FastTrack LIVE workshop #41 | Dissertation Planning 101

Starting a dissertation can feel overwhelming. Where do you even begin?

In this session, we’ll walk through the essential ingredients of a strong dissertation plan, drawing on the core frameworks from the FastTrack Dissertation Blueprint. You’ll learn how to clarify your research question, structure your project, and identify the key steps that move you from a vague idea to a clear research roadmap.

Whether you're just starting your dissertation or feeling stuck somewhere in the process, this session will help you see the big picture and identify your next concrete step forward.

As ever, we’ll also cover your questions live, so feel free to bring your research ideas, challenges, or anything you're unsure about.

💡 Publish Fast *Guaranteed*: Apply to work 1:1 with Prof Stuckler: https://www.stucklerconsulting.com/consultation/?el=podcast

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Transcript

SPEAKER_01 0:00

Sounds simple, but actually causes enormous problems for a lot of students. And that is how to plan out a dissertation properly. And whether you're doing a master's or a PhD, what I commonly see happen is that a lot of students just starting out don't have a plan. They might dive into reading papers or start a lit review or begin collecting data or try to cobble together a topic, but they don't actually map out the architecture. They just drift, they just skip past the whole planning process. And later on, they might find the project starts to drift, goes off track, and you know, weeks go by, they feel they've been working hard, but realize they've actually gotten nowhere and might even have a project that's not coherent or workable. So, what I'm gonna do today is help you start your planning because this is right about the time where in March people have deadlines to get their dissertations done, say by May or June, if they're doing a master's thesis or undergrad thesis. Maybe a PhD is, of course, a much bigger enterprise, but the ingredients are gonna be the same. Um, and we're gonna make sure that you've got the right mental model and that you start with a clear structure. And what I'm gonna do is show with you the actual systems we use inside our fast-track dissertation blueprint, so that you can start getting the pieces in place. And when you find you've got these nuts and bolts and these elements, the whole project becomes dramatically easier. Now, if you've already started your midstream, that's totally okay. This is just gonna be a helpful sanity check for you to see if you've got some of these nuts and bolts in place. You might have skipped past a few of these steps, and so you can even treat what we're doing here as a bit of a health check on your dissertation project. Um, and as ever, what we're gonna do is when we get to the end of the session, I'm gonna go through your questions. We have some that were submitted in advance, and I always love those, so we'll be covering those. And uh, if you post some questions in your chat, I also look through those carefully and we'll get to as many of them as we can before time runs out in about an hour's time. For those of you who are new to my channel here, some of you joining from LinkedIn, Facebook, or YouTube especially, uh, welcome. You're truly an international community, and I'm Professor David Stuckler, I've taught at Harvard, Oxford, and Cambridge, but my path to get here wasn't that easy. I struggled a lot along the way, and I really created this program. It really developed during the time of COVID when I realized a lot of students weren't getting the support they needed, and that resonated with me because I didn't get the support I needed starting out, and I really had to learn the hard way. So I've created the support that I wish I would have had, building on what I've learned now the hard way, so that you don't have to go through that torturous process to make things easy and break down these big projects into step-by-step components to make really that hidden logic that I've passed down to my mentees in the Ivory Tower at Ivy League institutions over the years and make it accessible to all. So uh again, great to have you with us. If you do get value from this session, do hit like. It does help the algorithm I've learned reach more people who might not otherwise benefit. Um, okay, so we're gonna go through a few steps, and I'd really encourage you to follow along. And these first two steps that I'm gonna go through, you would be amazed. I will venture to bet about now, some of you follow my channel might have already gone through these steps, so that's okay, but I will venture to bet uh about 90% of you um have not done these steps. Have not done some of these steps. So uh let me pull up a whiteboard here. Um I find a lot of the people I work with are quite visual, so hopefully this will help you. And the first step that you need to do when planning out your dissertation is what I call the supervisor alignment check. And we really encourage our researchers to do a supervisor audit. And a lot of people might be, you know, your best case is a supervisor really plays a critical role as a gatekeeper in making sure you get on to the next stage that things are right, they're there for feedback and support. They're not a mentor, remember, they're they're really looking out for the institution uh more than anything. But what you need to do in the supervisor alignment check is several things, right? Again, they're not a neutral assessor. Supervisors have their own research interests, their methodological preferences, their topics they find exciting. And so, what can happen is often if your dissertation does not align with your supervisor, you're gonna have friction. You're gonna get less time investment, less energy, and it might just be a drag for them because many of them, think about their incentives, put yourselves in their shoes for a second. They're depending on where they are in their career ladder, they're under a lot of pressure to publish. And so just supporting an especially an undergrad or master's that they might think is going nowhere, no chance of getting publishable, it's just dead time for a lot of them. And I hate to say that, but that's unfortunately the nature of the reality and the pressures that faculty are under. So do this supervisor alignment check. Look up their recent publications. Okay, go to their Google Scholar profile. Very simple. I I'm amazed at how few people have actually gone to their supervisor's Google Scholar profile and look at what have they published the last three to five years? What are their recent papers? What are they working on? What are they interested in? Pay close attention as well. Uh, what methods do they use? I find a lot of students are maybe doing qualitative research, but they've got a quantitative supervisor and they struggle because they're talking past each other and they're not a good fit. Or have others are doing systematic reviews and their supervisors never even publish a lit review and they wonder why they're struggling. Or students trying to get into a top journal and their supervisors never published in a top journal. Well, how are they gonna help you do something they haven't themselves done? Um, and and you might also look at their active research projects and grants, you might be able to slot into something that they're already doing, and that's gonna create a natural confluence of interest. Is this indispensable? No, but especially if you're doing a PhD, I'd say for masters and undergrad, maybe it's less important. But for the PhD, the supervisor alignment is something you should have got right from the outset. Again, it it's not necessarily a deal breaker, but for the PhD, uh, I get very worried if there isn't alignment. That to me, that's that's a red flag. Um so when when you've done that, right, this is gonna link to your topic later. You don't have to do exactly what they're doing, but I want you to be able to see if you can land in a neighborhood or something that can intersect