Balance, Stick-to-It-iveness, and Planning with Dr. Preston Cherry
Dr. Russell Strickland [00:21:35]
It goes back to so. The dissertation process actually started in the Middle Ages, and back then the way they taught was through this master apprentice relationship where somebody would work at the foot of the master for a number of years, starting off by sweeping the stalls or whatever, but working up to doing the master’s work under some supervision until eventually they were doing it without supervision. They would create this masterpiece and they would be told, OK, now you can go into the trade, into the guild. You are able to go out on your own, make your own way, and you’re no longer an apprentice. Same thing actually happens in the dissertation process. That is your masterpiece, so to speak. You’re going out there saying, look, I can do this. I can do this myself. And if it looks like the right sort of thing, then they’re going to approve it and tell you you can go out and they’ll start doing that on your own without supervision. And so you touched on another very important point where you’re talking about passions. And, listen, if you’re if your goal is to graduate as soon as possible, you need to be strategic about everything in the dissertation process. And that starts with your topic and how you’re going to set things up. You want to make sure that it’s not some sort of exploration because you never know what you’re going to get when you explore. You never know when you’re done. If you’re exploring, you want to have something that has a specified beginning, middle and end so that you can actually get through it. And that’s that’s strategic. You have to make sure you’re thinking about that ahead of time because so many people will fall into kind of following their passions. And then you become all emotionally involved and entrenched and and intractable instead of being ready to compromise. And when your committee says do it this way, you just say, yes, I’ll do it that way.
Dr. Preston Cherry [00:23:17]
Absolutely. And I tried to be strategic with my approach, particularly the last year and a half. And we were introduced we were introduced to our topic, so to speak. We could we could pick it or we actually there was a hat and you could pull your topic out of a hat actually or you or you could come up with one or you can come off what you just had to you had to it had to be within the realm of department and you had to be able to say you had to formalize. Did it make sense? Because sometimes I got nice. Not a good idea. Insane. Try something else. So really, there’s an art, as we all know, there’s an art to coming up with a question. Yeah. And the answer to that is, is what people don’t like. You go back and read some more, so you read enough articles and some ideas will pop up and hey, yeah. Now when we when we had when I started the research, one in two classes and I had the topic you can and our particular program and this probably sounds maybe you could finish those classes and that doesn’t have to be your dissertation topic. That said, I wanted mine to be because I didn’t want to start. I didn’t want to clean it.
Dr. Russell Strickland [00:24:29]
Right. I take this classes anyway, but if you can get a little extra benefit out of those classes going into your dissertation, why not?
Dr. Preston Cherry [00:24:37]
Right. I didn’t want to clean up their data set. Yeah, I didn’t want to. And I was already getting all the data and I didn’t want to. I didn’t want to. I was already ahead on feedback as I had been getting it for a year on this topic and that left me another good twelve months of whatever it was to. I was already ahead in the feedback game. I didn’t have to start from scratch developing the question and all that. Oh man. So that’s how I took my approach. My approach was to to finish.
Dr. Russell Strickland [00:25:08]
And and if you are a doctoral student earlier in the process, you’re not working on your dissertation yet. You’re still taking classes. We actually will guide students through the strategy of doing this. So feel free, reach out to us and we can talk about whether it’s a good fit. But there are ways that as you’re going through your classes, if you’ve got a dissertation topic in mind and I don’t have time today to talk about exactly how you do all of that, you were alluding to the fact that it’s it’s involved. But if you have a dissertation topic in mind, you can actually go through a lot of your classes and you have some flexibility in those classes, usually about how you’re going to complete those assignments. You can do that with your dissertation topic in mind and start to build up the same sort of head start that Dr. Cherry was just talking about in your own project. So even if you don’t have those classes with the research classes giving you that head start, you can begin at least understanding literature and and developing a framework for how you want to proceed with your dissertation by looking at your dissertation topic through these various lenses that your classes represent. Something to think about if you happen to be a little earlier in the process right now.
Dr. Preston Cherry [00:26:15]
Absolutely. And I hope not spilling too many of the beans of of your coaching framework, because I know it’s very intricate and beneficial and specific. I’ll show you something that helped me that I started a little bit too late, but oh, man, I got good at it. And toward the end, simply building a file system, OK. To capture research and I started early, I started a little later, and I wanted to like having a a thorough file system. I have about, I don’t know, 50 folders and very topical. So when I researched and found an article now, you know, this sounds familiar where you wrote a paragraph and I said, and I still do this because you never stopped researching. So I’m doing this from all the papers as well that I’m starting to write for publication. But I’d write a paragraph and then I’d write three sentences of what I know I think I could find or prove or at least support and research and they’ll be placeholders. Yes. And I know that those four sentences. I know I have to go get those somewhere. Right. All right. So if I read a paper I scanned through and I didn’t find anything to plug in there, that paper can either be discarded or it has enough in there that I may use in the future. So that’s going in the folder. And I don’t want to look for that again.
