There’s not much good to find in a destructive pandemic, but here’s one potentially positive outcome: Covid-19 may bring graduate schools to a long-needed reckoning with the dissertation requirement.

Embarking on a PhD is “probably the most challenging task that a young scholar attempts to do”, write Mark Stephan Felix and Ian Smith in their practical guide to dissertation and thesis writing.

You have /5 articles left. Sign up for a free account or log in. Roger Conover, the press’s executive editor, tells me that the handbook has been staple reading for ...

you will have to produce written proposals for you research. In some programs at Northwestern, you will need to write a formal dissertation proposal. And when you become an independent researcher, you ...