Perfection and Dissertations

On July 18, 1976, Nadia Comăneci became the first person in Olympic Games history to score a perfect 10 in gymnastics. Although a generation of young athletes would strive to be like Nadia, no dissertation student should…

Let’s play a little game, shall we?

Let’s see how much I know about you…

You earned your undergraduate degree some time ago and waited quite while before enrolling — or even deciding to enroll — in your doctoral program.

You work full time. You have a family, a mortgage, and a hundred other priorities all vying for your time.

You’re a really good student. You even have a 3-point-something-ridiculously-high GPA in your doctoral program.

You never quit. You always finish what you start. And, you always do your absolute best.

You’re a perfectionist.

How am I doing so far?

OK, I have some bad news for you: being a great student is not enough when it comes to the dissertation process. The dissertation is a completely different thing, requiring not only typical student skill sets, but also research skill sets, project-management skill sets, time-management skill sets, organizational skill sets, political skill sets, and the list goes on.

So, what’s a straight-A, perfectionist doctoral student to do when confronted with the myriad complexities of a dissertation project?

Cut yourself a break! Perfectionism is like a bags of bricks. And, all you have to do is set it down.

Consider your real goals for entering the doctoral program. Was it to write a perfect dissertation? Was it to create a dissertation study that changes the world? Did you go back to school to cure cancer, end hunger, or bring about real peace?

Of course, not!

You started the doctoral program to finish. To graduate. To earn a doctoral credential so that you could make a bigger impact in the world!

Don’t let the perfect be the enemy of the good.

There’s a word that derives from the Old French that people use to refer to the person who graduates last in their class from medical school.

I’m sure that you’ve heard the word before, but perhaps not in this context.

Do you know what word is used when referring to the person who graduates dead last in their medical school class?

The word is doctor!

Let that sink in…

All you have to do is finish, graduate, and no one will ever ask about your dissertation. 99% of the population never earns a research-based doctoral degree. And, they don’t tend to question the 1% who do.

But, Nadia Comăneci was perfect, and we’re still talking about her more than 40 years later! Why shouldn’t I strive for that?

OK, fair enough. Listen, it all comes down to your goals. Nadia’s goal was to win gold at the Olympics. To win she needed to score as high as she could. There’s is no “good enough” standard for winning the Olympics.

But there is a standard for “good enough” for your dissertation. And, that’s the big difference here. That’s your goal here: good enough, passable, done!

As a bit of an epilogue, Nadia Comăneci’s performance was not perfect; her score was. In fact, gymnastics has changed their scoring system because, as gymnasts continued to improve, the scoring system eventually started to yield too many perfect scores.

Salvador Dali, painter of my favorite dorm-room poster, advised that you should “have no fear of perfection, you’ll never reach it.”  So, stop carrying the weight of striving for perfection. It’s a bag of bricks, and you need to set it down.