Over the course of my recent studies, I have been each of these four people.

On Finally Beating School

Retrospective Thoughts on a Doctoral Degree

I finished my doctorate. It’s a lovely thing to be able to type that sentence, and an even more lovely thing to have completed a degree that is widely regarded as the ultimate piece of one’s formal education. While I won’t officially graduate from my Educational Leadership program until May, my dissertation is successfully defended. Subsequently, it has also been minorly altered as a result of comments from my dissertation committee, minorly reformatted to bring it into the University Library’s APA (7th ed.) standards, and accepted by that self-same library for publication. I have even submitted the thing to ProQuest. While these last two steps are not quite fully processed, by any measure of what it means to complete a doctorate, I am done. It no longer is a thing. Now, it was a thing.

So, what did I learn?

I am somewhat skeptical of the notion that any one person’s Doctoral experience can really have any lessons for any other person’s thinking about what it means to complete a Doctorate. Fundamentally, a Doctorate, and the dissertation work that undergirds it, is a very personal experience. Before I hold forth on what that experience was for me (and believe me, I am about to hold forth), I want to acknowledge upfront that what follows almost certainly does not generalize…