A true process orientation also means being aware that every outcome is preceded by a process. Graduate students forget this all the time. They begin their dissertations with inordinate anxiety because they have seen other people’s completed and polished work and mistakenly compare it to their own first tentative steps. With their noses deep in file cards and half-baked hypotheses, they look in awe at Dr So-And-So’s published book as if it had been born without effort or false starts, directly from brain to printed page. By investigating how someone got somewhere, we are more likely to see the achievement as hard-won and our own chances as more plausible.
~ Ellen Langer Mindfulness
…the reason why I plunged into this project, even though I didn’t know whether I was smart enough to complete it, was because I knew I was smart enough to start. Starting is what matters. I’ll be smarter by the finish.
~ James Marcus Bach Secrets of a Buccaneer Scholar
It is very easy to get discouraged when we see someone do something amazingly well that we would like to do. It can seem like we will never be able to achieve what they have achieved and we may give up before we have even started. The problem is that we do not see the hours and days and weeks and perhaps years of practice that have gone into their current performance. We have not seen what they were like when they first started out, how awkward they may have been, the mistakes and missteps they made and the sheer effort that they put into getting where they are.
How I wrote my thesis
When I first started to write my dissertation or thesis after four years of research, I was totally bamboozled and didn’t know where to start. I felt overwhelmed and that I would never be able to accomplish the task. So I took steps to try and make it appear more doable to myself.
I firstly did some investigation and found that the average thesis in my area of mathematics was only about 112 pages long. So OK, I had something to aim for…112 pages didn’t seem like much...
Next I put together a shell of what the chapters of my thesis should be about. I had already had a number of papers published co-authored with others in my field, so I cut and pasted the content into the relevant chapters and then edited them so that they read more like a chapter than a separate paper.
In the process of doing this, I discovered a few more results that looked like they might have been worth investigating while I continued working on my thesis. I worked out what the central focus of my thesis would be and decided to include some additional results in Appendices which were relevant but not part of the central focus.
As my thesis began to take shape, my list of references grew and I also began to write the introduction which described the history of the problem I was working on, previous results and their limitations and how my work fitted in.
In the process of doing all this I taught myself more advanced aspects of Latex (the mathematical typesetting program I was using) and also tracked down a book from the 60’s which contained two key early papers from my field of study.
Gradually, things began to fall into place. My thesis continued to grow and a logical structure emerged that I was able to refine as I continued to edit the work I had done. Finally the day came when I realized that almost all of the work was done and that it had not taken as long as I had originally thought.
By taking things step by step and dealing with the immediate problems I was having and then moving on once they were resolved, I had achieved something that I had previously doubted I could do. My final thesis (after it had been examined and accepted) ran to eight chapters and 187 pages or just more than 50% longer than the typical thesis in my field.
I had done it but it wasn’t easy and I learned a lot by trial and error as I went, so the process of writing it was itself a work in progress.
In the movie Soul Surfer there is a line “I don’t need easy, I just need possible”
A lot of the time we fail at learning either because it looks too hard or because we want what looks amazing to come easily. But if it was that easy, it wouldn’t seem amazing. What we are left with is possible: through honoring the process and applying ourselves we can arrive at excellence – it may not be easy, but it is possible.
To view a copy of my thesis in its final form go to my thesis
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