome, you’re probably doing a good job. But it can be hard to deal with imposter syndrome in long-term projects. The motivation starts to decrease and you start questioning yourself and your work. If you’re not confident in your work in the presentation, the jury will notice and it will start to make more technical questions and it will doubt your answers. How do you become confident in your work?

My Experience

Thankfully, my supervisor has always reminded me of how good my dissertation was. Because she knew me well, she knew that I would not relax if she said that, it would only give me more motivation to keep working. When I was not motivated (it happened 3 or 4 times), I called a meeting with her and I would explain to her why that was happening. The work was re-scheduled and adapted until I was comfortable and motivated for what I had to do.

My Advice

Just like I said in the previous tip, it gives you more confidence to take notes of the downsides of your work, to think about adequate responses if it comes up in the presentation. Even if they do not come up, it gives you more confidence in your work.

No one in the world knows more about your work than yourself. You have been working at least for a year in your dissertation/thesis: no one knows more about the cahracteristics, the difficulties, the pros and the cons of your work. Remember: your goal is not to make the perfect dissertation/thesis. In fact, no dissertation is perfect: there are great dissertations that completely fail their main objective. The most important are the conclusions: if you did all over again, would you change anything? Say it in the conclusions and in the future work. Remember what Einstein said,

Failure is success in progress.

If you totally fail, say why to help someone not to fail. Or to fail better.

Explain what you have failed in your presentation. Be clear and don’t come with excuses. The jury knows when the students are honest.

15 - Write a paper!

You are at the end of this dissertation (or you have already presented your work) and your supervisor wants you to write a paper (or more) about it. He/she says that your contribution with your dissertation/thesis can help others in the field - and it can also help you to have a higher grade. You get excited, but at the same time writing a paper also means more work. If you are finishing your masters, you probably have never written a paper, and you don’t know where to start. What should you do?

My Experience

Months before the dissertation presentation, I submitted a paper to an international conference. The result came back in the day before the dissertation presentation: it was rejected. My supervisors came to me saying that it just needed a few tweaks to be accepted in another conference, that I had nothing to worry about. I relaxed and, as I said before, the dissertation presentation went really well. After the dissertation presentation, besides the rejected article being reviewed to be submitted, I made another conference paper and a journal paper, about different topics approached in the dissertation. I still don’t know if any of them will be accepted, but I know that with the rejection of the first paper, I learned a lot about writing papers and the probability of the other papers being accepted is much higher.

My Advice

If you are in doubt about writing a paper, my advice is to go for it. Share your work with others. By my experience, students regularly underestimate the potential of their projects: try to submit a paper and then wait for the feedback. If the feedback is negative (the paper was rejected), don’t worry. Rejections happen. Use it to improve your work with world-class specialists in your topic, even if some reviews seem totally wrong. If that happens, maybe it’s because the supervisors did not understand your work, and you should explain it better.

Writing a paper is different from the work you have done up to this point. You have to use your summarization capabilities for the reader to be able to understand what you did in your work. Writing your first paper can be confusing, due to lack of practice, and very boring, due to the number of hours you will be reviewing it and changing it, with the feedback from your supervisors. Just as in the dissertation/thesis, you have to discuss critically the consequences of your work. Even the cons of your work should be discussed. But do not fear: when the paper is accepted, you know that it was all worth it.

That’s it for our series!

Thanks for sticking by until the end.

See ya on other posts!