Making Success Inevitable with Dr. Thomas Joseph
Dr. Thomas Joseph [00:20:41]
And I just and then the good thing is I always like when I even when I had conversations with students in the dissertation process, I always said, when you get to your research classes, take those very seriously. Yeah, the classes are good, but your research classes, they are very substantial to help guide. Where you going to go with your dissertation?
Dr. Russell Strickland [00:21:05]
That’s where we that’s where we start is to develop your research plan right from the beginning. I don’t care what the topic is until we have a research plan. You’re not going anywhere. Or if you try to go somewhere, you don’t know where you’re going. And so it’s going to take you a lot longer. And your your chances of success are a lot lower. We can develop a plan from the beginning. You’re going to be in much better shape moving forward. So I’m kind of jumping the gun a little bit, talking about the dissertation. But let’s go ahead. Make that transition now so you finish your classes. And I know Capella you’ve got comp exams that varies from school to school as to how that process goes. But then you get into the dissertation. What was that transition like for you skipping over the process but going from classes to the dissertation. What was that like for you?
Dr. Thomas Joseph [00:21:51]
When I started off, it was hard to find a mentor, a chair, I’m sure that was hard to find. But when I finally got to program chair, I think the bigger thing for me was to to convince my program chair of my topic, my title, where I wanted to do my study. That was the hardest thing. If I can jump into that real quick, I did my study on the leader member exchange theory LMX theory. Right. That kind of sets the perspective that leaders build this in group and it’s our group relationships. So you have this people as a leader, you have that intimate relationship with. And then one of the things I captured from reading about the concept was it was a universal concept. Right. And then I took that word universal in the context of everywhere around the world. Right. That’s how I took it. That was my OK. And then when I did my background study on that concept, I realized that research was done in America, some places in Africa and in Europe, some places in Europe and Asia. But there was no study done in LMX in the Caribbean, I mean, from the Caribbean. I was like, oh, there is an opportunity for me. Absolutely. As you mentioned at the beginning, I’m from Dominica, a Caribbean island, which is a very small island in the Caribbean, not very well known by many people. Sometimes people even contradicted of the Dominican Republic. But it’s not. So, to convince my my chair that, hey, this is what I want to study and this is where I want to stay. So it was really hard going back and forth and trying to identify what was the significance of doing that study in the Caribbean yet to a small island. So that was my hurdle. So one of the things if anybody reads my dissertation, one of the things that you will find in my dissertation is I actually had to say what is Dominica? And I had to give statistical information about that island to validate my study and why it was relevant. So that was the hardest thing for me. But when we got to that, it took us almost a month and a half just to get to that place. That said, this is my topic. This is what I’m going to study until it’s kind of just like a lightbulb went out in the head. It was like, you know what? That makes a lot of sense.
Dr. Russell Strickland [00:24:16]
It’s really too bad that your chair would fight you so much on that, because this is actually the way we often tell our students to to build out a project. If you can find a project that someone has done before you and you can more or less copy what they did, but study someone else, study a different group of people, whether it’s a different country, whether it’s a different industry in business, whether it’s a different educational institution, public school versus private school versus high school versus elementary school, whatever it is, if you can shift the folks that you’re studying, that’s a new study. And because the original study was worthwhile, that study is almost certainly worthwhile. The new one, the new group of people you want to study is a great way of developing a project. And it actually works from a scientific merit standpoint, too, because you’re testing the boundaries of knowledge that that’s already there. If I move over here a little bit, do we see things look different? If so, how do they look different? And why and exactly where does that transition occur? It’s really interesting. And if they don’t look different, if they look the same as they as with the previous person found, that’s also interesting. This becomes a more universal concept that we study this with a different group of people. So I’m really kind of surprised and disappointed that your chair thought you on that, because it does sound like an excellent way of of just moving the ball a little further down the field in an academic sense.
Dr. Thomas Joseph [00:25:47]
And to add to that, too, this goes back to something that we might mention throughout this whole conversation, is the why they apply. Even when I had that pushback, I knew this is what I wanted to study. And sometimes, again, if we have the why taken care of and then we know what we’re going to do, it was the good thing about this. I mean, I would not trade my relationship or my experience with my my chair for anything else. To be honest, it was a superb relationship that we develop even today. If I get your message or get information from all of that. But that challenge, that push it was like a push to me is like somebody nudging you back is are you sure that’s what you want to do? So that’s what you want to do. But then to stand your ground, bring your explanation and then that’s she kind of prepared me for my defense, to be honest with you. It actually prepared me when I got to that point where I had to defend my dissertation so that. I needed that right? I needed that coming in saying, OK, this is what I want to study, this is where I want to study. And instead of having a yes person say, yeah, go for it. It was good to give me that push back because I utilized that push back for energy. And that helped a lot with my when I got to the defense part of my dissertation.