Dr. Russell Strickland [00:27:43]
Right. I want want to know what folder it goes into so that when later on you’re saying, hey, I had this point that was trying to make that I know is true, who can back me up here? I’m going to go to that folder and find out they might be able to back me up. Yeah, that’s very smart. We do a similar thing with those going through their their lit review. But I’ll tell you, when you’re saying, hey, I don’t want to spill too many of the beans here. Spill away. One of my authors when I was starting out in business, he’s a consultant, a business consultant. And he he said that it amazed him for a while and then he just got used to it, that organizations would pay him ten dollars for his book and then turn around and pay him ten thousand dollars to read it to him. Because that’s what coaching and consulting is all about is. Yeah, we can tell you all the theory. We tell you exactly how everything works. But then to have somebody who can come in and actually kind of do it for your point and say do this exact thing in your situation is very, very helpful. So there’s always going to be people who will take the advice that we give them out here today and they’ll take that to heart and they’ll run with it. And there’s no to other people that’s there to say, you know what, I can get a whole lot more out of it. I have a relationship with somebody who knows this stuff and that can help me understand how it applies to what I’m doing. Because another point here is that I’m in a mastermind’s with other folks that run businesses. And it’s amazing how many times I can be a genius telling them what they need to do in their business because I can see it so clearly. And then they turn around and they’re a genius telling me what I need to be doing because I can’t see it worth a darn. So it’s hard to see your own your own thing sometimes. And getting getting some external advice on something that you’re very, very close to can be very, very, helpful.
Dr. Preston Cherry [00:29:26]
It takes. Yes, a great point. You know, it takes it takes courage to go through what I call a new uses for my in my practice as well. But I think it just works well in life. And this is one of them, too. So I call it a personal audit. Yeah. You had to be able to have the courage to go to a personal audit and reflect a little bit because they know next to I just generally there’s tons of those, and I’m sure you have them as well. But that that one, as soon as I get my first couple of feedbacks and I got received from that class, I didn’t like that at all. I’ll tell you that right now. I, I didn’t I did not like it. I got my feelings hurt. I was upset. And, you know, you’ve seen those you’ve seen those probably names or gifts or something like that where you’re right in the text message and you go with your first promotion and you start writing curse words at the beginning, you start backing it out. Yeah. And that’s what so it’s OK to have those those emotions.
Dr. Russell Strickland [00:30:26]
Absolutely.
Dr. Preston Cherry [00:30:28]
But it’s also what is the next step? Let’s step back from now a little bit, you know, and and every time I’ve done that, it seems been beneficial.
Dr. Russell Strickland [00:30:38]
Yeah. So I had when I first went to graduate school at the University of Chicago, very, very tough program. Very, very hard top tier program. First test I took. I’m trying to remember what it was exactly, but I got an F on that test. And by by my measures, by my accounting, it was a 50 something or 60 something. Whatever it was, it was horrible. And the professor passed out. All the test is like, listen, I’m really pleased with how you guys did. And I saiid, “Ugh! Everybody else did fine.” Then he was like the average was… And I was above average was like. What is this man talking about? And it’s just one of those things where you’ve got to know that it’s at a different level for a lot of folks when you get into a doctoral level program. It’s at a different level and they can say, hey, you’ve got a long way to go, but I’m happy with where you’re starting out. You know, you’re doing well so far. Just understand you’re nowhere close to where you need to be. And so that was the message I took home from that. Was that. Well, like I said, if if we had phones back then, I would have been doing the like, no little curse words it because I was like I never seen a grade like that came back on one of my papers. And and I just thought, oh, I got to pack up and go home.
Dr. Preston Cherry [00:32:00]
Right. Right. And I would say to you, you mentioned you had mentioned mental health a little bit, too, you know, during the dissertation, probably these theses these programs are this process. This process can be can be a lot of competition. But they shouldn’t be, right. They shouldn’t be. And that’s going to help mental health, too, in my opinion. It helped me. Yes, I was involved with my my my cohort, so to speak. You know, that’s and that’s one of those words that I swear, if I never hear again, I’m good about this cohort cohort. I was like, oh, my gosh, I want to hear that. As I used to wake up dazed, just not to hear cohort the word. But yes, I mean, you do go through that group that you came in with. Some of them are going to make a similar or not with so many people see this as some sort of zero sum competition. Yeah, yeah. I mean, it’s good competition if you just want to make each other better. You know, iron sharpens iron type of thing. But, you know, there’s so much of what does this person do? What is this person doing? Is that person doing this that, you know, it’s your own in your own lane? Figured that out because once that starts getting into, then you start getting inter-departmental. The walls are thin because you’re going you’re going back to that those rooms every day for four years, that three to four years, the campus can be huge. All right. But you’re going if you’re on campus, you know, you’re online, too. But if you’re going on campus, you’re going back to just those six halls. Right. You know, so you drive yourself crazy trying to keep up with the Joneses, so to speak. Yeah.