in some way, whether methodologically or on topic, with something that they know and understand and enjoy. It sounds basic, but it can save months of wasted effort. If you guys have done these steps, do let me know. Uh if you haven't, and this is new to you, let me know as well. And uh, hey Abdullah, good to have you, good to have you join us. Alright, so that's a step that I find a lot of people have just glossed over at all levels. And and step two is gonna be linked to that as well. And here, in step two, it really comes down to understanding the yardstick uh of what the bar you've got to clear. And so what you want to do is actually study successful dissertations at your institution. And I'm also amazed by this one. I'll ask people, have you looked at what a successful dissertation looks like? Maybe one by one of your supervisor's mentees or one for your department. And uh I just get the reactions like, huh, I uh you know, Professor Suckler, I didn't think about that. I I don't know where I can find that. Um, just ask for it. An admin in your your department can get that to you. Your library will have that. You can go look up a database, and all these theses are are out there. Most of them are gathering dust on a shelf. You can get the physical thesis. We used to jokingly put, I think I put a 20-pound note in my Cambridge thesis with a joke that I'd come back in 20 years and nobody would have ever looked at it. Uh uh anyway, anybody who wants to grab my thesis will get 20 pounds. It probably still is there. But uh yeah, go study successful dissertations. People just skip past this, right? You don't want to look at actual papers, but dissertations at your level institution. That's gonna tell you what's achievable in your time frame, what the scope looks like, what the formatting is, what your examiners have accepted before. And again, pay attention to a few things. Uh, just so you know, because this is gonna be the yardstick. I find it's so much easier. It demystifies the whole process. Like, I gotta climb a mountain. Well, you want to know how high the mountain is. So you want to figure out kind of their structure, maybe uh their length, uh the number of chapters, you want to see type uh of data and analysis. Maybe they did, especially, and I can't type and talk at the same time uh that that they did. Just look at them carefully. Anyway, it's just gonna almost give you this breath of a sigh of relief when you see you see what it looks like. It just makes everything just more concrete and manageable for you in the whole process. Again, I find these two steps just so often, for some reason, don't get done. So, really encourage you uh to do these as part of your kind of preliminary uh dissertation planning process. Again, some people ask me where do I find these dissertations? Your university will have a thesis repository. Um, you can also go, there are databases like ProQuest and others that have dissertations. You can search specifically for dissertations. Um, you can filter by the department, the level, the last few years. Um, and again, um in our mentorship communities, you can also ask us and we can point you in the right direction for that. Oh, I see Andrea's joining us. Hey, hey Andrea, good to have you with us. Uh a pleasure, as always. And again, guys, if you like some of these steps, do uh do hit the like button because it helps the algorithm reach others who might benefit from this message today and would not otherwise be getting it. Okay, we're gonna go on to step three. And now we need to get into figuring out your topic. And we need to get into the nuts and bolts of your topic. And some people are really lost here. We break the whole topic process into two stages. One, we want to get into your topic neighborhood. So we want to find your topic neighborhood, and we don't need the precise topic yet, we just need the ballpark, right? And we use what we call a convergence method because we're gonna try to converge three streams that are really important to get right here. And this is gonna be supported by step one and step two. Um, so basically, we we don't want to get to like a fine fine-grained research question. We're not at the level of methods yet. We really want to align three concentric circles, and this is gonna be my bad attempt at drawing concentric circles, okay? So um, we got three circles. Let's see here. I got another circle. Okay, here we go. All right, and circle number one is your passion. And sometimes people gloss over this, but it's really important when you're doing a big project, it's not just writing a short paper for an assignment, it's something that you're gonna have to work on quite extensively. So I want to make sure you have passion for it, that you get energy, that you want to talk to other people about it, that you're excited to share what you're doing, you're excited to get out of bed and look at this. If this topic just feels like an emotional vampire sucking the life out of you, how are you gonna do the hard yards to finish it? So I want you to find something in this whole universe of intellectual ideas in your field uh that you're passionate about. And it should be there. It should be there. I know when when I was doing my master's thesis, I was super nerdy, and I was really interested in needle exchange programs for people with HIV who are HIV positive to prevent spread. And I was very interested in the politics around that. When I was an undergrad, I was really interested in mental health issues in the homeless population that everybody seemed to silently ignore. Anyway, those were things that I really cared about then. I'm sure as you look into it and you introspect yourself, you're gonna have something you're passionate about. Identify that. That's the first part of the convergence method. Second part of this is you need to line up to a debate. There needs to be actually some activity in the academic literature. So well and good to be passionate about something, but if there's no academic discussion on it, now's not the time to try to break out and forge a whole new literature. Think of science. There's science that sometimes it it evolves like a punctuated equilibrium. Most science is just these baby steps. Baby steps along, and then a big breakthrough, like a paradigm shift. We're not going for paradigm shift, we're just going for baby steps here. Just stand on the shoulders of giants and build and take next step, add another brick to the big scientific wall that we're building. Anyway, go look for a debate. How are you gonna do that? You're gonna just go into Google Scholar, put in some keywords around your topic. Like if I did needle exchange HIV, it'd just be Needle Exchange HIV, right? I'd Google Scholar that, see it's there. I just want to see that there's a lot of activity. You can see that activity by recent papers being published, by citations. Um, and and you know, one other thing you can also do here, um, and I'll get into this a little bit more, um, is you you're just gonna probe this gap a little bit later on as you hone into your research question. But for now, in your topic neighborhood, I just want to see that there's stuff that the field is actively arguing about or hasn't resolved. If it's like they right, they've closed the book, it's over, nothing's been written on it for three decades, probably not gonna want to go there. So, what what could a topic neighborhood be? It could be digital health interventions, it could be AI in education, could be migrant mental health, climate adaptation policy, just broad neighborhood. And again, if you can, way better if this aligns with your supervisor. Finally, I want you to do something that's feasible. So, um, you know, if if if a lot of these studies, for example, are only making inroads by doing a randomized controlled trial? Say you want to see if a drug works, well, and you have to do a randomized controlled trial. Well, you probably can't do that as a master's thesis. Probably can't even do that as a PhD thesis, because the timelines are too long, the ethical approval