Does Everyone Hate Their Thesis / Dissertation by the End?
I think this is one of those emotional experiences that becomes a quiet part of the journey of writing a dissertation that people don’t always love acknowledging, let alone holding up to the light of day for others to know. I think it’s important and needed though, to make space for this, so thank you for bringing this up.
I do believe everyone goes through a stage - or many stages - of feeling disenchanted, confused, disappointed, and disliking of the thousands of words they have to output for a dissertation. Hatred could be and definitely has been a part of it for people (it’s such a recognizable experience that there’s a meme I’ve seen on academic accounts that reads something like “I know a paper is ready to submit once I hate it”).
As could feeling disconnected or apathetic. So I don’t want to say that all the emotional experiences of this stage look and feel the same to people, but it appears as though it is a part of everyone’s journey.
I will always remember the text I sent my best friend a couple weeks before submitting, something to the effect of “it’s a waste of paper to print this thesis” and “I have no contributions and I don’t even know what my findings are”. My brain was fried and my thoughts were circular and I could be hard pressed to differentiate between up and down. I was so tired of looking at the same ten chapters, of rereading the same paragraphs that didn’t quite complete the point in the way that I wanted, of rewriting sentences I wrote months ago whose meaning I wasn’t even sure I grasped anymore.
It was an unraveling of what felt like my confidence and ability. Felt like being the operative phrase here.
Just because it feels like what you’ve written is a hot piece of garbage (what I felt, not projecting that onto you even if you used a similar phrase above), doesn’t mean that it actually is a hot piece of garbage.
It’s just like the saying goes, “it’s hard to see the forest for the trees” (or something like that). It’s challenging to see the whole picture when you’re only look at pieces of it.
Remember when the game of being shown a zoomed in photo of something and then asking you to take a guess on what it was? And it’s sort of an impossible task?
That’s what I remember this stage of just-before-completing the dissertation writing feeling like. Like I was too zoomed in to see the whole picture, to see the value and the beauty of all the work I had put in. Because of that hyper focus, of finding spelling errors and grammar mishaps and unclear points, I started to look at everything as not being good enough and that’s where I descended into similar feelings as you here.
And I definitely think that’s a universal experience, this period of feelings you maybe didn’t imagine feeling (or as though you hoped it might be a happy or confident moment, finishing your dissertation) across fields and subjects and lengths of dissertations - that we get too zoomed in to have an honest reckoning with what’s written. While I haven’t run a marathon, I often think about it like that dip in energy and desire and motivation during one because a dissertation is in fact it’s own kind of marathon.
Because it’s part of the process, I’m going to encourage you to not have feelings about this being part of the process. There can be grief and disappointment about the stage for sure, of this being normal for (I want to say all but I’ll say nearly all) dissertation writers, but it’s the feelings about those feelings, that I want to discourage you from. The feelings of maybe not being enough because you have the disappointment or feelings of ungratefulness or disgust towards yourself because you have the grief. That’s where there damage can be done.
Experiencing a distaste for the work doesn’t mean you’re doing a poor job or that you’re not cut out to finish the thesis or that you don’t belong in academia and that they made a huge mistake admitting you. So you don’t have to make up any grand stories because it’s part of the process to become disillusioned with the work because you’ve been so ‘in’ it and so critical of it (as writing a dissertation calls for).
So make space for these feelings, wallow and stew about if you need to. Write a letter to these feelings or write a letter to the expectations of what you thought you’d be feeling right now. Watercolor your emotions. Cry it out. Go have a coffee chat with a cohort member or lab mate to discuss. Or dive into the recess of vlogs and blogs of folks who have written dissertations before to see what they did to pull through. Give yourself permission to feel the feelings, to welcome them as one stop of your journey (even if it’s a returning stop because journeys aren’t linear).
If you let yourself feel this hatred of the hard work you’ve done so far, the feeling will do what feelings always do, which is change. Downgrade into something less intense, switch to something more true, leave all together. Sometimes the hardest part of the feelings is thinking we’re the only ones who have them or that we’re wrong to have them. And the easiest part actually becomes the feeling through them, the welcoming.
Allowing those feelings to move through you means you then have a clearer head to find where your writing is actually finished yet, the points you still need to connect out loud (rather than in your brain) and rewrite sentences clearer, etc. Because it’s a brain drain to ruminate over the ‘appropriateness’ or ‘normality’ of these feelings about not loving your dissertation right now. And you do need that brain power for the aforementioned tasks like edits and rewrites and citation clean-ups. Again all part of the journey, not that you’re doing anything wrong!
One of the most helpful things for me to not go into defense having these types of feelings was to give myself weeks away from the thesis after submission. I picked my thesis back up one week before my defense and I read through it chapter by chapter, making notes and highlighting. I then had Microsoft Word read it to me out loud while I was packing to leave my flat (moving the day after your defense, I would not recommend, the having your computer read your thesis aloud to you, I would recommend). I had so much more wonder for the work I did, so much more connection to the research and the findings, and I recognized my story and narrative of the work. A set of feelings that felt so far away, dare I say impossible, a few weeks prior when I was in my own feelings like the ones you wrote above.
Feeling through this writing stage allowed for that to happen for me. I won’t speak for everyone and say that they don’t tend to hate their work by the time they defend it, because it’s likely true that some people do. And that will bring up another round of feelings I can imagine. But I know that giving yourself time and space to exist in this stage of the process, even though it’s not fun or easy, will give you the best chance of having whatever emotional experience you imagine having on your defense day (satisfying, fulfilling, exciting, relieving, ambivalent, uncertain, scared, etc). The variation and fluctuation of feelings during this last push is so familiar to so many of us on the other side. Eventually, you’ll be able to speak to your experience in past tense too, surviving it.
Cheering you on through these last few weeks!
See you in a few Sundays, after a two week break (for graduation!),
Dr. Sydney Conroy
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