GRIT: A psychologist has come up with a painfully simple 12 question instrument to determine whether someone has the stick-to-it-ive-ness to finish something great.  She calls it GRIT.  See Getting Things Done in Academia (newly reawoken) to understand a bit more and follow this link to the instrument itself.  I got a 4 out of 5, meaning I have quite a lot of Grit.  Hardly a surprise.

SPITE:  In contrast, Post-Academic in NYC talks about the power of SPITE to drive you through the completion of your dissertation.  I could empathize here, since there was an extent to which I finished to prove a particular full professor wrong.  I’m pretty sure he told people I would never finish, and that pisses me off.

I’m not quite as bitter as Post-Academic, and I don’t know that spite alone could have gotten me through if I hadn’t had grit as well.  Grit was the part of me that said “You said you were going to do this, so DO IT.”  Spite was just the gleeful voice in the back of my head that wanted to rub his nose in it.

P.S.  The universe gave me a graduation present this summer.  I was asked to review an article on a topic I know something about.  I agreed.  When it showed up, it was clearly the latest edition of an ongoing series of reports by aforementioned full professor.  I shredded it.  Not maliciously, but because he had failed to support any of his assertions with research or facts, and I called him on every single one.  It was cathartic.

How project management applies to research

Think of yourself as the customer, the project leader as your chair, and the others as your committee and you'll be pretty close...

Your research is a project, or rather a series of projects within a larger program called your research agenda.  The first big project is your dissertation, but nearly every paper, conference presentation and book/chapter after that qualifies.  It therefore pays to learn early some of the basic principles of managing such a project.

Note: I do NOT advise taking formal project management training.  That training is intended for a much more complex environment than most researchers face.  If you end up running a lab somewhere you’ll need to learn those skills (or more likely hire a project manager to do the work for you), but early in your career you will be mostly concerned with yourself and maybe a couple of others.  Full-scale project management is too administration-heavy for that environment.  However there are some principles you can and should borrow.  That’s what I’m going to talk about.

The Triple Constraint

If there is any single project management concept that you should learn, it’s the triple constraint.  It goes like this.

You have three general types of resources at your disposal:

• Time
• Scope
• Money / Costs

You can control the SCOPE of your project.  You do this when you define the research question you are planning to answer.  For this reason, a person introduced me to the concept early on of the LPU: The Least Publishable Unit.  You should choose projects that contain sufficient new ideas to get published, but NOT put all your great ideas into one paper.  When people ask me how I got through my dissertation so quickly I point to this idea.  There were a LOT more questions I could have asked, but I tightly controlled the scope of the project in order to get it done.

Scope ties to TIME.  The bigger the scope, the more time it is likely to take.  And TIME ties to COST, both in terms of additional time at a lower salary to the cost of lost opportunities while you work on the old stuff.

Here’s the thing about the triple constraint.  You can flex one leg of the triangle, but when you do, you need to change the other two accordingly.  The three are still joined at the corners, and something has to give.

A couple of examples:

• My chair announced he was taking a year-long sabbatical in Spain (lucky dog) and that, therefore, I needed to finish before he left.  TIME was constrained.  Therefore I strictly monitored the SCOPE of my project and invested more MONEY by paying people to do certain things for me (like editing and delivering meals) in order for me to get the project done in that time frame.  I kept a tight rein on SCOPE and allowed it to COST more in order to meet the TIME constraint.
• A colleague got to their proposal review and had their committee heap a bunch of additional stuff on to the scope of the project.  (In their defense, she will be writing on this data for a decade and got some great stuff.)  She didn’t have a lot of money to spend, so in her case she cut out everything else in her life to finish the project.  She put in more TIME to make up for the increased SCOPE.

One of the dangers of the triple constraint in academic circles is the COST issue. We tend not to see it clearly.  All too many PhD students take a very long time to finish their dissertations due to massive scopes without any awareness of what that time is costing them.  The tuition cost is easily quantified, but few look at the cost of continuing on as a graduate assistant rather than getting a full-time job. Early career faculty see six years to tenure review as a very long time when, in fact, with academic publishing on a stone-age schedule, it is actually quite short. And this is before we get to what economists call the Opportunity Cost.  What COULD you have been doing/making (now and for the rest of your career) if you were done now?

