Your Journey to Doctor is Not Over with Dr. Louis Fletcher
Dr. Russell Strickland [00:20:13] I agree with that. One hundred percent, some of the most common advice that I think doctoral students received. I was just talking about this with someone else on the podcast not long ago. They tell you, immerse yourself in literature and pick a topic you’re passionate about. And if your goal is to graduate in any reasonable amount of time, emersed doesn’t sound like a quick process to me. So, you need to be a little bit more mercenary, quite honestly, about what you’re doing and get in there, find something you can do and move on with it. And this notion of picking something you’re passionate about, you know, your story illustrated exactly why this could be a problem. But whenever you’re passionate about something, you’re intractable. It’s got to be done your way. You can’t write. You can’t give in to somebody else on your passions. That’s your thing, right?
Dr. Louis Fletcher [00:20:58] Yeah. Your passion project later
Dr. Russell Strickland [00:21:00] Is not your thing. It’s something that people don’t understand at first. But it’s your committee’s dissertation when they like it, when they approve it, when they say it’s good to go, then you’re done, and it doesn’t matter whether you like it or not. You might think the dissertation has more to do with more things you need to do to it. But when the committee says it’s done, that’s it.
Dr. Louis Fletcher [00:21:19] It’s done.
Dr. Russell Strickland [00:21:20] And it’s not done until they say it’s done. So, if you think it needs to go this way and they’re telling you this, go that way, it’s not going to happen until you move over to the side. So very important for you to pick something where you can be coachable, where you can receive what they’re telling you, what they’re giving you, because you should really think of this is like you’re building a house, but it’s not for you, it’s for them. It’s going to have your name on it. You’re the builder, is your house, is your design. But if they don’t like the color, the walls are painted or where you put the kitchen, they’re not buying it until you fix it. And so just plan on that and then you can do your thing after you graduate.
Dr. Louis Fletcher [00:21:57] Yeah, and it’s one of the things I think I learned at the University of Maryland as an undergrad was psychology major and it was about a healthy detachment. And I think that’s probably part of what you need to do with it, is that it can’t be you or something you will do. When I tell my doctoral students, I’ll say if your dissertation is the best thing, you’ve ever written and you have failed because that you should write better things, your dissertation is not your great American novel; it’s not your life’s work. It’s just the beginning of your doctoral career. It’s an entrance to it. I would say it almost seems like the welcome mat at the academy. Exactly what you step on to get into the academy. And now you’re a doctor. And if you if you speak on your dissertation, then you’ve done something horribly wrong. You just don’t even understand it yet.
Dr. Russell Strickland [00:22:45] Yeah. Yeah. They don’t celebrate. They don’t celebrate graduation with determination. They celebrate it with the commencement.
Dr. Louis Fletcher [00:22:51] So with the commencement. Yes. Yeah. You know, it’s one of those things. Where did I think that when people are getting to their headspace and they’re like, you know, and kind of just shake it off, it goes to the whole thing. A bit of an important don’t get self-important and concentrate on the wrong things. When I was doing the first dissertation with first doctoral process, I was really I got a 4.0 in my master’s program, you know, got a masters education, 4.0. So, I’m hot stuff. So, I’m concentrating and trying to get a 4.0 on my doctoral program. And the first time I got a B I finished, ABD with 3.92, I was crushed when I got to be so when I got B a more mature person and look at it. This said, you know what, I am not going to worry about having a 4.0. I’m going to do well enough. I said I’m going. Don’t do well enough to make sure that I’m do that finish. I think a 3.6, which was fine with me, but that was that was for me. Go on. OK, I don’t need to worry about this. Let me not overconcentrate on that kind of thing. And I ended up getting the dissertation a year award from North Central the year I graduated. And that’s more a testament to I think my relaxation was not stress to say, let me do it. Let me make sure that I work with my committee to get it done, then me going, I’m eaten up. I’m trying to win an award. I had no idea that was even an award. So, you calm down, relax, do what you do and you’ll be fine.
Dr. Russell Strickland [00:24:07] Well, you know, most folks that you meet when you tell them you have a doctoral degree, they’re never going to ask you what your GPA was.
Dr. Louis Fletcher [00:24:16] Absolutely.
Dr. Russell Strickland [00:24:17] Very, very unusual question asked with a doctoral degree. You know, maybe if you if you’re dealing with a lot of other people that also have doctoral degrees and there you know, unnaturally competitive, they might they might want to try to pull that out. But, yeah, generally speaking, you don’t have to worry about your GPA if you graduated. That’s the thing. That’s the thing. And the clinical detachment that you talked about earlier, I like to tell my students that, you know, think about you’ve got this little baby on this cold metal examining table and the examination is proceeding. You find out that the baby’s got a gangrenous arm and it needs to be removed or else the baby’s going to die. If you’re the mom, if you’re the dad, you’re looking at this baby, say she’s not going to be able to braid her hair great, her hairs. And then we are able to wear certain kind of dress, the sort of thing. If you’re the surgeon, you’re looking at this girl saying she’s going to walk out of here, she’s fine. And she’s probably young enough that she’s not even going to care about the fact that she didn’t have an arm because that’s just what she grew up with. So, she’ll adapt. Right. You want to be your dissertation surgeon, not your dissertation mom or dad?
