- On episode 14 of Office
Hours with Dr. Guy, I'm back.
(lively music)
Bring your questions to
Office Hours with Dr. Guy.
Hey, everybody, this is Dr. Guy,
founder of TheDissertationMentor.com
and author of The Dissertation Warrior:
The Ultimate Guide to
Being the Kind of Person
Who Finishes a Doctoral
Dissertation or Thesis.
And it's so just amazing to
be back with you here today.
And so what I'd like to do
is just immediately jump into questions.
Oscar asks, "where have you been?"
Hey, Oscar, welcome to the show.
Where have I been?
Well, number one, my family,
we moved to Portland,
Oregon, from Los Angeles,
the culmination of a
lifelong dream for me.
My dad, when I was about six years old,
moved us from, like, proper Los Angeles
out to a sub, a far-out
suburb of Los Angeles.
And I get emotional thinking about this,
because what he gave us was,
he gave us, like, a country life.
We were headed as a family towards a place
where we were gonna be
disconnected from one another,
where the busyness of just everyday
was just gonna swallow us whole.
And he moved us out, and
we moved onto a small farm
when I was about six.
And we got chickens, turkeys, goats,
ponies, dogs, cats, and parakeets.
I mean, if you can imagine
the animal, we had it.
And what that gave to me
was just this strong sense
of being connected with the
place that I was living.
And not only that, but
my dad gave me the gift
of working at home for pretty
much the majority of my life.
Until I was about 12 years old,
he was a computer programmer,
and he just worked inside of
his house, inside of our house,
and my dad was always just
right down the hallway.
I remember at 3:30 am most mornings
I would wake up to the smell
of Kool menthol cigarettes,
those cigarettes that
come in those green packs,
and it was just the constant reminder
that he was always home.
And I wanted to give that to my kids.
So that's the first thing that,
not the cigarette smell,
but the country life.
So we moved out here to Portland, Oregon,
for the country life.
I left my teaching position
of 12 years, and here we are.
The second thing that I've been
up to and the biggest reason
why you haven't seen me here on the show
is because I've been writing this book,
this book that is on
sale today on Amazon.com,
The Dissertation Warrior.
It is my manifesto.
It is my love letter to
you, all of you people here
that are trying to write a
doctoral dissertation or thesis.
And it's so overwhelming
to me to be sitting here
and to be able to communicate
what I would just say is my love letter.
Everything that I could say to you
within the last year is in this book.
And I would just highly encourage
you to take a look at it.
You know, just like you,
when you're coming to
the end of a project,
sometimes all things tend to really focus.
And that's where I've been
in the last six months
is in an absolute state of focus
as I've been getting my family
up here to Portland, Oregon,
and as I've been finishing
this book for you.
So that's where I've been.
Talaya asks, "when I'm
doing my literature review,
"what do I do if I can't find
"anything related to my research?"
Talaya, welcome to the show.
This is a very common question.
First of all, if you can't find
anything related to your research,
that's the sheer sign that
something is going wrong
with the way that you're
searching for literature.
If you look at, for example,
if you were studying
trauma-informed care practices of nurses,
and you went to ProQuest, which is,
happens to be my favorite
database in the whole wide world,
and if you typed in
"trauma-informed care nurses,"
and you're searching, and you just get
hundreds of thousands
of articles potentially,
and you just aren't
finding anything that fits,
it's much more likely that, two options,
number one is that
you're being too literal
in what you're trying to search for.
You're searching for
something too specific.
Or option two is you're
searching too broadly.
Because the middle way is the best way
when it comes to
literature review searches.
So what do you do?
Well, step one is you do great,
first of all, you find a great database.
You start there.
And my recommendation for
everyone that's watching this
and hearing the sound of my voice,
that great database is ProQuest.
Now if you're in the UK,
if your school is not a
subscriber to ProQuest,
EThOS might be the database
for you, but ProQuest for me.
Start with dissertations.
Go to ProQuest dissertations
and theses global, start there.