Scope Creep

One of the biggest pitfalls for academics is Scope Creep.  We ALWAYS have more questions, more ideas, more literature to read, etc.  I got stalled for about a month on my literature review; there were so many interesting things to read, most of which were only peripherally related to  my hypothesis.  Then I almost did it again with methodology books/articles.  It’s in our nature to be curious, but that makes us especially at risk.

You have two protections against scope creep.  First, tightly define your research question for the project at hand and stick to it.  If what you are reading/asking doesn’t apply to that question, set it aside for now.  Second, keep a notebook of ideas to explore and things you want to read.  This is where you place those things not related to your current project but that could lead you in potentially interesting directions in the future.  Plan time between major project to review that material.  Your Nobel Prize may start out in that notebook, so it’s worth going back to regularly.  For more on this topic go back and read my post on Cal Newport’s research framework.

Planning

The first stage of planning is determining which of those constraints represent hard limits.  Think broadly here.  Whether you are heading toward graduation or tenure review, there is always a deadline.  What defines that deadline in terms of graduation might be money (your assistant-ship runs out at the end of year four) or an externally imposed deadline (tenure at year six or your contract doesn’t get renewed).  Regardless, figure out what it is and then back into what your scope needs to be in order to meet your objective.

Once you have that objective defined, you can now lay out how much time and cost will be involved in achieving it, as well as the minimum scope of the projects.  PhDs very rarely do only the minimum, but if you know what that minimum you can be sure to meet it while going above and beyond in your core areas of interest.

I would not advise making up a gantt chart, detailed work breakdown structure or any comparable formal project management tool.  Since much of the work of an academic is solitary or in small groups, using the agile project management ideal of focusing on communication is usually your best bet.  However that is a big huge topic for another day.

If you have questions about managing your research projects and agenda, feel free to leave a comment or ask/follow me on twitter: @protoscholar.

He recently put up a great post that looks at his framework for putting together a coherent research agenda and for supporting that agenda.  My first thought was that I wished I had seen this earlier in my grad student career.  (You know; like before I had graduated.)  My second was that the system could be adopted at ANY point in one’s career, although it might take some time to really get everything into it.

What I like the best about this conceptual system is that it uses a mission statement (which includes the primary area of research) in order to coordinate and direct the work, ensuring that there is a thread of coherency to the work.  My work is a primary example of what happens when you lack that coherency;  I have publications in history of ed, higher ed, charter schools, and looked at a national data set for my dissertation.  I can force them all together if I have to, but it takes some explaining.

The second thing I like about this is that he doesn’t try to suggest that you can go away for months and come back with some type of genius product.  The entire process is iterative and in manageable chunks.  He talks about learning new things in his field (although at a rate of 1 item per week, that must be fairly tightly defined) on a weekly basis, and using that to brainstorm new ideas.  This is something I could easily adopt myself, although my field (possibly due to the presence of numerous think tanks and such) puts out far more than 1 new item per week.

The new ideas need to be timeboxed into testable chunks, and small enough to take under a month, but big enough to be something that could turn into a talk or something on which he can get feedback.  This might be challenging for some social scientists, but could well be possible if you are mining an existing data set.  (All the more reason to ensure that when you take the time to collect data, you go beyond just collecting the minimum.)  Notice that this step isn’t required to be publishable on it’s own; the idea is to use these short projects to create the building blocks of something bigger and to vet the pieces.  I would imagine that some don’t work out and get tossed; if so, limiting the time spent on them is an incredibly important component of long-term success.

Finally the new items are used to support grant applications and papers.  By the time this point is reached, you’ve gotten some feedback on the ideas and have a selection of pieces that can be combined into something bigger.

If I were a full-time academic I would be working to implement this already.  Because I’m not, I have to be a bit more patient about how I implement something like this.  My research agenda is only partially my own.  My day job informs many of  my research questions and, realistically, expects answers to them that are not publishable due to the proprietary data I have access to.

Nonetheless, the approach (if not the speed) is something I am going to try to work in to  my own approach to research.  There is no reason I can’t apply a process like this at any speed, and this approach would be exceptional for a student working on their dissertation.  Yes, they may need to read more than one new thing per week, but the idea of regularly brainstorming small, testable ideas is one that has merit for any researcher.

Conference proposals (and resulting presentations) serve a number of purposes.