process is too cumbersome. So you gotta also do something and look hard at those methods. Is this something feasible? Do I have enough knowledge to engage with this? Where right, I wanted to do a project where I wanted to get some Russian data out of archives, but I didn't speak Russian, and I just looked at it and realized I'm, you know, I'm good, but for me to learn Russian well enough to do this might take me too long in the scope of the time that I've got, and I ultimately ditched that idea. As cool as it was, as much as I would have loved to have done it, um, I just had to take a hard look at the feasibility of the project and go down a different path. Um, so take a look at feasibility and make sure you've got the skills already, or you can acquire it relatively quickly. Um, and this depends on your timeline. If it's a PhD, you got a little bit more time to acquire skills, really good time to invest in yourself. If you got a two-month master's project, well, you're probably not going to be able to go uh learn Python very quickly or master very advanced data and statistical analyses. So keep an eye on feasibility as you go into this uh topic neighborhood. All right, guys. Any questions? I'm keeping an eye on the chat as well. Um that I see uh somebody wants to find my Nary wants to uh find my PhD thesis. Uh 20 pounds is is waiting for you. But you know, it is the old 20 pound note, so I don't I don't even know if that's still good in in the UK. Um and uh I saw PhD ads in which so this is from Sally. I saw PhD ads in which we don't have to contact a supervisor beforehand, they'll assign supervisors to the successful applicant, then we have no choice about who to supervise us. You know, I'll be honest, I'll say something radical. I would not go to a program like that. I I just wouldn't, I just wouldn't. You are investing time, energy, and many cases money, and in a sense, in a counterfactual sense, you are investing money to learn from someone. It's like a job, and you're gonna you want mentorship, not just a passive supervisor who I see programs where you get one hour of supervision a month. It's not enough. It's just not enough. It's not how successful people learn a craft. Any craft, any skill, you need input from an expert to learn it, no matter how smart or how good you are. So I would really be cautious about that. Uh and again, think about it. If you're supervised and you just landed with somebody who doesn't isn't really a good fit, you got these frictions, that misalignment. And and look, it can it work? Absolutely yes. It can work brilliantly, but not everybody wins that supervisor lottery. What I encourage our students who go through our PhD application masterclasses to do is actually do their homework. Contact these people beforehand. And even you don't have to, but if you have, and the supervisor says they want to work with you inside the department, that will happen. That match will happen. Supervisor raises her hand and says, Hey, I want to work with Sally, it will happen. It's just that uh uh that that simple. Um, Jeff has a question. Oh, hey, Jeff. Really nice. Uh Andrea and Jeff, really nice to see you from the community joining us at the YouTube Live. I appreciate that. But by the way, guys, I'm going to run another open QA in Sunday in the in our research collective community. So uh Jeff, Andrea, let me know. I'll try to set that a little bit later in the day. I know Jeff, you're in Peru. We're always trying to juggle the time zones to get that right around the world. So we have we got about five workshops uh per week in our collective community, which is awesome. Um but yeah, I'll probably do it later in the afternoon on Sunday this time around. Jeff asks, um, what level and type of citation metrics tell you there is a debate for a thesis? Well, again, so we're in the topic neighborhood at this point, and again, uh something I commonly point out is the median number of citations for papers published in the last two years is zero, um, which is kind of devastating. But um I want to for the thesis, I'm gonna get to the next point, which is gonna help you calibrate um how how much impact you need for the thesis because it's gonna depend on step four. So I'm glad you asked this, Jeff. So I'm not ignoring your question. I'm gonna get to it in a second, but this next piece of information is gonna help you assess the level of debate that you need. MK5759 and MK, I saw your comment on our lit review mistake uh video that we just released yesterday. I'm just glad that was helpful. But MK says misalignment's really painful, prior contact will really save. Sally, I hope you're listening to MK here because it is something I see people learn the hard way. They're like, oh well, the department says I don't have to do that. It's like, well, do it. Just do it anyway. Just because they don't want that administrative burden and hassle doesn't mean that they're looking out for you and what's gonna be best for your success. Um so Sally says thank you. And uh, that's one of the lovely things. I really believe in the power of community, of mutually supportive environments, uh people helping each other. If you do want to check us out, guys, I'm gonna drop a link here. Um, just because I know um I I wish I had this. That's all I can say. And uh uh, if you guys want to get in touch with Jeff or um or uh uh any of some of the others who are here in the chat, um do, and they'll give you the unfiltered lowdown of what it's really like uh working together here. So, okay, yeah, Andrea's here too, I see. Okay, I'm gonna keep going. So, Jeff, bear with me. I s and and we're getting to step four. So, step four, um what you need to know, and this is gonna help you in this calibration as well, is to define your end goal. And this is really a bit of a fork in the road. And I'll call this the fork in the road. Actually, to make it even more um explicit. So, right, what I commonly ask when I'm meeting with somebody for the first time, I want to know kind of what where are you trying to get to with this? And you've really got two roads you can pick. In road one, uh, okay, I'm gonna try to draw a fork in the road, guys. Uh, I'm really art is not my thing. Um, okay, this is me trying to draw a fork in the road, alright? Uh don't laugh at me too much. All right, mode A is kind of you just want to complete. You just wanna you're in completion mode. You just want to get this thing done and move on with your life and tick the box. In mode number two, you want to publish, you want to aim high, maybe you want to go down an academic path, keep your doors open. You really want to make some real genuine impact. Um, and this matters. So, Jeff, coming back to your question, you know, your debate needs to have some tight citations and real live activity if you want to go down publication mode. If you're just ticking a box on completion, you see something solid, defensible. It doesn't necessarily need a live hot debate. Um, you just need more than anything on completion. You need completion, you need your supervisor to approve more than anything. You don't need to change the world. For publication, we're gonna really need to craft out a clear gap and value add in the literature and make sure there is there is active citation happening. You will see the median citation metrics for your field. They vary a lot by field. Um, but you wanna see that right papers getting published in that area in recent years are at least hitting those median citation metrics. You can go find those fields, there are different journal citation count indices and sites that can show you that, um, even looking at The age index for different journals will give you some ideas. I don't want to go too much into the metrics here, but um, for example, just to uh give you a sense when uh an impact factor for say a top econ journal is like three to five, well, that's that gives you an indication of the number of citations you might expect, where say a top health-related journal impact factor might be 30 or 40. So just a very crude rule of