Second thing you do is you
start with search terms,
and you really narrow
down your search terms.
So in this case that we're talking about,
trauma-informed care and nurses,
first thing I'm gonna do
is I'm gonna pop "nurses,"
quotation marks around
nurses inside of ProQuest.
Now the reason I put
quotations around nurses
is just to simply illustrate the clarity,
the precision of the search term.
I only want nurses.
I want to see how many things
I get just with nurses.
So if I type in just "nurses,"
by the way, if I have the
quotations around nurses or not,
it doesn't matter at this point,
but you'll see where it
makes sense in a second.
If I search just "nurses,"
I imagine I'm gonna get
somewhere, like, half a
million dissertations,
something like this.
So I quote "nurses"
and I'm gonna do "and,"
I'm gonna type in the word "and," A-N-D.
This is an advanced search, by the way.
And I'm gonna add in, with
quotation marks around it,
"trauma informed care."
So I have, quote, "nurses"
and, quote, "trauma informed care."
And if I hit Search then,
my imagination says that I'm
gonna narrow significantly.
I'm only gonna get articles that say
"nurses" and "trauma informed
care" as a whole word.
My hope is, of course,
that I'm gonna narrow down significantly,
500,000 searches, results
down to something like,
you know, 50,000, 20,000,
the ultimate would be less
than 1,000 is what you get.
Now if something happens,
if it says no search results found,
we know where we went wrong.
It was in that "trauma informed care."
Maybe there's a hyphen that needs to go
between "trauma" and "informed."
Maybe I need to get rid of the word "care"
and just do "trauma-informed"
and see what happens.
If there is maybe a different word
that I could use for trauma-informed care,
that's what I could do; I
could insert that word there.
Let's say there was an additional
level that you want to do.
Let's say your dissertation
is about nurses,
about trauma-informed care and training.
And so I might put in the
word as "and training,"
"and" and then in quotations "training."
so what I'm doing is I'm
taking this, the most broad,
and I'm narrowing down
more and more specific.
Now in the case of the second option,
it's perhaps that you're doing,
you're being too specific
in your search results.
Let's say, for example,
you were doing this study
about nurses and trauma-informed care.
It is possible that you can instead search
for "nurses" and "mandated training,"
'cause really that's
what you're getting at
is how are nurses
trained in a mandated way
to deal with people who are engaged in,
or people who need help with trauma?
And so you might do "nurses"
and "trauma" and "mandated training."
Just notice that by getting around this,
what we're doing is we're
looking for anything
that's somewhat like this,
somewhat like the study that you're doing.
It's not so much that you're looking
for exactly what your study is about.
You're looking for things
that are somewhat like that,
because ideally what are you looking for?
One is that you're looking for, you know,
the search, the results
of other people's studies.
And secondarily you're looking
for their recommendations
for future research that
are gonna back up your study
and why you're doing your study.
So my recommendation is start
with these two strategies.
Use ProQuest, try out
dissertations and theses global
to start and then advance out
into the larger, the larger databases.
And I wish you luck; email me the result.
Peter asks, "what if I have
no time for my dissertation?"
Hi, Peter, welcome to the show.
Thank you so much for taking
the time that you do have
to watch this video and to
get answers to this question.
I think by far this is something
that most of us can relate to.
The reality is that we give time
to a load of things in our life,
and my hope is that the majority
of the time that we give
are towards things that
we believe matter to us.
We go to work because we
want to bless our family.
We go to work because we want
to bless the people that we serve.
And yet, this makes me,
this is a very emotional topic for me,
we often give those things
that our highest version
of ourself is calling for,
we often give that part of
ourself last, last pick.
If today, if you, and god forbid,
let's just say if someone,
if someone had some sort
of health scare today,
a significant health scare,
their entire world would come aligned up
to fixing this health
problem and making it right.
The feeling of time is short
would be immediately present for you.
You would orient your entire life
around making this right.
I had a dear friend a
little over a year ago
go through, I mean, he's around my age,
go through a cardiac event.