• They allow a researcher to get their work out to an audience, in some ways more quickly than through journals
• They offer a great networking opportunity at which you can meet others interested in the same topic
• They get a new researcher exposure and name recognition with the established leaders in the field
• You can get some feedback on an early draft of a paper and refine it before submitting to a journal

My current thinking is that my summer would be better spent writing up my work for a journal, not crafting a proposal.  However one thing on my to-do list is to research missing data methodologies and apply them to my data in order to allow me to draw some conclusions on the really different questions I was trying to answer.  (The conclusion in my dissertation was that I can’t answer them because once the missing data is removed the sample is no longer representative.)A friend suggested that I could get a lot of mileage out of submitting the proposal with a discussion of the intended change for missing data techniques written up.  It would both be interesting and different, as well as ensuring that I actually did the work.  I can write a good proposal.  (Heck, the very 1st one I did my 1st year of graduate school was accepted and upgraded from a poster to a presentation.)  But would I be better off just charging forward?

I haven’t decided yet.  I have to admit that conference proposals are good ego boosts, in that so far most of mine have been accepted.  It feels good to get that positive reinforcement back, and far more quickly than a journal would get back to me.  But is it a waste of time when I have a pile of other presentations under my belt?  Can I do both without delaying either?

Having gone through the process, this is no longer surprising.

I wrote once before about knowing what you are getting in to when you go to graduate school.  I’m not going to repeat what I said there.  If you are thinking about graduate school, go back and read that post.  I would add that if you are going to graduate school to change the world / do good / make things better [and you are not going into specifically medical research], join the peace corps or go work for a non-profit.  A doctorate is rarely the right path to do those things.

I would add a few more things however.

1. Money.  Living as a graduate student is a type of painful, debt-incurring poverty.  Many of those who stop do so because they can’t deal with being poor anymore, and they discover that they have options.
2. Doing a dissertation is hard work.  It isn’t impossible, and doesn’t require you to be a genius, but it DOES require you to be stubborn and play the game according to the rules of the academy.  These rules apply nowhere else and are often detrimental to success in the “real world”.
3. Most of this work is done on your own.  While this was moderately easier for me as an experienced professional, it is still sometimes overwhelming and full of doubt.  Then you get two cross-examinations by experienced people in your field who will grill you on all sorts of things, at least some of which you never considered and many not even care about.  You are put through a confidence-destroying process in the hopes that you will come out strong and confident on the other side.  Then they wonder why many people don’t finish and others graduate with “imposter syndrome”.
4. There is little structure, which allows you to drift aimlessly for a long time.  As I did, earning 12 extra research credits because I couldn’t pick a topic and changed my idea a half-dozen times.
5. It is easy to feel that your work has no impact on the world.  Especially because it doesn’t.  Most of what is written by academics equates to a strange form of verbal masturbation that involves writing things few people will ever read about topics so specific that no one cares or so obvious to a practitioner that they make the writer sound too stupid to qualify for “Big Brother”.  There appears to be a point during the dissertation process where that futility hits you, and you either have to muscle through it or walk away.
6. It is usually at this stage that you find out what a starting associate professor gets paid, what you have to do to get one of those jobs (such as pack up your life and move to East Nowhere to work at Bottom-of-the-Barrel University), and just how much work goes into getting one of those jobs in the first place.  [The academic hiring process is like nothing I have ever seen outside of the executive offices of fortune 500 companies, and even those places rarely go to the same extent or take half as long as a small department will take in hiring a lowly new prof.]

Sometimes it’s all of the above.

I wanted to quit a dozen times during the process.  I didn’t because it was drilled in to me by my good German father that we finish what we start. Despite the fact that he’s been gone for a good 20 years, that is still part of my psyche.  But as I have admitted on here before, the degree adds little to my career and I blush every time someone calls me Doctor.

In hindsight, starting the PhD was a mistake.  I shouldn’t have done it.  I should have dropped out early.  I should have dropped out anytime before I started the dissertation.  Once started, however, my personality wouldn’t let me, and now I have a cookie.  But that cookie cost 6 years of hard work, a great deal of stress on my marriage, 60lbs gained and a lot of a good bit of money.

Over the next weeks I am going to be making several retrospective posts.  Specifically, these are the “knowing what I know now, what would I have done differently” discussions.  Some will relate to being a productive student, some to the graduate school process, and others just to life in general.  There may also be a couple regarding what I thought I did right.

If there is a particular question or topic you would like me to hit on, please leave a comment or send me an email.

