Coach Eases Ultimate Steps on Long Road to Doctorate
The people who seek counseling from Joan Rodman dream of being called doctor.
Rodman says she can help. She’s a doctorate doctor.
A 50-year-old resident of Venice, Rodman is a counselor whose unusual specialty is helping graduate students complete dissertations. Her clients are ABDs, inhabitants of an academic limbo who have fulfilled almost all the requirements for a doctoral degree--All But Dissertation.
Rodman is one of a handful of people nationwide who specialize in counseling the academically unfulfilled. She currently has about 40 clients. Some, still students at 60, have been putting off their dissertations for decades.
“It has nothing to do with your brightness, your grades, your test scores, your everyday ability to get things done, your professionalism,” Rodman said of failure to finish. “That’s why it’s so perplexing.”
Writing an acceptable dissertation is the last act a student must perform before getting a doctorate, academia’s highest degree. Typically book-length, the dissertation is supposed to represent significant original research in the student’s field of study.
Sometimes it does. But dissertations are often less notable for their content than for the torment they cause the people who write them. As one longtime UCLA graduate student said, “You feel at certain stages as if you’re losing your mind.”
Each year, about 30,000 Americans earn a Ph.D., Ed.D. or comparable degree. But only half the people who start doctoral programs finish them. The non-finishers, Rodman and other observers of ABDs say, can stand in agony for years in front of the final academic hurdle.
Point of Embarrassment
“There’s a point where you find it an embarrassment not to be making progress,” said Diane Propster of West Los Angeles. A Rodman client, she has been working on a doctorate in education at UCLA since 1983 and is not yet panicked. “But it’s something that hangs over your head,” said Propster, whose dissertation is on adolescent rites of passage.
Because of their scale and complexity, dissertations are often genuinely difficult. But, according to Rodman, most ABDs are as capable of doing the work as most finishers. The non-finishers become paralyzed, she believes, for a variety of reasons. These range from unrecognized fear of success to failure to realize that even a monumental job like a dissertation can be broken down into a series of smaller, more manageable tasks.
Rodman usually sees her clients in weekly small-group sessions in which the ABDs can scrutinize the dissertation process and swap practical tips for getting on with it. She never asks how the dissertations are coming.
Sometimes these sessions sound like traditional psychotherapy. One client, Rodman said, finally got her doctorate from UCLA after 12 years of trying. In analyzing her reluctance to give up her student status, the woman decided that she was clinging to the campus because it reminded her of her late father, who used to take her there as a little girl. That insight seemed to free the woman to finish.
In a Safe World
“The campus is a safe, predictable world,” Rodman said. “Graduate school is a kind of teddy bear for many people. Their anxiety increases as they approach graduation.”
The prospect of completing a dissertation can be terrifying. “I’ve had people say they think they will die when they finish,” Rodman said. But actually getting the degree is usually an enormous relief. Ellen M. Benkin, a UCLA administrator who took 12 years to get her Ph.D., said, “After I finished, I asked people, ‘Do I giggle a lot more than I did last week?’ ”
Many of Rodman’s ABDs have full-time jobs and other responsibilities that make it more difficult to complete their degree work.
Adele Butterfield, a graduate adviser in the English Department at UCLA, said that part-time students are much less likely to finish than full-time students. “They have families, they have jobs, they come home at night and have a drink and they don’t want to work on their dissertations,” she said. Part-time students may also lose touch with faculty advisers.
But often, Rodman said, a job becomes an excuse for not finishing. “I think anyone who wants to can make the time to do something creative. It’s not as overwhelming as some students would have you believe.”
Women ABDs who have been raised to see themselves as nurturers of others find it especially hard to make time for themselves, she said.
Many Ideal Subjects
Rodman, who has a Ph.D. in psychology from International College (formerly of Westwood and now in San Diego), was able to turn her own job into an asset. She did her dissertation while head of student services in UCLA’s Graduate School of Education, where the halls were filled with ideal subjects for her study on psychological differences among doctoral candidates.
One benefit of an ABD group, participants say, is that it helps them overcome their sense of isolation. Scholarship can be a lonely business, especially in the humanities and social sciences.
“People in the hard-core sciences finish faster,” said Rodman. She attributes that partly to the team spirit of the laboratory. “In the humanities, everyone’s competing for the few insights that are left,” she said.
For students who feel overwhelmed by the loneliness of the library carrel, Rodman recommends the buddy system: “Go to the library with a friend.”
Rodman counsels her groups on how to approach faculty advisers (as a fellow professional, not as a whining child) and how to get started on the dissertation itself. She recommends writing on a word processor whenever possible. “I see the computer as a good therapist,” she explained. “It holds everything you give it, and it doesn’t criticize.”
Starting in the Middle
Students often feel that a dissertation must be an unfolding work of art, created one perfect word after another. Rodman reminds them that they can start in the middle if they want to, as long as they start. Once they have something to work with, they can go back and revise.
Rodman encourages ABDs to reward themselves each time they complete a step on the road toward the doctorate, instead of beating up on themselves because the dissertation isn’t yet done.
A personal system of rewards is also recommended by T. Thorne Wiggers, a psychologist who lectures on procrastination control and counsels ABDs in Washington.
When Wiggers was writing his dissertation on nonverbal behavior, he allowed himself to go to the movies each time he completed his daily quota of work. A museum was running a Greta Garbo film festival, so he treated himself to “Camille” and “Ninotchka.”
It worked, and a grateful Wiggers dedicated his completed dissertation to Garbo.