thumb, look for at least the number of citations that correlates to the impact factor of leading journals in your field. Hope that makes sense. And we can get into the math of that, but that's just the simplest rule of thumb that I recommend. So if you're going for a publication, make sure your debate is gonna have at least commensurate magnitude of citations of kind of average performance in your field. Um yeah, hope that hope that makes sense. Um so ah, Sally, awesome, awesome. You just joined the community. Well, join me on Sunday, and yeah, awesome. Okay, you're gonna love this mindset track and Yvonne, our mindset coach. And uh so yeah, awesome. I hope to see you on Sunday. And I Andrea says, I miss my artistic calling. All right, well, uh uh yeah, I know it's kind of embarrassing. Um, thankfully, guys, nano banana in just fun, the most fun AI to say, nano banana, but uh Gemini just saves everything. You can literally take this crappy drawing that looks like a four-year, and you know what? I mean, I'm I'm gonna do a screenshot. And you could drop it in there, and maybe I'll do this in the background, guys. Just to uh just I'm I'm I'm gonna do it. Uh you forced me into it. Um, I really recommend this, guys. I just published a video on my YouTube channel on AI tools that I recommend. And um 100%, this is uh this is one of them. This uh nano andana works incredibly well for for making high quality academic figures even out of garbage. Um and and that's about where I would, you know, I I to be fierce with myself, I I'd call it garbage. So I'm I'm doing this in the background right now. Make this into a quality academic figure and let me see what it comes up with, and then I will post this as soon as this gets done. Um I will post it back onto the whiteboard. Um, okay. Um yeah, Sally, I'll come back to your questions later. I'm gonna keep going through planning for the dissertation. But all right, understand in step four which mode you are in, and that that really will make a difference for the strategic choices you make along the way. If you are in mode B, the next section matters more to you, and that's step five. Step five, now in your topic, going from topic neighborhood onward. Um, yeah, this is also okay if you're in completion mode. I really do encourage this for everybody, but it's more important if you're in mode B. You need to find a publishable gap. You need a gap. So you need to say, this is this kind of there's a missingness in the field. Something that nobody has written about, but the field actually needs. Uh and that's gonna be your your value, value add that you can bring to the literature. There's a lot of different types of gaps. We were just having a conversation in the community about somebody who wanted to look at the um uh basically was just looking at the determinants of usage of um electric vehicles, and they were looking at a population gap. So population gap might be, well, we've done this in the US, done this in the UK, but haven't done it in China or low-income countries. That would be a population gap. Uh another type of gap might be a temporal gap. Maybe it was last studied in 2012. Well, we're in 2026, the world's changed, we need some updating. You can be have a methodological gap. A lot's been done with cross-sectional data or surveys, but no one's used administrative record linkages or longitudinal methods. And that can right, so that that can help. What's even more important is if you can get to the why is this really gonna matter. So if you have these methods, if you can go more and say we need longitudinal methods because there's a reverse causality problem, there's a chicken and egg problem, and why, you know, we we can't tell which came first. So, yes, you've got a cool method, fancy gizmo, but you want that method or fancy gizmo to tell us, well, what's what does that mean? What's the payoff? And maybe we say population gap and say, okay, no one's looked in China. Well, maybe that's not just because it's China's a big country, but it's to say, but actually, China has fundamentally transformed the sector and done very innovative policies from which the rest of the world might learn. Right? And then then it becomes relevant. When you do this, you open up the conversation in a way that you're right, if you just construct your gap narrowly, then only that maybe China is going to be interested in what you found on China. If you frame it more as a very interesting case study that the whole world is interested in, you massively increase your chances uh for publishing. So keep that in mind too as you set out to define your gap. Um, but yeah, there are different types of gaps. We have whole gap training that goes into much more detail than here. You can find this if you comb through the live videos on my channel. I encourage you to check that out. Um, and one thing to say on the gap is um right uh is that if you can't find your gap, go get 10 to 20 papers from your topic neighborhood. It just goes straight to the future research and limitations section. Authors will actually tell you what gaps are in the field. So go to Fruit Your Research and Limitations, and they literally will tell you what's missing or what they didn't do and still needs to be done, and point to a direction for future research. So this can be especially good if you're looking at papers that have done systematic reviews or literature reviews, because the whole purpose of those papers is often going to be to conclude with rolling out a research agenda or next steps. Um, so if you're struggling to find a gap, this is just one of the techniques um that I recommend using that's going to help you. Um, okay. Um, guys, hope this is all making sense. I'm gonna come back to questions and then we're gonna get to a really important alignment sequence that I find that if you get this alignment sequence right, your dissertation is on track and and really critical to get on track. And guys, let me know if if you're watching along, have you done these steps? Did you skip past some of these steps? Did you get into trouble skipping past some of these steps? We had MK mentioning that not having alignment um created challenges down the road. Uh so um do let us know. It really helps others who who are looking on. And I love seeing our new members. Hey Jim Hassan, I can see you're joining us for the first time. Welcome, good to have you with us. Um, let me come back to a couple of the questions that we have. Um so I can see um I'm gonna come back to these here because some of you are getting like Minerari and MK, you're getting to some very specific questions that I'll come to at the end because I won't be able to address them. Uh they're specific to your your project. Um so let me come back to those. Uh but I I want to get this into the kind of planning architecture, and then inside each of these steps, they're gonna be troubleshooting how to implement this step and know that you got this step right along the way. So let me get into step six. So whether you're in completion mode or publishing mode, you gotta get this right. So this this we call is to set get our North Star alignment sequence right. And so once you've got your topic neighborhood, you've got a gap, you're gonna need to keep things contained. Uh, or otherwise, a dissertation can really snowball and get way too fast. So, what we find is is a well-designed dissertation has uh an anchor often in a gap. This is often the anchor of the whole thing. Um, and if you really have aspirations to publish, it needs to be something that that there's really adding value to the literature. Then you need your research question, like what you're gonna do in your dissertation, needs to directly come in contact with this gap, needs to create some value to what's what's missing, what we don't know. Um and so this really links to the next thing that you need to make sure hasn't drifted. And I like to make this clear, and this is where passion comes back. It's what do you want to show? And that that's just another way of saying your your claim or your