Metadissertating: Comprehensives and Dissertations

In my continuing fascination with this whole dissertation writing process, I've been thinking about the PhD process in general as well. Although the dissertation has taken a long time to draft, it's been a valuable experience, which made me realize how frustrating some of the other parts of the whole process have been.

I'm specifically thinking of the comprehensive exams process. The way that my department has it structured, we have one year after coursework to write the comps. Of course before you can write the comps, you have to read all the things on your list. The thing that gets me about my department is that it also requires you to create the list before you can begin to read it.

When I was doing the comps, they weren't too stringent about the one year rule. They've gotten much more militant about keeping people to the limit lately , and I have to say, I'm just glad that I did my comps when I did, or I would've been screwed. It took me a year and a half before I finished writing mine, and I feel like I busted my ass to get them done in time.

I honestly don't think I could've come up with the reading lists for three areas and read everything on those lists in a year. I don't mean that I wasn't willing to do so, or thought it was too much work. Obviously, I undertook the work needed to complete those lists and read them all. But I cannot imagine how I could've done it in a year. I just can't imagine it.

I have done this whole PhD the hard way though. I came into the program thinking I would study one primary area and one secondary area. After the first year, I was told that neither area was feasible (even though on the books, both would've been). So I really had to kind of start all over again to figure out what area(s) I wanted to specialize in. So even by the end of my coursework, I had no idea what I really wanted to do.

I think if I had known from the start and been able to stick with my plan, perhaps the comprehensives wouldn't have been such a huge pile of work. I know some of my colleagues have started thinking about them in the second year of coursework and started working on their lists. I suppose that's the thing that a person would have to do in order to take the comps in a year. That, or designate one of your areas based on your Master's thesis (which is another thing I didn't do - I was a little disillusioned with it at the time).

I understand the rationale behind having students create their own list is to become 'experts' in a field - actually three fields - but to have to discover what makes one an expert by having to create those lists in the first place seems a trifle unfair. I do find myself wondering whether an informal network of existing lists will crop up in an effort by student to stick within the one year limitation. I know I've shared my lists with people who have asked. I hope others do too.

But what has become even more apparent to me since then is how much more valuable the dissertation has been to creating expertise than the comps ever were. The comps were great because I've now read a whole bunch of stuff. But I don't feel they gave me an expertise in any of it. That came with the dissertation.

The dissertation (understandably) has forced me to become an expert in the topic. Which of course means I've read a lot of books. And I would say that 80% of those books were not in my comprehensives lists (and 95% of the important ones were not). So in essence, the dissertation reading was like it's own kind of comprehensive reading list.

But just as much as the dissertation had me reading things in a particular area, it also taught me HOW to write up all that work. There's a monumental difference between writing a series of seminar papers, and writing the dissertation. I would suspect that even for people who strung together seminar papers for their dissertation, that a considerable amount of effort went into making it all hang together. That's the tricky part - to see the whole in its entirety, not just the little snippets of scholarship that the seminar paper, article, or (even shorter) conference paper require.

What I suppose I'm saying is that if I was asked to design a PhD program, I would change the way the comprehensive exams and the dissertation were structured so that the comprehensives were less critical and the dissertation more so. Perhaps my experience is unusual and others have felt the comprehensives to be more - or as - useful as the dissertation. But for me, they're just a huge storehouse of work I've read. They help me understand other people's projects far more than they helped me understand my own. Until I'm part of that big academic party that tt-faculty represent, I don't know how much good that big storehouse actually is...