Dear Dissertation Coach,
It is September now. I want to graduate in May. How do I assure that I can finish on that timeline?
Dear Dissertation Writer,
Congratulations on setting a goal and planning now. The first thing you have to know is when is your graduate school’s last day for May graduation submission. Check with your Graduate School, which should be online. See it in print. You can ask your faculty advisor or a fellow graduate student, but they may give you an answer with all assurances that they are correct and still might be wrong. See it in print from the people who will be granting you a degree.
I’m going to use examples from the University of Texas at Austin because those are the rules I know. You can extrapolate from this to your own institution. The UT-Austin Graduate School requires that students turn their dissertations and theses in on the last class day of the semester. This is usually the first Friday of May in the Spring. So that’s your deadline. Hear this: You do not have May to work on your dissertation if you want to graduate in May.
Another rule at UT-Austin is that is that you give your finished dissertation to your committee four weeks before your defense date. Four weeks! Most faculty members I worked with across the university were fine with two weeks, but you need to know that for sure.
Now you know you need to finish your dissertation by the middle of April to be able to hand it over to your committee. However, before you give it to the committee your faculty dissertation advisor has to approve of the final draft. How long will that take at the end of the semester? Find out. Ask your faculty advisor.
Finally you have a date for when you need to finish your dissertation to give to your faculty advisor. I’d guess that would be around the beginning of April.
That was a long way to explain that at a minimum to graduate in May, you have to have your dissertation finished no later than the beginning of April.
Tune in to a later post that explains how to actually write a dissertation in a semester.
Warmly,
Your Dissertation Coach
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