Journey to a PhD – The Renegade Coder

It's July 2024, and I have three chapters of my dissertation drafted! Two more and we'll be ready to defend. What Does It Mean to be All But Dissertation? It's been some time since I've written about my PhD journey. After all, quite a lot has happened since 2018, and I've been so sucked into the grind that I've forgotten to share my progress. As a result, I wanted to spend some time today talking about my current stage in my PhD program, which is often affectionately called "All but dissertation" or ABD. To illustrate what ABD actually looks like, here's a little recap of some of the major milestones in my PhD journey: The Nightmare Before Grad School Application Deadlines Orientation Week Reflection: Teaching, CSE, and UCAT Preparing for the Qualifying Exam I Failed My Qualifying Exam Two Months Away From Getting a Master’s Degree I Passed My Qualifying Exam! I Am a PhD Candidate! Since passing my candidacy exam, I've conducted my entire study, and all that's left to do is write up my dissertation. That's what we mean when we say ABD. What's Left to Do? At the time of writing, I've drafted three of the five chapters in my dissertation. Specifically, I've written the literature review, the methods, and the findings chapters. The last two chapters are the introduction and conclusion chapters. I estimate about two more months of writing before I have a full draft of my dissertation. Therefore, I am planning to defend my work in the fall and hopefully graduate on December 15th, 2024. In the meantime, I'm going through feedback cycles with my advisor and my committee. At the moment, I'm feeling pretty good about my progress, so I expect to have a full draft around the time fall semester begins. At that point, there is somewhat of a painful process that begins. For example, I have to declare my plans to graduate by September 6th. The defense then has to occur by November 22nd, and the final dissertation document has to be submitted and accepted by November 27th. In addition, the dissertation document has to be reviewed for accessibility somewhere along the way to submission. Did You Find Anything Interesting? Glad you asked! At this point, I haven't really talked a lot about my work on this site. I think the closest I've done is talk a little about ethnography. Regardless, the short description is that I looked at student values and how they compare to their beliefs about the values of their institution. In this case, the students we're talking about are undergraduate computer science students, and the concept we're looking at is called value congruence. What I found is perhaps not going to be all that surprising. In general, there is alignment in values when it comes to getting students into the classroom (i.e., students want to take classes and institutions want students to take them). However, once students are in those classes, the alignment in values breaks down. To illustrate what this looks like, students value a much more diverse set of resources than they believe the institution does. These resources range from relationships like friends and family to practitioner resources like Stack Overflow or ChatGPT. On the other hand, students believe the institution only cares about institutional resources like faculty, homework, and textbooks. Ultimately, I don't find the results particularly surprising. You hear students say these sort of things all the time when they are rightfully critical of their education. However, it is nice to have some empirical evidence of this reality that we can point to. What Can We Do With This Knowledge? One of the arguments I've made in my dissertation is that undergraduate computer science education needs to be reformed. I make this argument on the premise that others have made the same argument before me and that there are many recent issues in the literature that could also benefit from reforms. I take that argument a step further by centering students. Specifically, I argue that students should be the primary benefactors of any educational reforms, and I justify that in a variety of ways: there are more students now than ever before, students face a lot of challenges, and addressing these challenges would result in positive benefits for institutions more broadly. I then extend that argument to say that we should leverage value congruence as the lens by which we prioritize students in reform efforts. The majority of this argument hinges on the known benefits of value congruence in the business world, and I'm just mapping the results onto computer science education. All of this is to say that the results of my study give us ways that we can construct reform efforts that improve the experience for students. In turn, institutions will see a variety of benefits like improved retention and pass rates. Ultimately, it's a win-win for both parties. At the moment, I'm not sure what reform efforts would look like explicitly, but I imagine some of them will lean in the direction of adopting a more community-based education focus as well as more real-world curriculum. These are things that are already evidence-based. My work just provides another way of arguing for their inclusion in computer science education. With that said, I don't want to give all the goodies away just yet! I'll update y'all with where things are once I've successfully defended my work. As a result, look out for an article titled something like, "lessons learned from earning a PhD," or something like that! In the meantime, feel free to read some of the following related articles: Reflecting on Two More Semesters of Teaching: Spring & Autumn 2023 Using Ethnography to Advocate for Student Needs in Computer Science Education It’s Time We Talk About Student Evaluations of Teaching Likewise, you can take your support a step further by heading over to my list of ways to grow the site. Otherwise, take care!