Leading from Loss with Dr. Angelia Griffin
Dr. Angelia Griffin [00:10:35]
One of my friends said to me early on, she said, the best dissertation is a sign. Oh, yeah, that makes sense. Now, granted, that was after I lost all my little disks, that I kept all my information. I thought, do I quit or do I start over? And I think it was when I got my second win, I made up my mind. Everything I did, every class, I was going to start cataloging some of this information. So I use it later.
Dr. Russell Strickland [00:11:01]
Yeah, well, since you brought it up, it’s getting to be less of a problem than it is. I’ll give the obligatory warning to all that world students out there in this day and age. Make sure that you have. US an eye cloud or a Dropbox or whatever Microsoft calls theirs. Everybody’s got a service where they will back up your computer for you or at least some part of it. Make sure you have that set up. I don’t get paid by these guys. I don’t own stock in these guys. But Dropbox will let you put set up a whole series of folders on your computer and say, this is my Dropbox and it’ll back it up automatically. You have no excuse whatsoever for you losing your dissertation. I had a student who backed up her dissertation on a thumb drive every single night and she put the thumb drive in there in her desk drawer. And every night she’d back it up to two, that same thumb drive. One day she came home. Her neighbor’s house had burned down and her house was fine. But one wall on her house had gotten singed because of all the heat. And it was the wall that she kept the computer and the thumb drive on and she lost them both. And so if you think that you’ve got your plans out there. Just make sure check and recheck. What else could go wrong? If you’ve got a billion-dollar company backing up your dissertation, it’s probably in pretty good shape. So make sure you’re using those cloud services. Most everybody does it by default now. But just in case, I tell one person to do it and they get the hint, it’ll be worth spending a minute on that story.
Dr. Angelia Griffin [00:12:36]
That is the best advice I wish. The only other thing that I did is I had a buddy and I would e-mail stuff to her, like when I had. And then that was our backup system. And for that, my, if you will, my peer buddy, peer partner here. I probably would have quit because I didn’t know to do what you said. Now we know people are a little bit techie, but we’re talking a few years back now.
Dr. Russell Strickland [00:13:00]
Well, and the services that something’s not been around forever, I mean, you know, 15 years ago or something like that, this would have been just coming out or maybe not even there yet. So there’s always things, you know, different things that people can do. If this had been 20 or 30 years ago, I would be telling you, put it on your little floppy disk and keep one at the office and keep one at your house and get one to your grandma or something. Right. And that’s what we call geographically distributed backups so that if something happens to your house and it burns down, I don’t want your only backup to burn down, too. I mean, losing your house sucks, but losing your dissertation along with your house is just another level. So that’s what we would do. And but these days, you don’t have to worry about the dissertation even being in your town. It’s going to be stored somewhere, you know, on a server farm far, far away. So and it’s these companies get paid, you know, billions of dollars to make sure your data safe. They’ll do a much better job with it than you would just like you’ll do a much better job writing your dissertation than they ever would. So you let them do them and you do.
Dr. Angelia Griffin [00:14:05]
Absolutely. If anybody’s listening, please listen to what he just said, because that’s a sad place to be to tell yourself I’m quitting and you’re quitting because you just don’t have the strength to start all over again. I’m just saying word to the wise. It happened to me. Happen to me can happen to you.
Dr. Russell Strickland [00:14:26]
And as we already discussed, even if you do quit, you’re going to come back because this is who you are. You want to finish this thing? It is. It is part of your identity. It’s deep, deep down inside of you. The fabric of your your make that reconstitution. So make it easier on yourself. And don’t don’t quit. Come back. Let’s just get this one meter down. So, Dr. Griffin, I know that you so you got through this process. You mentioned work. You mentioned before. There were a couple of things that helped you along the way. Why don’t you tell folks a little bit about what you attribute to getting you through this dissertation process, particularly, you know, notwithstanding the problems of losing the dissertation, just getting through it at all. What do you attribute to that?