hypothesis. Um, but I want to make sure this is all aligned. I sometimes see people they have a research question on paper, but it's not actually what they want. They answer the research question, but it's not what they want to show. And there starts to be some drift, these things go out of alignment. I'm about to release another video on my channel about this this idea of drift that happens that sometimes kind of think about this as like a spine that aligns everything, and something gets off, creates friction, and you can work harder and harder, but if there's misalignment, it's like having a broken arm. You don't go to the gym and keep training with a broken arm. So all this stuff needs to line up. Um these three kind of integrate. Sometimes you want people to be have something called a thesis aim or a problem statement. There are different ways that departments will call this, um, but we often find this is something they look for, and they're really wanting you to kind of consolidate these three things, and that'll often read to a flavor of this thesis aims to assess whether something, something, something. Um, or you know, uh prior research um, you know, has shown this but not that. In this thesis, we're going to do X, Y, and Z. Um, that thesis same. And usually that's gonna be right at the point where you're gonna have a bridge to your methods. You want your method to then seem inevitable to be able to answer your question. And that method can be it can be a lit review, it can be a systematic review, it can be interviews, it can be content analysis. If you're in the qualitative world, it can be a survey, it can be a randomized controlled trial, all sorts of different things. But your method you want to feel like the inevitable way to to fulfill all these components. So this really is important to get to line up. Um, so for example, right, your methods have if you want to establish causality, you probably aren't going to be able to do that with semi-structured interviews or even a cross-sectional survey. If your aim is to exactly show how you know does unemployment hurt people more over time, again, just a quick snapshot in a cross-section might not work. Or if you want to test out new models of leadership, um right, you need to have some way you can actually get that data. And so you need that those methods uh to be there. There are different components that are really important here. The passion part of our convergence method really comes in here, the feasibility part really comes in the methods here. So you'll call back some elements of step uh step three in our convergence method as you flesh out this North Star alignment sequence. Again, all of this needs to be in sync, guys. I really would encourage you guys. Do you know what your gap is? So here's the here's the test that you can do very, very quickly um for yourself, right? Before going too far. So, what is the gap in the literature that your dissertation is going to address? What is your research question? What are you trying to show? What's the argument or finding you're working towards? And if you can't answer those three right now, you're not ready to start writing anything. That might be the most important thing I say today. If you can't answer those three right now, you are not yet ready to write. Most of the students who I see struggling is because I started writing and they couldn't answer those three core questions. So the rest here we're going through is gonna be to make sure that that you that you can. Alright. Then um one other thing, one other thing I want to point to, just a tactical tip from our fast track methods, is wherever possible, use secondary data. Okay, this is this is a very strong tip that I recommend. Some people don't know what the difference between secondary and primary data is. Very simple. Primary data is data you go out and collect yourself. So you went out and did a new survey. You right, uh went and did a trial and collected data from people. You went out and did a whole bunch of interviews yourself. That is primary new data that didn't exist until you collected it. Secondary data is already existing, somebody else collected it. Existing data set, administrative records from the government, published databases, uh, registers, things already collected. The reason why this is so powerful is it's lower risk. Whenever you go collect new data, right? So these secondary data maybe they've already been published on, uh, established methods, they're valid. The problem with new data is it's high variance. Your recruitment could fall apart. You don't get enough responses to your surveys, you don't get ethical approval to go get that data. You end up with a fraction of the data you need. The reviewers later on don't like the way you construct your variables or think it's valid enough. Secondary data removes almost all of that risk. The data exists, you know its quality, you can focus your energy on the analysis, and you save a ton of time. This doesn't mean that primary data is wrong. It just, if you're if it is the only way to properly answer your question, then great. But if you have the choice, I almost always will recommend using secondary data as the lower risk path. Hope that makes sense. Um so default to secondary data to de-risk the project. So again, um let me go back and recap. Um and then I'll come back to your questions. And we've also got one video question submission I want to go through, and I'm gonna have a quick zip of espresso along the way. So, well planned dissertation um has uh at least these key steps. You need to get supervisor alignment in place. So make sure you you know their world before you lock in a topic. You need to calibrate the scope based on benchmarking against successful dissertations. You need to know uh the bar that you have to clear. So benchmark against successful dissertations ideally in your department, and even more ideally by your own your own supervisor. Uh, you want to get in the right topic neighborhood using our convergence method with the ingredients, passion, debate, feasibility. You need clarity on your end goal. Are you taking the the road into uh completion mode or publishing mode? If you're going in publishing mode, you need to figure out what type of gap, especially you gotta have that gap right. It's good in both cases, but especially in publishing mode, you gotta have that right. Um, and then we need to get the whole spine of your dissertation. Every PhD, especially, uh, but all theses will have a spine that goes from the gap to research question to what you want to show to thesis aim to bridge over to your methods. And then for the methods, you need to just a tactical point, have a data strategy. Where are you gonna get the data? How are you gonna actually go about doing this to answer your question? And I given many of you face significant time constraints, I would default to secondary data to de-risk your project. If you can get through these steps, guys, I promise the dissertation will feel like just a series of clear steps rather than a big mountain of overwhelm. And if you want to work through this with support from me personally and other great people, the good and the great we have here, like Jeff and Andrea and now Sally. Uh I believe you know no person is an island, and I benefited a lot from the support. It really helps to have friends and peers you can count on when times are hard and dissertation times are hard by design. Um, not everybody can do it. It is a real achievement. That's why you do get doctor in front of your name afterwards. Um, but if you are looking for that kind of support, definitely encourage you to check out if we're a good fit to work together. So, with that, guys, let me turn to your your questions. I'm gonna keep the whiteboard up here. Um Alright. Oh, let me get the the video submission up too. I the problem with the video submission today is that it's a little bit hard to hear. So I'm gonna really try to crank the uh the volume so you guys can hear it, but it's actually a question on dissertation by Maxine.