Then comes the real questions – what now?  Am I still a “proto”-scholar?  I haven’t published anything by myself yet (although I’ve done solo conference presentations).  I am not seeking a tenure-track academic position.  Perhaps my version of “imposter syndrome” will be related to never quite feeling like I make it all the way to a full scholar.  Regardless, for now I will keep posting as I learn new things and find better ways to approach academic tasks.

The Bad: Despite my clearly telling him that most of my work time was on weekends, he got it back to me at 8:30pm on the Monday of a long weekend.  So I took a vacation day today (my least busy work day) in order to work on it.  If it’s going to take him nearly a month to respond, I want to make sure he has all the time that he needs by getting my parts done as quickly as possible.

The Ugly:  While the numbers appear fine, he has some issues with the organization.  Rightly so to some extent; it wasn’t until I started to look at the data that I realized what a big impact the missing data would have.  (Some of my variables have as much as 35% missing data, and logistic regression by default just drops the entire record.  Additionally the group who is missing is different from the group that has the variables completed, suggesting that I can’t generalize from the subset that has complete data to the broader population.)

So, now I go back through it, looking at his comments and hoping I can fix this quickly enough to not have to delay graduation.

Now, when I hear that the proposal is “ready” I assume that means its pretty close to where it needs to be and the intention is to meet, discuss, maybe tweak a few things, then sign off.  Boy was I wrong.  In addition to two copies of it heavily annotated (one of the reviewers really hates my writing style) there are a sum total of 14 things that were enumerated as needing to be changed prior to sign-off.  After which my chair has asked for 2 weeks to review them.  If he approves, it gets signed off and I can move forward.

I was very upset yesterday about this.  In many ways I felt like my definition of the word “ready” and his were not from the same language, and that he had misled me by letting me sit on my hands for two months waiting, when much of the more substantive feedback [the stuff that will take time] came from him and could easily have been done back then, before the document went to the rest of the committee.  I feel as though I’ve lost a chunk of time when I really don’t have it to spare.

My goal is to graduate in May.  That means I have to defend in the first half of April.  I had wanted to defend in the first half of March before the late-start course I am teaching starts, but this may have just eaten up the flex time needed to do that.  This is all made more difficult because I don’t have all day every day to work on this – I work full time, teach, and try to get a decent amount of sleep.  That gives me about 16 hours a week (all day saturday and most of sunday) to work on this stuff and deal with my teaching.  That’s a very different schedule from most graduate students.

So what have I learned from this process?

1. Clarify what READY means.  I don’t want to go into the dissertation and be told that I have weeks worth of revisions before it is done.
2. Be explicit about when I will get him things and when he will get them back to me.
3. Try really hard not to get stressed about this.  Stress leads to confused thoughts, which make the document worse, not better.

I ran into a couple of problems, and since I know that several of you use the software I would appreciate any suggestions.

1. The import from Zotero went relatively smoothly, but it put almost all of the items into the Needs Review folder.  When you click on an item that needs review, it lets you search google scholar and try to update/complete the item.  However there doesn’t appear to be a way to say “just take them as they are”, and google scholar‘s throttling won’t allow for sending all of them at once.  (Nor would you want to; I did a few and what came back was worse than what I had before in some cases.)  Not major but annoying.
2. I have a LOT of citations.  5 years worth of accumulated stuff, totaling several hundred citations.  They weren’t well organized, which I admit is my fault, but I am struggling with figuring out the best way to GET them organized now.  Anyone know if there is a search that will look at titles so that I can grab all the ones on specific topics to put into their own folders?
3. The biggest issue is with the citation generation.  it comes in two parts.
   • First, Mendeley does not appear to have been updated to APA 6th edition yet.  While I realize that it is hard to keep up with all the different formats, that is one of the core ones they support.  It’s important to get it right.
   • Second, I regularly used a Zotero feature to basically create the citation for a single item, copy it to my clipboard and then paste it into something else.  I needed that this weekend to put a citation for some data into my presentation.  When I tried it from Mendeley, the citation was wrong.  Specifically it was missing the title field.  I tried a few and they all had the same problem.  This is a big deal.

The sum results of this little trial are that I’m not sure I can use Mendeley for my dissertation.  Item 3 is a big deal when faced with the evil people who check dissertation formats, and if I have to spend a day cleaning up my library it may not be time I can spare.  My hope is that the folks from Mendeley are working on the APA issues and coming up with better tools for cleaning up existing citation libraries.  I can’t believe I’m the only one to have problems with dirty data being imported.