Dr. Russell Strickland [00:27:09]
But it’s a fine line that you have to walk when you’re when your chairs are telling you or your committee is telling you about a certain thing. The fine line you have to walk between. That being a no, we don’t want you to do that and it being a challenge or a push back, like you said, if your committee doesn’t want you to do something, quickest thing is to find out what they want you to do and do it, because that’s how you get to graduation. And if they’re if they’re simply trying to probe and get you to to be sure about something, then that’s that’s another thing. And then you’re right, it develops a lot, lot more strength in your project than you can stand there, tell them what you want and how you plan on something. Yeah. I do it my kids all the time. They’ll have like a you know, something in math that they’re asking me to help them through and they’ll say, oh, well, such and such is the answer. And they’re right. I’ll ask them, are you sure that’s the answer? And if they go back and say, well, maybe it’s this, then we got some issues at work. But if they’ll come back to me and say, yes, that is the answer there is, then then they know that they know what they’re talking about. And I know that they’re not guessing. And because you can guess, right. Occasionally we want you to know what you’re talking about. We get to the test. So it’s really important to understand when when your committee is pushing back, accept that as a welcome test of your own strength. But if telling you to do something else, I’d advise you to to think about doing something else that you can graduate.
Dr. Thomas Joseph [00:28:39]
And the good thing was that on that topic is, is she was not telling me something else, but it was an opportunity for me to convince her why this why this topic? Why do you want to stay here? So that helped me. I had to dig and dig and dig and dig does bring up information.
Dr. Russell Strickland [00:28:58]
So now beyond the getting started on on the project and actually getting the topic approved. Were there any other challenges or hurdles that you faced along the way?
Dr. Thomas Joseph [00:29:13]
Along the way with my dissertation I think by Capella did a very good job of approving my topic and stuff. When I get to my mentor and we went for that, there was the approval. I was good once we started off when she agreed that yes this is good, give us some of my information that once we got to that level. Yes we agree I’m going to support you, I think with me going through the process for me to know how to think. And that’s back in 2012. So when two thousand twenty might be a little bit different from you. Right. Just to share my experience back in 2012, I remember just working on my dissertation. I started off with my chapter one, working through my Chapter two and my literature review. And all of a sudden I’m sitting at the computer doing some work. The computer crashed. I knew nothing about computer crashed. My computer literally crashed. And guess what? At the time I had everything save on my hard drive. Yeah, I had everything saved. So literally I took the computer to to Best Buy and I said, this is what happened. And they said, check it out for me and said, everything’s gone. We cannot restore anything for you. And you think that that’s about between 50 and seventy five pages of work? Yeah. Along with that, all my resources that I had, I had that storm. So I was just like. And then I remember this, the rental recommendation, I bought a new computer and it made a recommendation to me to buy an external drive and I go back into work because I’m not giving up. I go back into work and then we’re working on that. I remember traveling from New York at the time. I lived in Louisiana, traveling from New York to Louisiana, and we had a layover in Charlotte, North Carolina. I was there for my two daughters at the time and we there at the airport waiting for my one of my younger daughters, she came to me and asked, “Daddy, can I use your computer?” I say, “Sure.” So I gave her the computer, but I had the external hard drive and my computer in the in my computer bag when we took the back, when we took the laptop out, the hard drive, the external hard drive, it fell off the floor. So I didn’t take that for nothing. And we got home that night around midnight, maybe 1:00 in the morning. I said, well, let me go do some work because I’m not that sleepy. I love my work, my yeah. Turn on my computer, cloud, my external drive. But nothing is coming out. Nothing is coming up. I said, oh my gosh. And I had already got back in the groove and written the whole chapter one and instating off in Chapter two. The next day I went and I went to Best Buy again because that’s what I had bought it to. I got them and they said to me. It’s dead. Let me tell you the best, but the worst part about this. The interesting thing I had a weekend of I had a I had a meeting set up with my with my chair and we spoke about it and she said to me, you know what I think you should do? You probably should just kind of take a break. You’ve been going at this for a while. So I think it might be now might be the time to take a break. You had your computer crash. You’ve lost everything. But maybe take a break for a year and get home. And I said to her, I said to her those words. I said, I started on this process, I have a goal to finish this process this year and it’s not going to stop. That’s not going to stop. When she heard that, she says, wow, I had my. And then that when that’s when I was introduced to Dropbox, that she’s talking about saving my information on the cloud itself because this is not a commercial for Dropbox.
Dr. Russell Strickland [00:33:01]
Well, let it be. They’re great. I have been using Dropbox. There’s a lot of those functions out. There are a lot of those services out there. But, yes, tell it. Tell everybody how great that is.
Dr. Thomas Joseph [00:33:16]
That is that’s why I went so and the honest truth about it, I have not paid a sample of Dropbox. I have enough space that was given to me. I think got like 10 gigabytes was given to me for free, and I just put all my stuff in and that was a life saver from that. Everything just went on till I got to site approval.