SPEAKER_02 39:27

So it's Maxine have a lot of things.

SPEAKER_01 39:30

Oh wait, I need to get the volume up even more. Hang on a second. Yeah, I don't know if I can do that. Okay, well let's try.

SPEAKER_00 39:43

However, I do feel that I have uh imposter syndrome because I'm not studying my master's and my PhD.

SPEAKER_01 39:51

Okay, so she's saying she's doing an undergrad thesis and she's working professional, feels like she has some imposter syndrome about going about this thesis. Um, and that's perfectly normal. Every if you don't have some imposter syndrome, something's going wrong. It's because you're stretching. And so imagine if you go to the gym and you're training really hard, it it's a little bit painful. You're pushing yourself. You don't push yourself to the limits, you're not gonna get any growth. And so that's what's going on here uh intellectually. Um, so that's good. Let's keep going. I'll I'll try to fill in because I know the volume is a bit low the way the recording came through.

SPEAKER_00 40:26

I'm simply studying for my bachelor's degree. As you can see, I am already a professional working in medical devices, um, high functioning team with uh high hours and a lot of pressure. Um, a job joy, but I'm also an interesting mom. So I'm really attempting to maximize my time to make my work.

SPEAKER_01 40:50

So, same thing here. Working professional, um, obviously been successful career-wise, a mom, so a lot of time pressure. Um, you don't maybe have the same time that an undergrad can go piddle around, you need to cut the fluff and be able to go in a straight line start to finish. Um, that especially means getting that North Star alignment sequence in place. Um let's keep going.

SPEAKER_00 41:14

To be able to do it in limited time. I have to get many videos and received an email. And I think that's a very valid point in today's um mental health awareness and these high-functioning teams that are currently in many, many sectors. So thank you very much.

