Episode Details

Hi, welcome everyone to finishing your literature review with less stress. I am your host, Dr. Marvette Lacy, and I would like to thank you for taking the time and spending the next 40 minutes with me or so to talk about all things literature review dissertation proposal. We are going to cover a lot today, so I'm going to ask that you as much as possible eliminate distractions, anything running in the background and take the next 40 minutes for yourself because there's no point to waste your time. Um, being here if you're not going to be fully committed and focused on this because I know that what I am sharing with you today will truly help you accomplish not only your goals as it relates to your dissertation, but any other goals that you may have in life. So with that, please eliminate distractions. I want those of you who are here live on a call, please introduce yourself, take some time, let us know who you are, what's your name, your institution, year in the program and the hardest part about being a doc student that you are having right now. Let us know in the chat and any other information that you think it would be helpful for us to know because this is very interactive and the more that we get to know about you, I'm going to share some things about me. Um, it just helps with the time and helps make this a very positive experience. So while you're doing that, I'm going to share a little bit about me again.

I'm Marvette. I currently live in Milwaukee, WI. And I graduated from the University of Georgia in the College Student Affairs Administration Program. It's a whole other topic thing about what student affairs is, if you're not familiar with it. Um, but I just want to talk to you about a critical point in my dissertation program. So my program was set up in that between your first and second year, you as a student were required to do, what is called publishable paper. Publishable papers, some can say that it's kinda like, um, a pilot study. So it gives you an idea of not only what you could potentially research about for your dissertation, but it also gives you an idea as you are completely designing and conducting in writing up your own research project, but on a smaller scale as a way to prepare you for your exams and for your dissertation.

A lot of people in our program do not continue on with the same topic from their publishable paper to their dissertation because the time in between and what you learned in between can, it's a large gap in, so this is truly meant as an educational tool, right? And it's happening in between your first and second year. So I started working on mine. I remember taking at least three or four months to really focus on the literature review because I knew that like people usually say that's the hardest part and that I knew that I was only in the program for about a year. And I knew I didn't know a lot, right? I didn't even know how to, um, like build a research paper. I only, I think only how like an intro to research course, um, at this point. And so I just did not know what I was doing. And so for me, you look at what people have done before and you model what they do right. And that's what I was doing. And so I spent a good two or three months just reading article after article and like seeing how they set up their literature reviews and which topic. I just knew that I wanted to study black women, but I was like, I don't know exactly what. And so I was just doing my best to collect all the references and write all the notes and I just remember having notebooks and notebooks and documents and documents of notes right. And, Somehow after like three or four months, I managed to put together some sort of document or a proposal because you also have to go through the process like you would and and dissertation and that you defend your proposal, you conduct the research and then you defend the entire paper.

And so I really worked really hard and I got it down