For the month of January, and in celebration of our two year and 100th post anniversaries, we’re revisiting some of our most viewed columns. Today we’re re-posting about the importance of failure in the dissertation process. Enjoy!
My birthday was last week and I threw a party. In lieu of a cake I made dozens and dozens of macarons.
They were delicious (it was the cake batter buttercream) and my guests were very impressed.
Several people told me that they didn’t know I had such advanced baking skills as macarons have a reputation for being particularly difficult to make.
But here’s the thing about macarons: they aren’t that hard to make if you have the right equipment. To make macarons you need the following ingredients:
- blanched almond flour
- powedered sugar
- cream of tartar
- egg whites
- granulated sugar
- flavored extracts or emulsions (if you want to add them)
- food coloring (if you want)
- filling (I like buttercream but you can use jam, ganache, or whatever you want)
Other than the blanched almond flour, most of the ingredients are common place and not very expensive.
The equipment, however, is a different matter.
Macarons are ridiculously hard to make if you don’t have a stand mixer to make that crucial meringue. You can make a meringue with a hand mixer or, god forbid, a whisk but it takes sooooo long and will tire out your arms.
You also need something to sift the almond flour and powdered sugar together.
Once you mix the batter together and it gets to the stage where you can make a full figure eight with the batter sliding off the spatula you’re ready to put it in the piping bag. Piping bags are a wonderful invention but they take some getting used to.
From there, pipe the macarons to the size you want, bang the tray on the counter three times, let them sit for twenty minutes, and put them in the oven.
After that, you’ll probably have pretty good macarons.
You see, the process is time consuming and resource intensive, but it’s not particularly difficult.
I was thinking about this while I was making endless macarons for my party and realized that most skills are that way: not particularly difficult if you have the resources, the time, and the freedom to fail (as I did with my first several batches of macarons).
Dissertations are the same way. The PhD process, from course work to prelims, is designed to give you the resources you need to complete the project.
If you’ve completed those things then I promise that you have what you need to write and defend a dissertation.
To make that crucial transition from ABD to PhD, you need to give yourself the other two things: time and the freedom to fail.
This month we’ve been covering the latter. Next month, we’ll be covering the former.
Part of why we started with letting go of perfection is because you will find that, when you let go of being perfect, you gain a lot of time.
This isn’t exactly groundbreaking advice. A lot of authors more famous than me have said the same thing. There’s the Jane Smiley quote, “Every first draft is perfect because all the first draft has to do is exist. It’s perfect in its existence. The only way it could be imperfect would be to NOT exist.” There’s also Shannon Hale’s quote, “I’m writing a first draft and reminding myself that I’m simply shoveling sand into a box so that later I can build castles.”
I could pull up a dozen more quotes but the point is always the same: let go of perfection in your work, especially your first drafts. This is necessary for writers to function generally but particularly necessary for academic writers. You have a committee whose job it is to assess the quality of your work. Your job is to do the work. Let them do theirs and you do yours.
Is it more complicated than that? Sure, there are nuances, but if you want to make any kind of progress you have to give yourself the freedom to fail.
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