SPEAKER_01 42:12

Okay, awesome. Well, Maxine, listen, um, thanks for sharing that with us. Uh that's incredibly helpful. And um so let's let's actually go through some of the steps in the sequence that we went through today. Um, because you've given us a lot of ideas and makes for a really nice case study of where you're at. What we can maybe work on or or or think about together. So let's go into the sequence and I've I've got your notes here. I'm gonna pull up the whiteboard again, and um again, thank thanks for sharing with us. So uh, right here again, the two steps that you probably haven't fully gone through. I I appreciate that you said your supervisor is not one-on-one. Uh, an undergrad dissertation, that's unfortunately common. Um, it's unfortunately common. It's just a burden, and sometimes because it's more of a grade out of fairness, they want to make sure all the undergrads get the same amount of attention. But still, I would go through the alignment check with your supervisor, see what they like, see what they know, and go look at the successful dissertations. These are two things you need to do right away, um, and that's gonna help you see what the bar is. Now, for an undergrad thesis, you don't need to worry about a gap or a research gap. Honestly, at the undergrad level, you're kind of looking at just a literature review. Um, and I think that's where you're gonna be at. I I don't know if you have quant skills that works very well for business management, but you don't want to go collect new data. Um, here you've got um you've got a topic neighborhood, sales rep burnout, and always on culture from toxic leadership. So this is probably a little bit narrow. I think I would look at how different leadership styles maybe impact on burnout. Uh and maybe specifically you could look in sales teams. But I think if I were you, I would be looking here. You've already got your topic neighborhood. Kiri, you Just want to complete is your gonna be your goal. Um, you don't need to worry too much about a big publishable gap, but it sounds like I'd like to go know a little bit more. You know, this doesn't really tell me so much what you want to show here, so maybe it helps, especially if you could what what would you kind of want to argue? Do you just want to say? I mean, I don't know what you mean by toxic leadership. It's a little bit of um unclear, not not really academic. Is it uh narcissistic leadership styles? Is it I mean, there's different leadership models like servant leadership out there? So I'm not entirely sure what you mean by toxic leadership, and that could be something you do as well. You know, when is leadership toxic? An analysis of what are the main traits that you know are harmful to organizations or something. And there's a lot of liter leadership uh leadership literature that evaluates good and bad performance uh by CEOs. So just need to connect this a little bit to academic conversation. Um, and then so I really think what I'd be doing for you, for your methods, I'd be looking at a lit review. If you do want to publish maybe a systematic review, but undergrad thesis, probably a literature review is fine. I want you to get clarity on what you want to show. And uh yeah, I the these elements you gotta get right. So I would just go read a few papers on leadership and burnout. Um, I have I mean, from my background in this literature, I I know a little bit that uh you know, burnout is is a is a math issue at the moment. Um so in many, many fields. But uh yeah, this topic isn't clear. So I maybe would look at the effect of alternative leadership styles, or if there's a leadership style you like that you think is better, or a style that's particularly harmful, and go try to summarize the literature around that. You'll be doing a narrative lit review, so you kind of want to think of it as a strategic argument for some of the points you want to make. I I hope this helps you, Maxine. Thanks for sharing this with me. By the way, legally use AI, just get rid of I don't recommend AI in your workflow uh right now. And I think people are oftentimes going in and using AI when they're not getting support from their supervisors. But I'd encourage you to get the fundamentals right, then we can use AI to enhance. Right? So think about AI is you're at the driving wheel and AI is just gonna accelerate. If you try to use AI to accelerate based on this right now, you're gonna get a bunch of junk. It's just gonna drive you into a wall. So we got to get some of the nuts and bolts uh right of your topic, get the narrative literature review probably as your method in place, figure out what you want to show so we know where you're gonna be at the end of your literature review, set it up like a funnel, and then everything's gonna run um run from there. Um, but thanks for sharing that, Maxine. Super helpful. And guys, if you ever want to share a video question for me to do a deep dive on what you're struggling with, um just follow this QR code right here. Um click the QR code and submit your own video question in every Friday, same time, same place, this is your time. Um, I'll have a look. Of course, in our private mentorship communities, um, we you know five days a week you've got that that kind of access and support. But um this is uh in the spirit of open access for everyone to benefit. So encourage you to take advantage of that. Uh okay, and guys, if you do comment in this video, I always go back uh and look at all the comments and reply to them uh for people who are watching on the replay. So, okay, let me come back now. We'll go back to the chat. And uh hey Jutumo, good to have you join us. Welcome. And uh MK asks, so can challenging assumptions of development approaches be a good idea for a gap? Um well what's the what's so I'm not really sure what you mean by development approaches. Um for example, let me talk about one. There was this idea around a Washington consensus for a long time about what Washington thought was good for development, and it had a series of policies around privatization and liberalization and small government that Washington thought would be good for development. And there was a lot of literature testing whether that was a good idea or not. When you say challenging assumptions, is it you want to do that theoretically or empirically? Uh so using that Washington consensus example of a development approach that was heavily debated and is still debated, um, you know, most of that was being resolved with data, not just theoretical questioning. So I'd I'd rather say I'd like to see you be more concrete. Maybe if there's a paradigm where somebody says, get more concrete here, say like microfinance or microcredit is a good idea. And I just say no, microcredit's a bad idea because it can create debt obligations and indigenous people lose their land. Sure, they got access to capital, but now they've got debt obligations, something like that. Like, dig into an act it's just too vague. Um, you need to get into an actual academic debate and discussion. Like, think about the debate. They say this, but they say that. Let's see if we can resolve it with data and figure out who's right. Um, why do you think if you say this is a good idea, or sorry, these assumptions of development approaches, I think behind this, there's a what you want to show element here that you think maybe a development approach is good or bad. And you would like to marshal some evidence to support or reject it. That's just me kind of going behind the scenes what I think might be behind the words that you shared with me here. Um, so yeah, I would push you a little bit to get more clarity. I hope that helps, MK. Thanks for sharing that with me. Um My Neri says, Should the literature be more topic, the lit review be more topic-driven or argument-driven to critically evaluate and compare the theoretical models that will be used in developing my new framework? Okay, so the way to think it sounds like you're doing a narrative lit review, so you're not really going to be aiming to publish your lit review per se. And the purpose inside your thesis, or I'm assuming PhD dissertation here, my narrative, is gonna be to make a strategic argument for what you're doing next. So the end of your literature review should be gliding right into bridging to your methods to where your methods feel like the inevitable way to answer