Home | Reference-and-education

The Mindset Change Behind A Successful Dissertation

People struggle with theses and dissertations for psychological reasons more than writing reasons. The psychological challenge behind writing a dissertation is that you must claim that you are now an expert.

When you write a thesis, you need to see yourself differently. Instead of seeing yourself as a student, you need to position yourself as an expert ready to take your place among the other experts and authorities in your field.

For most of us, our educational experiences don't prepare us to make this psychological shift. How often did anyone regard you as an expert on anything in your student years?

Throughout our lifetimes, most of us experienced educational processes that taught us the "right" answers. Who decided the right answers? They were the real experts, who wrote the books we read. They graded our exams and papers. They taught us that we were not experts, but were supposed to learn the answers provided to us by the real experts.

It is entirely possible that you can reach the point of writing a dissertation without ever writing an original word about anything in your field of study. Teachers tend not to shower good grades upon original thinkers. Good grades are most often given to those who supply the predetermined "right" answers.

Throughout this whole typical educational process, based on learning the right answers, we learned to write essays and term papers. Most of us were never taught how to write a thesis. If your education was typical, you learned how to demonstrate that you had learned your lessons. You learned how to write essays and term papers. You didn't learn to how to declare an original thesis.

The typical term paper, in secondary schools and universities, is not based on your own original research in some topic. Instead, you gather information about your topic published by various experts in the field. Your objective is to summarize the material you gathered on your topic in a coherent way.

An essay is not the same as an argument to prove a thesis. Essay questions provide an opportunity for you to present your opinions, but a thesis requires more than opinion.

You can go through high school and college and never be required to make an original contribution to your field. Yet, this is what you must do when you write a thesis. This is one of the primary reasons the transition from essays and term papers to theses and dissertations is so difficult.

When you reach the point of writing a dissertation, you are suddenly the one who is supposed to ask new questions and provide new answers. You must become one of the experts in your field, not simply a student. This is a whole new life experience.

This is the real secret of success behind a successful dissertation. Your success is no longer measured by your ability to learn the right answers. Your success comes from your ability to ask new questions and provide new answers as an expert.

If you don't make your claim that you are an expert in your field, by offering a new perspective, you are not writing a thesis. It doesn't matter if your thesis is simply a tiny step or a giant leap forward in your field. To write a thesis, you must offer an original perspective and new answers, as an expert.

So, what is the psychological secret behind a successful dissertation? You are claiming to the world that you are no longer simply a student. You are now an expert in your field.

Article Source: http://www.uberarticles.com/articles

Kalinda Rose Stevenson, Ph.D www.WriteToPersuade.com. If you need clarity about your thesis, here's a writing a dissertation resource for you. My ebook, What's Your Point? gives solid methods to get to your point.

This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-No Derivative Works 3.0 Unported License, which means you may freely reprint it, in its entiretly, provided you include the author's resource box along with LIVE VISIBLE links (without "nofollow" tags).