Dr. Louis Fletcher [00:25:24] Absolutely.
Dr. Russell Strickland [00:25:26] You can’t care in that way. You have to care. You have to do a good job search. I want to do a good job. But the surgeon is not willing to let his emotions rise and fall on the day’s work.
Dr. Louis Fletcher [00:25:37] Is there is a certain emotional discipline as I guess, being a person with the military for 20 years? I think about discipline when we think about what people think, discipline, I think beating people into shape and things like that. But that’s not what discipline is. Discipline is really akin to education is having the ability to stepwise go through something. So having the discipline to be able to, you know, an emotion plays into it. It’s a big mediator, I know a lot of people who have not finished their Ph.D. or any doctoral program because they have a hard time managing their emotions went because, for example, we’ve both and anybody out there who is in the process has experienced this. You write this thing that you think is a wonderful, wonderful chapter, best chapter you ever wrote. You sourced it well. You had the annotated bibliography and then you sent it to your committee, and it comes back marked up and then you think, oh, my goodness, when I was a get my master’s program, I was the best. I wrote the best. And why are they doing this? I mean, what’s wrong with them? No, they’re taking you to I mean, the difference between a master’s and a Ph.D. is not linear. You know. You know, it’s not a linear thing. It’s exponential. So, you’re going to a much different level. And when you get to the end of the process, if you get there, you will understand why that happened and how you how you’ve been changed by it. So, in the beginning, when I first got the facts, it what’s going on here? This used to be good stuff. This is what people dreamed about. But then you start to understand it. What I have to do is have to manage my emotions. When I get something, I need to read what their changes were. I have to send it back to them. And it goes back to an Air Force concept called the OODA Loop that the lieutenant colonel may basically get inside the enemy’s battle to do it faster than the enemy does, used to defeat the enemy. So, I apply the OODA Loop to my committee. I apologize to them. I was doing asymmetric warfare with you. But you I look at what they say. I changed the changes that they want. And what I learned is to do that before they got to a place where I had kept it so long that they were changing the changes they made before, so I would make a standard for myself that I will get it, read it, change it and put it back out in less than 48 hours to make sure so they can be fresh in their mind. And that is the battle rhythm that I had the key to make sure that I was able to graduate. If I had to sit there for a week on Woe is Me, let me put on my robe, walk around with my coffee, let me cry a little bit on the front porch. I never would have gotten there but get inside their OODA Loop. Yes, you guys can Google OODA Loop if you want to, but I got inside their OODA Loop to be able to work with the committee and they like the fact that I was responsive. They never had to give me the “Hey, are you still there? Are you still working?”
Dr. Russell Strickland [00:28:18] Right. Yeah. One of the things that I tell my students all the time is when you get that feedback and, you know, the papers all marked that when it comes back to you, that’s time for you to celebrate, because what they’ve just done is they’ve given you all the cheat codes, right? Like, if you’re a video game player that tells you how to win the game, that’s
Dr. Louis Fletcher [00:28:38] It’s a win. It’s a win.
Dr. Russell Strickland [00:28:39] And you got it. And if the committee does their job right, you know, like you said, you got to make sure that they’re not going to start changing their changes. But if they do their job right, when they gave you that list of three hundred and seventy-two things that you need to do, that’s the list. Just knock them out and you graduate. That’s where it’s at. Occasionally you do get committee members do that who just keep looking at the paper differently. So that’s something you have to manage politically at some point. Yeah, and occasionally there are people, so occasionally they miss something. So, they gave you the list of three hundred and seventy-two things that should have been three hundred seventy-five things. You can’t get mad at them about that. They found a few things that need to be fixed later on. OK, but the goal is that if they do it right, once you go through that list of changes, all they’re going to do is say, all right, that’s three hundred seventy-two things, two hundred sixty-one of them we’re happy with. Now, I’m going to have trouble doing the math at this point, but one hundred sixty-one hundred twelve of them, you didn’t quite get the way we wanted to and rescue you fixed them, OK, but you broke something else. And those are really the options. When you when you change something, you fix it to their satisfaction. You didn’t or they’re OK with this now, but that broke something over here and you got to go chase that thing down. They shouldn’t be telling you there’s more things that you have to do or anything else. And it should just be a process of going this many things to this, many things to this, many things to you’re done.