Dr. Angelia Griffin [00:15:13]
Well, I have to admit prayer. First of all, there were so many days I felt like I was on an island by myself. So. And you were right. Right. So I as to what I call a peer group, may be our peer mentors to this day. We had a saying that quitting is not an option. And when one would get to a point and say, I can’t do anymore or the other would say QINAO quitting is not an option. So, I now tell people that once you put your mind to do this, it had to become personal. I couldn’t do it because all the cool kids were doing it. I made up my mind. I’m going to do this. And once I made up my mind. I can honestly say along the way, people got on the board, you know, on the bus. Some people got off the bus for whatever reason, but. I’m here. I’m done.
Dr. Russell Strickland [00:16:06]
But, Dr. Griffin, you made an important point to us that it can’t do because all the cool kids were doing it. But in fact, that is part of why you were doing it, because you surrounded yourself with cool kids that thought getting your dissertation on was cool. And when you normalize that behavior, whatever the behavior is, we normalize that behavior. It becomes easier for you to to to to to continue to visualize it, to continue in that way. Now, there’s an old saying that if your income is going to be the average of the incomes of the five people you spend the most time with, you can kind of abstract that to anything. You know, the people, the attitudes you’re exposed to and the attitudes that you choose to expose yourself to are going to dictate how you choose to live your life and to spend your time. So getting that peer group, I think was a really important thing for you to do. And surrounding yourself with other people who understand the magnitude and how important this is, is really important.
Dr. Angelia Griffin [00:17:02]
You know, it’s interesting you say that, because when I started out the group that I said I’m going to go get a doctorate. Some of those had to get off the bus because they were like, well, you don’t need all of that.
Dr. Russell Strickland [00:17:13]
But I didn’t get it. You think you’re some doctor? Yeah, I do.
Dr. Angelia Griffin [00:17:20]
Once I got those weeded out and then ordered the people that were like minded going in the same direction, those became my peer mentors. And all I can say is I’m so eternally grateful for all of them.
Dr. Russell Strickland [00:17:32]
Yes. Excellent. So that’s definitely an important piece of advice. Make sure that you have some sort of touchstone in your life of people that understand what you’re going through and who appreciate what you’re going through and can help in some way. I’ll tell you, one of my one of my students actually wrote her dissertation on the types of support that that that students need to complete a dissertation remotely. There are that many doctoral students out there in the world out there in the US. It’s about one percent of the population eventually graduates, maybe twice that drives. So it’s not a lot of it, folks. And what she found is that you needed academic support or operational support to tell you what to do, when and how. But also, equally importantly, you need to emotional support people who are wary of people who can lift you up, who can convince you to keep going, who can keep you. Aware of and cognizant of the fact that you can do this thing and that’s so important. She actually found that if folks knew exactly what to do. But they didn’t have that emotional support. They were just as much in jeopardy as people who felt good about themselves but didn’t know what to do. And that, to me, was surprising. But that’s that was what we found with our research.
Dr. Angelia Griffin [00:18:58]
Well, hopefully her research also indicated the old saying it takes a village. My people included my mom who stayed on her knees at the time when I would cry. She didn’t know why I was crying. She thought something. And then there was grandma who said, I don’t even know why you got to get that degree. It’s not that hot in here. But she understood that it was something I wanted and she was. Well, you want me to make you a glass of tea or something? And then I don. I would stay up nights and literally she would come in and cover over me. Yeah, Mom. OK. You know, we are going to get this degree. So from me, when I graduated, I gave all of those village people in my inner radius or certificate. I created those and I gave them a diploma.
Dr. Russell Strickland [00:19:42]
That’s awesome. I needed that to actually what her research found. I mentioned two types of support. There was a third and the third type of support. We called it practical support and it was people who could be there just to like you said, you need a glass of. You what? You know, here’s the covers. It also manifested in terms of people creating more time for you. So if normally you’re, you know, your family chores or to go out and mow the grass or take the trash out or to cook dinner or something like that, or maybe someone else in your family can take over that occasionally or while you’re working on your degree or something. And those those other elements of support can be very helpful as well. Turns out they weren’t required, but they were helpful. So you can you can graduate without having them. But but it made life a lot easier. You had that as well?