Dr. Russell Strickland [00:33:45]
Now, I think for most of the folks that I talked to, that’s that’s not a real problem. But it is certainly it’s a good point that this is not about what someone else is doing. This is about your dreams, your aspirations, your journey and being true to that. If you you know, if there are other people around you, I want you to draw strength from the fact that there are other people around you. They’re going through the same sort of thing. They’re having the same problems you’re having. And when they overcome them, that should give you strength and resolve, that you can overcome them.
Dr. Preston Cherry [00:34:19]
And you will get you get you will get a lifelong friend out of the process. Yeah, that is a guarantee. Your your your cohort may be five and may be 10 to maybe 15. I don’t know. But I think our starting out is twelve, I believe. And I think seven of us maybe it’s a it’s a process. It’s definitely and it doesn’t mean also it doesn’t mean if somebody doesn’t make it, that doesn’t mean that they were less than either. Things are just a good fit or they’re not a good fit. It just it just depends. I will guarantee and you may not be friends, you know, lifelong friend with the whole group, but there will be one, two. And I took and I took a couple out of mine. I found my future fiance out of this group, and I also found I found a great friend or two of them, actually. One of them, that’s just for sure. So.
Dr. Russell Strickland [00:35:17]
So. You know, as you you mentioned that you had. About half of your cohort graduated, that seems to be those seem to be the numbers that that hold over a lot of departments, over a lot of disciplines that about half of the folks graduate. So when you say it doesn’t mean that they were less than, some folks do move away because of changes in their goals and what they want to do. But a lot of folks, I think it. It comes down to kind of luck almost as to whether you happen to be a good fit with your committee, you happen to find a good adviser and a good mentor, and it’s important not to let it be luck as to who might be assigned as your mentor, who your adviser might be, whether it’s someone like me specifically who helps people professionally or whether it’s that someone else that you can find in your community, make sure that you have a mentor and adviser that can be there to kind of answer questions for you, support you, keep your head screwed on straight that, hey, yeah, this is tough. You’re going to struggle, but you can still do this if you have your fiance, your significant other, your parents telling you you can do it and they’ve never done it themselves, that’s going to ring hollow at some point for most people. We’ve had research done on this. One of our students did a project on that. And it does. It rings hollow for people. If someone’s if your mom’s always telling you, you can do it. And she never did it herself, but you find somebody else who can be there for you. So, yeah, I did that. I know what you’re talking about. I know I went through it. And yes, I’m looking at you. I know you can do it. It’s so important. I think it’s the primary difference between the seven that you said graduated in, the five that is having that touchstone, someone to keep them moving forward, probably.
Dr. Preston Cherry [00:37:07]
Yeah. And I would someone agree with that. And I would say that if you get to the dissertation stage, at least this is how it was for me, is that the dissertation gave me more control of my outcome. All the way up until then, it was a lot of subjectivity. Either came from the instructors or the process. You know, I was trying to get a feel, you know, they know what it looks it looks like. OK, well, it’s all subjective at that point. Once I got past the qualifying exam, I was that was the hardest point for me and my process. I mean, having that that cumulative right one day whenever we to you at this point is always fair game.
Dr. Russell Strickland [00:37:56]
A lot of people don’t go through that anymore. You have to write a series of papers or something like that. But yeah, I remember we had a test one day and the next week. Anything that you didn’t do well in that written test, they were coming after you on the oral exam or and we had that what you didn’t do. Right. Not they’re not going to tell you. You just had to know when you were filling out the paper. I don’t know what I’m talking about. I better figure it out before they come after me next week. I remember that big time.
Dr. Preston Cherry [00:38:24]
That was that was the that was the pivot point for me and for me. I knew that there was two places. The where and this is I guess is another good piece of advice if folks want it is is figuring out what you know, what my weaknesses are and not necessarily to a I had this discussion of date with another a professional friend of mine, and it was a good it was a good point. Not necessarily use your weaknesses to make them better and to sacrifice on your strengths, know what they are. So they won’t be barriers.
Dr. Russell Strickland [00:38:59]
Right.
Dr. Preston Cherry [00:39:00]
If you want to be good at what you’re good you’re good at and you want to do that. So at such a high level that it will give you benefit spending more time trying to make better your weaknesses, that that comes at a cost.
Dr. Russell Strickland [00:39:15]
A lot of people have this problem that they think they’ve got. They can’t have any weaknesses or they’ve got to fix those weaknesses. Listen, Michael Jordan, LeBron James, those guys do not do their taxes. Right? That’s not their strength. Maybe they might be good at math, but probably not. That’s not their strength. They have a different strength. And they got really, really good at what they were what they were strong at at that strength. And they they leverage that to propel them to heights that most of us can only dream of reaching, though. And when you find what you’re good at, leverage that strength. Don’t worry about the fact that you’ve got a weakness over here. Nobody else will worry about it.
Dr. Preston Cherry [00:39:55]
Just don’t let it be a barrier.
Dr. Russell Strickland [00:39:56]
You can provide to the world with your strengths.