Dr. Louis Fletcher [00:30:01] Yeah, and that’s the process and other part of support for those people who are who get out there and they are almost like the squirrel, they get out there and they go, hey, there’s another new piece of research. OK, if you’re already eighty percent into doing your stuff for your dissertation and something new comes out, that is not the time to take it all apart. For this to be valid, I need to put this piece of research in there because they’re looking at it being I’m going to publish this dissertation after I’m done. And then when it gets published, I’m going to go to an art house or a literature place and say, hey, listen, you need to publish my dissertation as a best seller. That’s not how it works. When you’re 80 percent done and be 80 percent done and get the other 20 percent. But I have seen people going, oh, this groundbreaking study just came out with let it be groundbreaking.
Dr. Russell Strickland [00:30:53] Yeah. So, if you are a professional researcher and you’re writing up, you’re writing up your results and you’re writing up your study and something comes out the week before those changes the landscape, you got to react to it. That’s the way it is. Your dissertation is a proof of concept, really. It’s the proof that you can do research. It doesn’t mean that you’re listen, people don’t go to students to learn about things on the forefront. It’s very, very rare. If you want it to get an expert right now, would you go get if you need a counselor, would you go to a doctor in psychology or doctoral student psychology? I mean…
Dr. Louis Fletcher [00:31:26] You go you go to the person who’s got it.
Dr. Russell Strickland [00:31:29] Yeah. So, yeah. That people need to understand that that yeah. The dissertation does not have to be perfect. That’s actually I think one of the big things that gets most people waylaid is not being able to get out of the way their own way, not being able to put aside their own perfectionism. I’m a recovering perfectionist myself and I know it’s hard sometimes.
Dr. Louis Fletcher [00:31:49] I had written on my report card when I was a kid in school back when I used to write them in there. Louis is a perfectionist who does not finish his work.
Dr. Russell Strickland [00:31:59] Yep. What does it mean to finish? I mean, there’s no such thing as finished work.
Dr. Louis Fletcher [00:32:02] I can just crack this one piece. Right is perfect. You know, the stuff that’s on Teach.
Dr. Russell Strickland [00:32:07] And that’s the thing that that when you when you want perfection, you never going to get there and you’re never going to produce anything. And the dissertation is a project that you have to produce to show that you could produce other projects in principle, because once that’s your license to go out and do research, basically you’re not going to have anybody looking over your shoulder anymore at that point. They don’t expect you to know the rules of the road. They expect, you know, how to drive the car and go do it. Now, see what you can come up with. But that’s after you graduate.
Dr. Louis Fletcher [00:32:36] Absolutely. Maybe talking a little bit about that after you graduate. Maybe that’s a place for you here to give them some insight into why they’re doing this and what they have on the other side. One of the reasons why you don’t worry about having your dissertation be the best thing you’ve ever written and why you don’t make your doctoral program into an all-inclusive search and everything you’ve ever been interested in. Because once you do have the PhD and you get out there, you have the opportunity to do other things. I went on a few years later and did my postdoctoral work at Colorado State University. I did some concentration with that in Student Affairs and Organizational Development because did some something scratching a few inches of the things that I was interested in. But at the point when you have a PhD, those things are additive right there. Now those were certificates that went along with the postdoc program, so I have those credentialling. A few more years of sitting right here doing stuff with the school district, I find myself I’m the chief authority outside of the district, retain lawyers on law. And I’ve read the books and I understand the books up and doing those kinds of things right there, but I’ve done something crazy recently, I started doing law school at Pepperdine University in California because I want to be better at that. But what that goes to is I’m a consultant, I’m a keynote speaker. I do a lot of different things. And one of the things that you have open to you, unless you go, as you said Russ earlier, it’s the traditional and I’m going I want to be tenure and I want to teach at a university that I have been open up to multiple streams of income. I do investigations freelance, and that’s a source of income. I do keynote speaking as a source of income. I’ve been teaching and funny enough, become come fish or fowl. I teach for a teacher for Webster University for about 12 and a half years. And what I teach there is the things that I learned from being on active duty as a space and nuclear operations guy, so I teach things like space mission operations and remote sensing. So, I teach in a totally scientific realm at the university because that allows me to stay connected to those things I love on active duty, but I don’t want to do that at my job every day. I work at k-12 school district because that I have gotten to a place in my life where I want to be able to give back, so I don’t have to I don’t have to make a billion dollars in one job to be able to be happy. I can say I can. You know, it’s almost like the doors. Anybody remember the doors, right. To seek your pleasure there and you know your treasures there. And if we’re going through to the other side, one is one of those things where I can do all of the things I want to do and then when I decide to not have a full-time job, I can still go out there and do adjunct teaching for the university. I can still consult. I can still do investigations on my own time and pace.
