Mission Control – writing a Harvard thesis

I’m writing two chapters that are due the day before the election: the Background and the Literature Review. Three weeks ago, I sent an email to my thesis director asking if I could change two of the four topics in the literature review – from “bureaucratic politics” to “interagency process” and from “military strategy” to “military doctrine and regs on contractors on the battlefield”. I had material on the substitutes so that wasn’t a problem. I made the argument that these two were more targeted to my thesis hypotheses.

In the meantime, I began re-reading some lit. reviews and articles on how to write good ones. I discovered a wide range of ways to handle a lit. review in a thesis (or dissertation). I skimmed some ALM theses at Grossman and some theses online from area grad. programs on international relations/security (Fletcher included), to poli. sci. dissertations in ProQuest. Some theses had NO lit review at all. Some had a lit. review of two or three pages and were poorly written – not even a summary, never mind synthesis. One thesis that was 127 pages had a 30 page lit. review! One dissertation had a lit. review of 50 pages! Yikes. That’s ridiculous. Then again, in a dissertation, I can see the need to be more thorough. Also, it’s not really optional in a dissertation.

Clearly there are at least three modes of handling a lit. review in the thesis these days:

a) ignore it; write several chapters on your topic, each with very short subsections and omit the lit. review,

b) fold it into the “Background” or “Context” -type chapter, or

c) give it the prominence it’s due: a separate chapter. This is usually found in the traditional structure (Intro, Background, Research Problem, Methodology,Lit. Review, Results and Findings, Conclusion) wherein the Lit. Review is actually a discussion of pertinent materials relating to your argument and, meets the more rigorous standard of synthesis, not just a summary.

A week later, not having heard from her (which was unusual as she’s been prompt replying in the past), I called her office and left a voice mail since time was running out.

Ever have a time when you have to choose between asking for permission and asking for forgiveness? I made a command decision and proceeded to write a tight, narrowly focused lit. review on the materials that directly spoke to my argument. Last Tuesday I finished it, coming in at the allotted 13 pages.

That afternoon, I received my Director’s reply, allowing me to use the substitutes. Her thinking was that due to that shortage of material, I should broaden my lit. review (I admit, we had agreed to that approach originally).

The next day, I took a deep breath, plunged in to my voluminous materials on the additional subjects and began the re-write. Today, I finished the first, rough draft of that chapter, summarizing Congressional testimony, think tank reports, scholarly works, and papers by military analysts. I have one week to cut it down by about a third. Ugh. I think the lit. review process has been the least fun part of this thesis project.

The next chapter to complete is the Results and Findings. That’s due in early December.

I’ve already booked a nice cottage at a B&B in the NH north woods for a relaxing Christmas holiday vacation. Snow, skiing, a wood-burning fireplace, great food, and a good fiction book to read at night. No computer, no academic materials. That will be a welcome change.

Thank god for computer-generated humor. Obama and McCain get down… Look for the surprise guest!

Harvard libraries have a new, live service “Ask Us Live”. Great idea. Gave it a try today.  As I write up my second chapter (Literature Review), I needed a good definition of “cognate literature”. I wanted to be sure I knew what it meant specifically. So I used their IM service. One caveat: they say it’s primarily for Harvard students, faculty, etc. but since I didn’t have to do via my Harvard email account, just sent it on their website, how would they know?

Anyway, it wasn’t as helpful as I’d hoped. Initially, I stumped them and they had to take a few minutes to check around. When the answer came back, it was mostly what I’d already found in the online (Harvard login required) reference materials. They pasted an Oxford Dict. definition of “cognate”. But they took a stab at the application to a lit. review and it made sense to me: “literature that expands on my subject or that describes related situations”.

They say you can ask anything, so it’s definitely worth a shot if you’re in the midst of writing and need a quick fact.

I’ve been working just about every day for the last couple of weeks on two chapters that are due in early November — the Background chapter and Literature Review. Last Friday I went in to Grossman Library to copy a couple of ALM theses (not for the faint of heart — that meant copying about 200 pages).  I did some of this last year while I was working on the Proposal.  I targeted three theses that had my thesis director and/or a topic on national security or defense. This is a useful exercise because I can see how other people have organized and written up their chapters.

Interestingly, not everyone uses the traditional chapter structure.  By that I mean not every ALM thesis has a Literature Review or even Background chapter. My structure follows a typical format — I’ll start with the introduction, background, literature review and then move into “results and findings”.  That chapter is where I’ll analyze and interpret my findings.

I am very glad that I started writing the chapters in order as opposed to jumping to the “results and findings”.  This way I am reviewing my material, which I really hadn’t done for most of the summer.  As I’ve organized my materials in writing the Background chapter, I’ve come across evidence to use in my Results and Findings chapter.  This way, I don’t feel pressured to do the interpretation “cold”. Also, I don’t think I’m as likely to overlook key evidence or data than if I had just started writing the Results chapter.