Dr. Russell Strickland [00:33:38]
Awesome. That’s amazing. So, yeah. So for folks who are obviously in this day and age, cloud services are ubiquitous. There’s Apple has one, Google has one. Dropbox is still around. Microsoft has theirs. And there are lots of others. Definitely one hundred percent. Make sure you’re using one of them. I know one of one of our our students. Saved her. Her dissertation on her computer and she had a thumb drive, but she put it on every night, every night when she was done with the dissertation, she would put it on her thumb drive. She kept her thumb drive in the desk drawer so that it wasn’t attached to her computer. It was separated. This is a smart thing. You want to have independent backups of your of your dissertation. She got home from work one day to find her neighbor’s house burning down her house was fine, except that one wall next to her neighbor’s house caught enough heat to do some damage. And the specific damage it did was ruined. Her hard drive and her thumb drive that was sitting in the desk on that wall and she lost everything she thought that she had packed up. So what these cloud services do for you is they get your back up, out of your house, out of your city, out of your state, their billion dollar companies and their job is to not lose your stuff and give it to them and let them do it. And another thing the poor person’s back up is email your dissertation to your chair or someone else on a regular basis yourself. So even to yourself. Right. As long as as long as you have an email server that you can go back to from a website or whatever, it’s going to be out there. You have to email, for example. It’s out there. So, again, not an ad for Gmail, but if you use that, they’re backing up all your email for you. Pretty good at handling data.
Dr. Thomas Joseph [00:35:35]
So use the cloud.
Dr. Russell Strickland [00:35:37]
If everybody says, hey, we know this. This is this is simple stuff. The one person out there who we save their dissertation is worth everyone else saying, I can’t believe you’re talking about this stuff in twenty twenty because it happens and it’s horrible when it happens to you. So don’t let it happen. Use the cloud, use backups, email your dissertation often and hopefully we’ll never have to worry about this. But but so that’s that’s a challenge to lose your dissertation twice that that takes a lot. I mean, I know when I do work the first time, I can be enthusiastic about it. Redoing work is not my thing. I do not like redoing work. And to redo it a second time would be I might start thinking about my why at that point.
Dr. Thomas Joseph [00:36:27]
Yeah, I really did it. I mean, it was it was very discouraging and disappointing to the honest truth, because, like I said, you have to find something to feel. Well, you have all time. It was very disappointing, but again, I cannot emphasize why, if you forget your why, then you actually give up when you face those those challenges. So all of those things have worked to the benefit of my benefit up to today.
Dr. Russell Strickland [00:36:56]
And just to make it clear for everyone, when you’re using Dropbox or any of those things, don’t just keep your dissertation there. But nowadays we have PDFs for all of our resource material. Right. Keep all of that stuff up there. Results that you don’t have to have that again yet. If you have to go to the library and pull seventy five or one hundred journal articles, that’s not gonna be a fun weekend when you go to do that. So if you have your dissertation, chances are you’re going to need those articles again at some point.
Dr. Thomas Joseph [00:37:23]
Save everything. Every article you want. Just download it and stick it up in your drive and your heart in your Dropbox or whatever cloud service you want to use if you need that.
Dr. Russell Strickland [00:37:37]
Now, Dr. Joseph, I remember you telling me that when you this helped you get through the proposal process, you go to collect your data. And you told me you had an interesting time analyzing your data. Would you like to share with what’s going on in your life at that point in time?
Dr. Thomas Joseph [00:37:54]
So there in the time I was actually getting set to go do my field study, we had to give birth to a little girl. Right. And so I actually had to push back my my going out field study for one month just to be with my stuff. So I went out to my field study a month and a half and then came back. And then there I am with a little baby and I have to analyze all of this data because I did a qualitative research. So in that process, you got to write things down to fix stuff on the wall, because that’s what I learned from people who have been through the process. So I wrote my paper in and during that time I’m home. So I have a child and I am actually on my wall going through my data analysis. And I have my baby right now and doing all of that at the same time. Lucky thing for me, she was young, two months to do so. So not little, not much crying at all. So I had that chance with her and stuff. But today she is eight years old. I think we have the best relationship in the world. She was in the process. But it was it was that was a bit of a challenge because I wanted to make sure I don’t drop my child or anything like that. But it was she was right there, right there in the process and stuff. So that worked very well.
Dr. Russell Strickland [00:39:25]
And so for folks who were going to tell me how challenging the dissertation process can be. If you can get started on your proposal, get halfway more than halfway through your proposal, lose it all, rebuild it, lose it again, rebuild it, and then finish the process with a newborn in tow. Then you can do whatever it is you have to do to get through this process. It’s worth it. It’s work, but it’s worth the effort. It’s worth the challenge. It’s worth the sacrifice to make it happen.
Dr. Thomas Joseph [00:39:58]
And the thing is, your story might be different from mine. Some people will go through this process without any of those. It is not with my eyes type of charge, but your own personal challenges. But everyone has their own value.
