'NOTHING TO DO WITH BRIGHTNESS'
Psychologist Specializes in Counseling Graduate Students Who Seem Unable to Finish Their Doctoral Dissertations
By Peter Monaghan
Venice, California -- With more sympathy than that of a schoolteacher who hears excuse after unlikely excuse from kids who have neglected their homework, Joan Rodman has listened over the past three years to hundreds of doctoral candidates who couldn't finish their dissertations.Psychologist Specializes in Counseling Graduate Students Who Seem Unable to Finish Their Doctoral Dissertations
By Peter Monaghan
Ms. Rodman, a licensed psychologist here, has a most unusual practice: She specializes in helping such students. Says Ms. Rodman: "Many students need to transform themselves if they are to produce."
It would be an ingenious schoolchild who blamed undone homework on classic psychoses such as the fear of dying. Ms. Rodman is convinced, however, that many graduate students' inability to clear education's final, formal hurdle is explained by precisely such factors.
She began to formulate her approach six years ago, while serving as director of student services at the graduate school of education at the University of California at Los Angeles. Enrolled in a Ph.D. program at International College, which has since been acquired by another institution, she was struggling to complete her own dissertation. It focused, ironically, on the problems faced by doctoral students who had problems finishing their dissertations.
Ms. Rodman saw a need for support groups, so she started one while she was at UCLA.
Ms. Rodman reasons that because many Ph.D. candidates are carefully selected, highly trained students, something else must explain their failure to finish. "It has nothing to do with brightness, high GRE scores, or grades," she says. "I find it has very much to do with personality."
Since she went into professional practice, Ms. Rodman has had no shortage of clients. Graduate-school officials estimate that fully 50 per cent of all Ph.D. candidates are "ABD's" -- for "all but dissertation" -- meaning they have completed all other requirements for the doctoral degree.
In groups of five to seven, or individually if necessary, Ms. Rodman's clients work with her on what she calls the "psychological underpinnings" of achievement. Her experience with hundreds of clients, she says, suggests that finishing the dissertation often is obstructed by unrecognized psychological barriers. Often, she says, people who take longer tend to be those who have had major losses in their lives -- such as a parent's absence due to death, divorce, or neglect.
She began to realize that as she was comparing fast and slow finishers for her own dissertation: To her surprise, she found that the very fastest students generally suffered anxiety just as other students did. But they coped by developing close relationships with their advisers, often by working as teaching assistants. Most significantly, she says, they worked productively whenever they felt anxious.
The fastest students also shared other traits: They could tolerate not being perfect, and almost all were married. (She cautions, however, that spouses are not always helpful. She recalls one client's husband, a minister, who declared once from the pulpit that wives had no business being in graduate school and were not good Christians if they were.)
At the other extreme, Ms. Rodman says, the slowest students had no relationships with others. And, while often given to helping others, they did not seek help themselves for fear of feeling vulnerable.
As Ms. Rodman sees it, feelings of loss may be compounded by a fear of the end of childhood, which she says the dissertation powerfully symbolizes. That may produce a surge of anxiety and depression that often takes the form of a flood of complaints from graduate students about their departments.
"Endings are very hard," she says. "I help people repair parts of themselves so they can complete childhood, as strange as that sounds."
To those who doubt her psychoanalytical approach, Ms. Rodman likes to point out that alma mater is Latin for "fostering mother," while the word matriculation has its origins from being in the womb. "It's time to get out," she says.
Often, identity issues explain a graduate student's problems, according to Ms. Rodman.
One former client, Jemela Macer, now a clinical psychologist, agrees. The child of a family of Armenian doctors, she says she was stumped trying to finish a dissertation about a family of Armenian doctors.
"I had completely negated the influence of my ethnic background," she says. "There were a whole lot of real interesting issues that I wasn't looking at and that Joan was able really to crystallize."
Another former client, who prefers to remain anonymous, says: "What Joan does is to let you confront the personal journey that is the dissertation. She said during a lecture: `Any issues that you haven't resolved in your life up to that point are going to pop up in the dissertation process.' "
Many dissertations, Ms. Rodman says, take forever because they involve an upheaval of the self. "You find a question in life or in yourself, and you literally have to rework yourself to come up with a solution," she says.
Dissertations in the hard sciences take less time partly because they entail less of an upheaval, and because students often share laboratories and collaborate with professors on projects that form the basis of dissertations.
"There's not the same communality about going to the library," Ms. Rodman notes. So she advises many clients to look further afield for support. She describes one student who, faced with a fast-approaching deadline, checked into an elegant Los Angeles hotel to finish her work: "I told her to find an absolutely wonderful place to write, and go for it. You pay your $250 for a night, you're gonna write, honey."
The student overcame years of dawdling and churned out her work, buoyed by views of the city, room service, and a sister who visited to lend moral support.
Ms. Rodman is not impressed with books on the market that offer advice to Ph.D. candidates. She objects that they ignore psychology and instead bombard students with tasks: Make check lists. Clean your desks. Color-code your filing cards. But that doesn't mean she won't include how-to advice in her book-in-progress, called When I Finish the Dissertation I Think I'm Going to Die.
Among her often eclectic tips:
* To overcome fear of solitude, go to a busy place, like an airport.
* Don't insist on writing rationally and sequentially.
* Use modest stationery, never good bond paper. "That way you know it's not a final product and you don't put up all of your defensiveness."
* And finally: Remember that the task is finite.
Ms. Rodman says she never asks how dissertations are coming, though she may nudge a client along with pithy advice.
"A dissertation is like a pregnancy that you can't abort," she says. "You have to go through with it, and if you don't, then you stay pregnant all your life, which is not fun. It takes a lot of rationalizing to say why you invested $50,000 -- and nine years of your life -- and never finished."
Copyright © 1989 by The Chronicle of Higher Education