In writing the Background chapter, I am also doing a few lit reviews and interviews.  In August, I discovered a dissertation by a Ph.D. student at Cornell who had one chapter on coordination of private security contractors in Iraq. We’ve e-mailed a bit and she has been great about sharing some of her contacts.  Between the background interviews I did over the past year and contacts I’ve made since June for “on the record” interviews, I actually have more people than I need. The contacts have run the gamut from being very helpful to difficult but manageable. I am not doing an interview-based thesis; these contacts are providing good quotes and some data, so it’s not incumbent upon me to worry about the quantity or a formal, structured interview questionnaire.

At times, when I feel a bit buried by the material or marveling at how long I’ve been researching this specific topic for the thesis (over a year), I remember that within four to six months I will be done! These days, I have far fewer moments when I think I’m not going to finish this beast. I think there comes a time when you have done so much work for the proposal and it’s been accepted and you’ve got your director on board and you both agree on an outline to proceed with and you’re actually writing the first chapter — at that point, I think you can see light at the end of the tunnel.

Occasionally, I think of my former virtual “colleague”/fellow student, Ian Lamont.  Unlike me, he was working full time and a parent. I do not know how he found the time around those responsibilities to do the thesis. But I figure if Ian can do it, I can do it.

The Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans Association (IAVA) has ranked Congressmen on their support of veterans’ issues.  Since Sept., 2001, IAVA tracked over 150 votes in Congress regarding veterans — in their tally,  Obama gets a B and McCain gets a D.

The New York Daily Post’s Robert Diamond wrote

As both an Iraq war veteran and a graduate of the U.S. Naval Academy, I am intimately familiar with John McCain’s valiant and honorable military service. McCain, as far as I am concerned, is a true American hero. Unfortunately, his heroism in the Vietnam War has been allowed to morph into a patently false “record” – ceaselessly touted by his campaign – that McCain is a strong advocate for veterans. That could not be further from the truth.

Read the report card.

My thesis director had asked me to start my thesis drafting with the “Results and Findings” chapter but I discovered as I started to get into it that I’d be better off beginning with the “Background” chapter and then the “Lit Review”.  The “Results” chapter is the meat of the thesis. Since I hadn’t been immersed in the thesis material over the summer, while we ironed out the argument and hypotheses, I saw that I’d need to refresh my memory with the background material anyway. When I asked to make the switch, she was fine with it. My advice here: if you have agreed to do something but then realize that it isn’t the best start, don’t be afraid to ask to make the switch if it makes sense.

If you are reading and writing about your material regularly and you’ve done most of your analysis and interpretation by the end of writing the Proposal, diving into the results and findings can make sense. For me, as with others in the ALM who study part-time around the other roles in their lives, I wasn’t ready to jump in to the heart of the thesis by analyzing and discussing the material I had on the three hypotheses.  Also, my Director had me consider a new hypothesis over the summer so I had to do some additional research recently. Be prepared to do new research after the Proposal is accepted if the Director thinks its warranted. In other words, your Proposal may not be the “final word”.

One tool to help me pull my evidence together is a self-made worksheet for each hypothesis. My argument centers on the interagency process, between DOD and DOS(State), and how that affected private security contractors on the battlefield. I have two contributing factors (important but not the root cause) so I have a worksheet for each of those. The sheets are quite simple really. The hypothesis is at the top to keep it clearly in my mind. Then I have a section for notes and the evidence list. As I write up the “Background” and “Lit Review” chapters, I add pieces of evidence to each sheet so I don’t overlook something.

When I did the outline, I guesstimated the length of each chapter. In the outline, I have each chapter broken down by major subtopics and their length. If I didn’t have an outline and approximate lengths, it would be much harder to do the drafting.

Having the first chapter drafted, it occurs to me that unlike any class paper I’ve done, my words, ideas, and the facts I gather will be out there for lots of people to read.  Having a professor give you an A on a paper is great but knowing that this will be “published” and accessible to whomever…puts an added pressure to check and double-check the story.

Finally, the Thesis Manual the ALM office publishes should be better. It really needs an update but doesn’t seem to be on anyone’s “to do” list. The Manual addresses all the ALMs but it would be more helpful if it had more info on each group (Humanities, Social Sciences, etc.). The Proposal examples in the back are great and the technical details (margins, pagination, etc.) are fine; yet, the some of the language is out-of-date in the Proposal’s “Research Problem” section. For instance, don’t offer your conclusion definitively (”my research will find that…”) since it’s counter to the idea of doing the research to figure out your conclusion! And the part about “using a computer” (pp. 34-35) — apparently the Manual was written before computers were big even though the pub date is 2003.

Anyway, I can see light at the end of the tunnel. Having my made it this far into the thesis process and finishing my last regular class over the summer,  I finally BELIEVE I’m actually going to finish this freakin’ degree! Being hardy New England/Puritan stock, I have not allowed myself the luxury of imagining saying “I just graduated from Harvard”. The first time I have the chance to say that is going to be fabulous!