I finished a complete draft of my dissertation at the end of March, and it seems like an important milestone – also one that I’ve kind of glossed over, as a stepping stone to the next thing that I have to do – get a job. I wanted to spend a little time reflecting on the experience before I do the defense, before I start revisions.
I’m no stranger to long writing projects. In high school, I wrote multiple drafts of a novel. In college, I worked on a creative thesis that was a collection of linked stories based on myths from Ovid’s Metamorphoses. In grad school, I wrote a lot of short stories. In the time in between grad school and the PhD program, I planned out another novel and wrote parts of it in fits and spurts. In 2022, I did a draft of the novel for National Novel Writing Month. In a way, the things that I’ve kept up with and written most reliably and to the most complete form – blog posts and academic essays – I never thought were things that I’d really do. They seem like exercises, or placeholders until I do the real thing – whatever that is. And now this dissertation.
The dissertation is the most complete writing project that I’ve done in a while, and it seems like perhaps I should make some observations.
- I wanted to write this dissertation, and I found an advisor who let me run with my idea and asked very good questions. I mostly enjoyed the process. The project coincides nicely with the recent publications of women’s translations, and the project would be different if many women had not recently published translations, but still doable. It is something that combines seemingly separate and distinct fields of study, puts them in conversation with one another. It is a very long justification that explains how English, Gender Studies, and Classics can and should be combined, and begins to answer my question of why English and Classics are so separate in colleges and universities, when they do the same kinds of things and often examine the same texts.
- This project combines the academic writing with the personal. I use “I” in my writing, and I am proud and happy that I’ve been able to combine the two. There was no other option, really, for me to complete this project without also reflecting on the way that these texts relate to me, the way that I have experienced them. My experience is not unfamiliar or distant from the way that other women have experienced the same texts. That’s why translation is important and why it is rhetorical – it is written with an audience in mind, and women take the opportunity to clearly and accurately translate women’s experiences across different cultures.
- I hoped that I would come out of this experience with a clear writing process, a clear way that I produced the project and that I could plug future writing projects into. What it felt like in reality: one day I had a bunch of notes typed and hand-written; the next week I had complete drafts (still needed work, but they looked coherent). It was like I blinked and something happened. I suppose that’s partly what an enforced deadline will do: make you finish.
- I treated this PhD like a job. This is perhaps the best and most consistent thing I did throughout the program, even during COVID disruptions. I taught when I had to, and I went to class when I had to, but my main focus was keeping everything on a strict nine-to-five schedule, write every day, do the work consistently. Writing is like a muscle, the process will grow stronger with more consistent use. All of the work that I did to create writing routines was helpful for this.
There is still a lot of work to do (revisions, defense, job interviews, submitting for publication), but for now, I want to enjoy the quiet and celebrate this milestone, even as I move forward to the next step.
Alexandra Sladky 