Customer Reviews

Destination Dissertation: A Traveler's Guide to a Done Dissertation

5 star:		(27)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(2)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

I have to say this book is extremely helpful and has the detailed kind of advice/guidance that you would hope to get from your advisor/program. The Dissertation process can be so overwhelming with so many moving parts and this book really breaks it down and makes it manageable and doable!! Plus it provides a very helpful timeline that is applicable to any dissertation. I have read many books about this whole "getting it done" deal and this is the ONLY book I think that provided me with clear guidance and thinking for the whole process... the best way to describe it is it provides a road map of where you are going and if you follow their "directions" then you'll get there!! You need to trust the process... and on the way you learn some VITAL skills to writing and completing a BIG project that can later be used when writing a book, a proposal, a report, etc. And since i love to travel... the title and ongoing travel discussion was very helpful!! GOOD LUCK!!

I had the pleasure of meeting Sonja and William (the authors) at their dissertation workshop in June 2006. This book is a reflection of the principles and techniques they use in their workshop to guide people over the axle breaking potholes of the dissertation writing process. I'd spent a year working on my dissertation before then and had dug myself into a big hole. They got me out of the mire, cleaned off the muck, and sent me on my way with clear directions (a draft of the book). Roughly six months later my dissertation was completed. I ordered the book to help my friends, other struggling travelers, complete their dissertations-which is happening as I write this review. I have a bookshelf full of guides to writing a dissertation and while they contain some helpful advice, this is the one that got me home. Trust the authors combined wisdom and experience and follow the directions on their map and you will soon be telling the stories of a seasoned traveler who has been there, done it.

With so many dissertation guides available, it's tough to know which one to pick. The unique value of Destination Dissertation lies in its suggestions for overcoming real-world road blocks in the journey. Foss and Waters provide concrete tips and actual examples for dealing with common problems like an out-of-control lit review, making sense of mounds of data, negotiating with advisors and committee members, slow and painful writing, and plain old boredom. This book keeps the reader's focus on a manageable plan for breaking down tasks and moving forward. Highly recommended for graduate students in the thesis or dissertation process who want to get it DONE and get on with their lives.

Definitely a book every university library should have on hand, but I returned it. (Note that I already had a topic and a nearly-finished proposal draft before reading it; I skipped sections on stages I had completed and most of the example material from other authors.)

The phase of dissertation work I was stuck in when I ordered it is something the authors think should take a week, not six. While there are many suggestions for how to deal with bad advisor-student interactions, I found little for good-but-confusing ones. The suggestions for optimal communication with advisors did not look like a good fit with my section of my department. I got much more comfort out of the suggestions for doctoral students tucked into the back of Krathwohl's
How to Prepare a Research Proposal: Guidelines for Funding and Dissertations in the Social and Behavioral Sciences. (Saved by interlibrary loan, phew! That book was a huge help in the week before my proposal defense.)

If you're in speech comm, linguistics, or the humanities, you might want to buy this book just for the comfy feeling of having examples from your discipline. The guidelines on data coding and getting unstuck were not ones that I could figure out how to apply to my (quantitative) topic, but I can believe they help others. The authors also include some key insights from Boice's studies of effective writing habits, and they present them in a less grating manner than Silvia's (How To Write A Lot). But since I've read that already and have Fiore's
Overcoming Procrastination: Practice the Now Habit and Guilt-Free Play, I could not find much new in the book that I could use, even reading with a very hungry eye.

If I could, I'd give the book 3.5 stars, and I may recommend it to others, especially people just starting grad school or trying to define their topic. Maybe the travel-guide tone was too Fodor's and not enough Lonely Planet for me or something... I give the authors a lot of credit for their efforts to demystify the dissertation process. The book did not help resolve the particular scope, approach, or morale questions I was grappling with, but the caring tone and practical suggestions will no doubt help many other students.

This book is an incredibly valuable resource for anyone who is at all intimidated by the dissertation writing process. With "Destination Dissertation," Foss and Waters have made a priceless contribution--They demystify the specter of serious academic scholarship by distilling tasks down into a series of baby steps that eventually lead to a finished product. In addition to getting me to think in original ways, this book had me doing simple tasks like using scissors and colored markers to organize my research into smaller, manageable bits that were easy (yes, easy) to process. In fact, the steps presented by Foss and Waters are so valuable as to make this a must read not only for students striving to complete their dissertations, but for anyone with a serious writing project on the horizon.

I used this book for shorter papers to start with. The feedback I was getting from my professors was that my papers had keen observations; nevertheless, they were not quite where I thought they could be. After using this book, the feedback I got from the head of the graduate program was: "This paper is publishable!" Now I will use the book on the larger project of a dissertation. I know it works!

Destination Dissertation presents an attempt to demystify the process of conducting, writing and presenting original research, completing dissertations and making the transition to journal articles. The travel metaphor is creative and one to which all of us, as scholars, can relate. The format is cohesive and the chapters flow according to the process of the dissertation format. The techniques suggested are ones that students in my methods classes have found extremely beneficial. I have had students comment on the usefulness of these techniques.

This book is wonderful--it really helped me get through a difficult time when I felt completely stuck and had no motivation to push through. Not only is it a joy to read, it provides wonderful strategies for getting through the long process of researching/writing your dissertation. The travel metaphor helps chop up the process into manageable parts, and puts a fun spin on process as well. I especially, especially appreciated the guidelines for coding data and the numerous samples illustrating the author's suggestions. Get this book, read it, and you'll be finished in no time!

I felt I had to write a review because I purchased this book based on all the raves I read here. This book may be great for those writing quantitative dissertations in the social sciences, but it is certainly not for humanities dissertations. I approached it with an open mind, and I was hopeful that the book would clarify the process, which was never fully explained to me by my school/adviser. In certain ways it did help, but only in the most general sense. And the "tips" it offered were ones I'd already gotten from my graduate school, which gives out equally non-specific advice in trying to address both the sciences and humanities.
I laughed out loud when I read that their timeline for writing the dissertation proposal is 40 hours and collecting data was 150 hours. My department expects you to work for several months on the proposal. And once you get past that, if you're doing archival research in a foreign country, 150 hours isn't going to cut it! So for those of you like me who are writing dissertations that are not quantitative, you won't find this book as helpful as the other reviews. It left me feeling more hopeless than before, actually, and wishing I were writing THIS kind of dissertation, because apparently, the people who are collecting and analyzing data can finish their dissertations in 9 months. The one-star rating I gave is because I think it is misleading to not specify who the intended audience is, and i feel someone needs to note that this will be of very limited use to many dissertation writers.

The analogy of a road trip was lame and stretched at points. It would have been more appropriate to simply entitle the book - Your Dissertation in 29 Steps.

If your dissertation's field of study is focused on the "soft" sciences like social sciences, then the book might be useful. If your dissertation's field of study is focused on the "hard" sciences like physics (or computer science), then it's going to be significantly less helpful.

The book focuses on the "process" of writing a dissertation. Regardless it is impossible to completely separate the dissertation process from the foundation on which it is based - soft or hard science research. In my opinion, hard science research has it own premises, pitfalls, and problems. Hard science specific issues were given short rift. This problem was aggravated by all the dissertations snips/examples found throughout the book being strictly soft science based.