This document discusses factors that contribute to doctoral student success and completing dissertations. It first outlines some common challenges students face, such as personal issues, cultural pressures, transitions from student to scholar, and inadequate advising. It then discusses the need for students to embrace ambiguities and evolving standards in research, which is becoming more personal, mixed-methods, critical, and holistic. Key criteria for successful dissertations include innovativeness, feasibility, clarity, ethics, literature review, and theoretical delivery. Eight signs of successful dissertation completion are realistic self-appraisal, vision, organization, risk-taking, managing demands, research skills, knowing one's calling, and understanding it as a step in one's career

1. Why Doctoral Students
Succeed
Powerful Research
May, 2014
Paul Ilsley
paul.ilsley@helsinki.fi

2. First the Challenges
 Personal issues during the process.
 Hegemonic forces from English-based countries.
 Shifting cultural priorities, especially in funding.
 Transitioning from being a student to being a scholar.
 Conflicting paradigms.
 Departmental culture.
 Inadequate advisement.
 Failure of nerve.
 Lack of creativity.

3. On Transitions, Orientations
and Living with Ambiguities
 Where we are going is inseparable from the way we go
there.
 How are conclusions made?
 What is the role of free will in research?
 All research supports the paradigms from which it comes.
 Sometimes we control the paradigm, sometimes it controls
us.
 Clearly research is both a calling governed by standards
and cumulative trends. But it is also intensely personal.

4. Evolving Standards of
Research
 Whose values does research serve?
 More personal, more autoethnographic.
 More mixed methods.
 More critical.
 More emphasis on the holistic nature of a piece, the
congruence factor.

5. A Word or Two about
Congruence
 Title
 Terms
 Purpose
 Audience
 Literature
 Research questions
 Data collection
 Data analysis
 Products

6. Criteria of Successful
Dissertations
 Innovativeness
 Feasibility
 Clarity
 Ethics
 Literature review
 Theoretical delivery

7. Eight Signs of Successful
Dissertation Success
 Realistic self-appraisal.
 A sense of the future and maintaining visions.
 Organization skills.
 Willingness to take a risk.
 Managing competing demands.
 Evolving research skill.
 Knowing one’s calling.
 Knowing the dissertation is a step along the way.