The Revision Dance
My thesis director sent comments via email today on my first two chapters. The good news is she likes my work. Only minor revisions. She made specific suggestions so I’m sure my second submission will be fine. It feels great to get “calibrated” – until the director returns your first submission, you don’t know how it will go. Now, I am confident we will work together well; there won’t be any “slash and burn” critiques.
The Background Chapter was the easier of the two to compose. The Lit. Review has always been the “beast”. I’m good at finding appropriate material and summarizing – which is often enough for some directors. But a stirling review includes synthesis. For my topic, private security in Iraq, there wasn’t any scholarship on my particular argument so I couldn’t do a narrow review that only addressed that literature. My director asked me to broaden the review and look at the interagency process, public-private partnerships, and private contracting in recent U.S. military operations. Each became a sub-heading in my lit. review chapter. She also wanted me to write about military strategy but I realized that was too broad so I got her approval to switch it to military doctrine and regs on contracting. Not only did I review academic scholarship but I included Congressional testimony and pertinent reports from the Congressional Research Service (CRS), GAO, and think tanks.
In August, a Cornell Ph.D. published her dissertation which had a chapter on my topic so I focused on that in the lit. review, in terms of scholarship. She’s the only other academic researching my particular topic. (There are plenty of others who research private military but not this specific question). This is one of the realities of doing a thesis/diss. — you can be well into it and “suddenly” someone pops up who’s also in your domain. You wouldn’t know about the other work unless it was published, you kept checking certain sources, or you heard about it from a conference. She and I have picked a subject which is hard to gather data on and only just began happening in OIF. That’s why there’s no one else doing it yet.
When you look over the ABI/ProQuest database of theses and dissertations, it becomes apparent that there is no one way to do this product. Even some dissertations don’t have a lit. review chapter. Some theses are just long papers. So it’s important to be clear with your director what style she expects. The vehicle is the outline. I can’t imagine doing a thesis without one.
Currently, I’m working on the Results and Findings Chapter — the heart of the thesis. It will incude analysis and interpretation. It’s due in early December. There’s a separate Conclusion Chapter. The whole first draft is due by Jan. 15 which should be doable.
More about the trek into the Results effort next time.