This is a healthy guy.
Everything in his life since that moment
has aligned due to this
event and has aligned
with what are the greatest
callings of my life?
What are the greatest things
in my life that I must accomplish?
Time is short.
Many people that are watching this
have the belief that the almighty,
the creator of the universe is calling you
to finish this dissertation.
Many of you that are here
and watching this today
have a belief the creator of the universe
in fact wants you to
pursue a doctoral degree.
So why then does this task often get
the last spot in our schedules?
If you told me that I was
gonna die a year from now
unless I woke up half an
hour earlier every single day
just to give 15 minutes of my
time to some sort of project,
I chances are would do that.
And likewise, for all of you here,
most of you that are
healthy and doing well,
just think about it.
What, there's so much little
time we have in this life,
do you want to do this or not?
And, Peter, for me,
as I'm hearing what you're going through,
and I know a little bit about
what you're going through,
(sighs) my greatest hope
is that you will be able
to take stock of everything
that's going on in your life,
everything that takes up your time,
and you will decide what
deserves the least of that,
and you will rob that to put in place
time for your dissertation.
Find the thing in your life
that is worth the least of your time
and replace it with something
that is deserving the most of your time.
And I wish you luck, and
let me know how it goes.
Serena asks, "how do I
deal with family pressures?
"It takes a lot of time
to write this thing."
Serena, welcome to the show.
You are part of a family.
If you have the aspiration today
of going out and getting a cheeseburger,
I have no doubt the skies would open up,
and you would be able to
get yourself a cheeseburger.
I have no doubt that
if you wanted to watch
that episode of Game
of Thrones late tonight
after everyone has gone to sleep
that you perhaps have missed,
I have no doubt that time
would manifest itself,
and you would be able to go and do that.
And yet for the things
that are of a rare nature,
a rare nature like exercising,
like, you know, getting and being healthy,
eating well and eating healthfully,
doing a dissertation,
climbing Mt. Everest,
or being an Olympic athlete,
these are rare things
that the vast majority
of people are not doing.
So when I go, for example,
when I go to family parties,
and I talk about what it is that I do,
what I often say is I'm a
teacher, I teach full-time.
Because if I tell people,
you might have this experience, too.
When people ask you,
"what are you studying?"
You might give them the basic answer.
I'm studying teachers.
I'm studying nurses and
how they do their work
and things like this.
Most of the people in
your life cannot relate
to you doing the dissertation process
and what it takes to do a dissertation.
Now in the terms of you and your family
and your role with your family,
that's where you as a
caretaker, as a lover,
as a person that is part and member
of this family that you're cultivating,
it's your responsibility to ease them,
ease their pain, and help them understand
a little bit about what
you're going through
and what you're doing.
And this calls for the
highest version of ourself,
because it takes the
highest version of ourself
to begin with to even do
this dissertation process.
But it even takes a higher version
to be able to help and steward others,
to shepherd others as we
go through this process.
It's like, you know, all the
course work you've done so far.
Everyone up until this point
has understood something
in common with you.
They've had class; you've had class.
You have class, and so they understand
what you're going through,
'cause they've had class, too.
But the idea that you're out of class,
and you're writing some paper
that's huge about something,
that's difficult for them to understand.
They have no idea what has
to go into this process.
And so my strongest
hope and desire for you
is that you can with
grace, with compassion,
with mercy communicate with them
a little bit about what
you're going through
and ask them to trust you.
"Trust me," you might say,
"this will be over soon.
"I just need these things
to happen in this way.
"I need to go into my office
for 30 to 40 minutes every day
"and just work on this by myself."
And I have no doubt, no
doubt that your family
at least has the desire to give you that.
And my greatest hope is they can
follow through with that as well.
Well, everyone, it's a pleasure
being back with you here today.
And I strongly hope
that you will check out
my new, brand-new book,
The Dissertation Warrior.
It's available on Amazon and
all fine bookstores today.
And it's so glad, so
great to be back with you.
Have a good one, guys.
(lively music)