the research questions that come out at the bottom of your lit review. So think about the whole lit review's reason deck, okay. The reason for existing is to kind of funnel and say, here's debate, what's going on now, take us to the edge of the evidence, get to the end of the literature review, and say, we need a new framework. These three theoretical models aren't fit for the purpose for whatever reason. So what we're gonna do, what we need to do is develop a new framework. And now you're gonna go along and set up your methods about how you're gonna develop a new framework. Um, so the end of your literature review is gonna be justifying the case for what rolling out the red carpet for what you're going to do next. Um, so yeah, you're gonna have to go into those theoretical models and probably say why they're not good enough uh in in some way for whatever you're you're trying to do. Again, I don't know the specifics here, um, but think of it as yeah, yeah, I mean you're gonna have to cover these topics, but you are making your lit review is not so people get this wrong. I think the lit review is just a summary of papers. No, it's a strategic argument for your research. Um, so glad you asked that. Really good question. Um, alright. Okay, we'll come back to Sally's. Oh, guys, I'm gonna pull out our Gemini drawing. Awesome. Look at this Gemini drawing, guys. I mean, just so good. Uh alright, Gemini drawing did it so much better. Here we go. Look at this, guys. Wow. Uh can you guys see this? Let me uh pull this up. It's just really impressive. Okay, wait, no, I gotta make this bigger. Alright, here we go. You guys can see it now. Look at that! I mean that that's pretty slick, guys. I uh I I like this completion or publication. Um anyway, really impressed with what nano banana can do, and it's just fun to say. Um but that that looks pretty decent. Um, okay, Sally. Okay, Sally says, I'd like to finish an SLR for publication in the next three months. Awesome. Yes, I would make the SLR um definitely be in the topic neighborhood of your proposals topic. It's really gonna be a helpful foundation for your topic, and very much like Minario, you can use the systematic review in the same way. Systematic review at the end will set an agenda for future research. You'll have read everything in your field, you'll see where the field is moving and going, and you'll see what's missing, you'll spot low-hanging fruit and see what needs to be done but hasn't yet been done. So SLRs are just great for spotting gaps, and that's why I even recommend it for others. If you're looking for a gap, go look at other SLRs because they're gonna help find gaps for you. So, yeah, Sally, SLR is an excellent, excellent foundation. You will have a very strong research proposal as a result of having taken this foundational step. So highly encourage that. So definitely get in the topic neighborhood of your future research proposal at worst. At best, you could try to be right on point in on that topic. And maybe at the workshop coming up on Sunday, we can look at that in more depth. Um, and here you say, should I aim for more than one publication to for a better chance to be accepted in the PhD? Well, I mean, as an academic, cliche is really true. Publications are like money in the bank, so yeah, publications are great. Um, but look, I mean, three months, one paper at a time, that's plenty. Um, we typically aim for researchers wanting to get to get on that proverbial fast track, getting about four papers out a year will be where you want to be to start getting visible, kind of plant a flag, make a name for yourself in a topic space. Um, so one paper every three months is great. And we've mapped that out, mapped that out on the SLR. If you follow the training, you follow the steps, investing about five to ten hours a week, you show up to the workshops, you engage with the research groups, you ask questions in our circles. Uh, that that is more than achievable. We just have an excellent track record of people who have failed before or who have no experience who get that done. Um, and and without AI, I mean the problem is I was having this chat the other day too. People say they want to use AI in SLRs, and it's just like, well, where where does it save you time? Um, screening, even if you have AI try to do screening, you gotta check it. And by the time you've checked it, you've done it yourself. If you try to do it, get it to do the extraction, same problem. Doing the extraction, it misses things. You still gotta check it and make sure the numbers are right, but then you've done it yourself. So uh and then say, well, well, you can do it for searching articles. Um, the problem for searching articles is that it has partial coverage, it doesn't have full access to the databases like you're gonna get with uh Web of Science or the others. Um so maybe it could save some time there if on the back end you have systems that you can connect your university libraries access to the platforms. Um so maybe that that's the one area, maybe it could work, but I find it's not that difficult to just set up the keywords and do the search yourself and load it up into Zotero. So um I just haven't seen massive time savings there. Uh I saw some of you were asking about AI, so I wanted to get that in there. Uh Dataraji privatization. Uh I'm not sure what you're saying there, Dataraji, but I think you were referring back to the conversation about development approaches and the Washington consensus. Um but yes, I mean, I on privatization, you'll see my own personal research. I've written about 20 papers looking at some of the pitfalls around privatization um on various things. For example, privatization in tobacco, we've written on you if privatization makes mark markets more efficient. Well, if you make a market more efficient by breaking up tobacco monopolies, you're more effectively delivering a product that when used as intended kills half of its users. So uh this raises some kind of some problems. In other areas, uh privatization, there's other stuff about um you know, depending on if if markets are perfectly functioning, privatization can be well and good, but they're often not. So, in the context of really significant market failures, um privatization can just lead to a lot of rich cronies. Anyway, um, you'll see I've read a lot about this after the collapse of state socialism in Eastern Europe, where a lot of state-owned enterprises were privatized. Um and we looked at both the health and economic consequences of that. If you guys want to dig up my old stuff on Google Scholar, go check it out. But um I've long been very interested in kind of how I've personally been very interested in the big social and structural forces that are outside people's individual control. People make choices all the time, but not in circumstances of their own choosing. And well, I like to understand how these circumstances impact on people's lives, often in hidden ways, for better or for worse. But that's because my core fields are in uh sociology and public health. But when I do research, I tend to think more like an economist methodologically. But uh I digress, I don't want to talk about me too much, but uh I get the great pleasure of working with so many interesting people in our communities. It's it's a lot of fun, and uh hope to see some of you guys on the inside. That has been a full session, guys. I hope uh this has been helpful to you and you're able to uh check your dissertation and see if you two are able to follow these steps. I guarantee you, if you do, especially if you do those first two supervisor check steps uh and and check calibrating your scope, you're gonna avoid 90% of the hardship that I see uh people get themselves into. Guys, I will be back next week as ever, same place, same time. Hope to see your video questions for those of you in our community. I will be seeing you on Sunday. Stay tuned for that announcement. And um, you know, this is your time. If there is a topic you'd like me to cover, uh do let me know. Uh everything in terms of research design to publication strategy to writing tips. Uh let us know the whole ecosystem that takes you from being a complete beginner to being able to publish in high level journals in the fastest amount of time and least amount of headache as possible. So, guys, have a great weekend. I will see you all next.