Dr. Russell Strickland [00:35:15] Yeah, yeah. It’s an important some of these are personally important to me. I think I know a lot of our students; they are very much they have one job, one career. This is the thing that I’m doing and it’s great you do what you want to do. The doctoral degree does give you a little bit of insurance because that that that credential started to come by. But I like the idea of diversifying and and and as you said, having multiple things. I think I shared with you that that was probably part of my own doctoral journey. Got me back into my doctoral program was I was working with a startup company that had been acquired by a larger media company and I was making good money. And one day I had somebody walk in my office, say, hey let me talk to you for a few minutes, you walked out of my office, and I wasn’t making any money anymore.
Dr. Louis Fletcher [00:36:09] It’s not fun. It’s not fun this time.
Dr. Russell Strickland [00:36:12] It’s not fun. It was not a very good day. And I didn’t have the perspective that I have now. That was probably the most worrisome day I’ve had since I took comp exams at the University of Chicago. Yeah, I pretty much flipped a switch when I passed those exams that nothing was going to worry me anymore. That got real close. I might have messed up on whether I got worried or not of that because that was a new experience for me. But what I did do is I vowed I was not going to have one person in control of all my money anymore. And so, I have you know, I’ve done different things to get to this point but now I have a business where, you know, like some people said, you don’t have a boss, like, well, I have a bunch of bosses. There’s a bunch of people that pay me and I have answered all of them. But that’s OK because you have different things you can do, and you can agree that there’s not a good relationship here. Both of you can walk away and be happy with that, if need be and you don’t have to worry about going from making good money to making no money. That’s not fun what you said.
Dr. Louis Fletcher [00:37:10] And you wouldn’t have that. You want to have that. You won’t have that base out there to give you the freedom to do to do different things. And, you know, you mentioned comprehensive exams. I’ve done them twice. And it’s like a trip to the dentist, the dentist out there. But it’s like, yeah, you almost you almost hate that more than the defense. The defense is kind of kind of fun. It was it was stressful. And you got to do some things like that. But the comprehensive exam is like, hey, I’m going to be in this room and if you don’t pass this comprehensive exam, your journey to a doctor is over.
Dr. Russell Strickland [00:37:42] Yeah.
Dr. Louis Fletcher [00:37:42] So I think that was more stressful.
Dr. Russell Strickland [00:37:44] So we had this unique experience at the University of Chicago. They have. So, we studied like all summer long for the comprehensive exams at the end of your first year. So, you went through each of your classes. They just stuff your head full of knowledge and then the summer you’re out, you’re coming into the office everyday studying like crazy. The professors that you have during your first year, we’ve mentioned from time to time that that don’t be surprised if while you’re studying for your comps, one of the professors, senior professor, will just walk in the room and ask you a question legitimately, like, I don’t know the answer to this and I know the best place to go is to one of you guys studying for the comp exams, because you have to know everything. And so, within an approximation, that’s kind of what they expected of us, is know everything in our field. We had to know what this guy knew and what that guy knew, what the other guy knew at their level when they were all world class. So, it was one of those things where you stuff yourself so full that you can’t possibly hold it all and you hold it in just long enough to pass the exam and then a lot of it just goes floating away at that point.
Dr. Louis Fletcher [00:38:53] Yep.
Dr. Russell Strickland [00:38:53] But the person who was responsible for our words and there was a committee and there was one guy who was in charge. So, after the written exam, no one passes that. There’s always you always come up short somewhere because there’s just too much it’s not humanly possible. What you’re supposed to do is realize what you came up short on and know that you did that wrong. Go back and figure it out and fix it, because in a week you have oral exams and they’re not going to give you the written exam in the meantime, you need to know all that stuff and they’re going to come back after you in the oral exams and you’re talking about going to a dentist, that’s really what it’s like if they find the marathon man style-start digging into it. This guy we saw as we were walking by his office one day, he had this article that apparently came from a real publication on the door about how to win an oral exam, and it was from the four professors, it was a game, and they said that the most important thing is for you to get one of those sort of Victorian English surgical theaters. You know, they had the seats all around and it was stacked up real high and all that. So, you could put lights around the room and have the examinee down in the middle on a swivel chair. And they talked about spinning the examinee around. And you get points that way and you win by knocking the examinee off the chair with around. So, I go in to take my exam and they, sure enough, pulled out the sharp hook and started digging into the sore spot and I said I was ready for this. I explained it all. And the woman had asked me the question, said, OK, well, I’m satisfied immediately from the other side of the room, this guy says, well, I’m not and my heart just like stops and starts and does all the things. And he asked me a follow up question, and I remember very clearly my head going through this train of thought of wait, he’s speaking a language I understand. I know what words he’s saying. They make sense to me. I actually understand this. I’ve got this. Wait a minute. Shut up. No, that’s right. And then I started talking and after a few seconds a minute, whatever he said, oh, that’s good enough. But I think he purposely choreographed that thing just to try to get that jolt and get that adrenaline and see how
