Ask Doctoral Advising

Its almost race day.  You’ve trained as best as you can. 
Now is the time to rest.  To vision your race.  To review and replay the race route.  And most importantly, to vision the finish line, seeing yourself cross the line. 

How can you be sure you are ready to defend your dissertation? 
You’ve done the work, you know the material.  You have reflected throughout your program.  You regularly  review the material from the courses and from residential colloquia. You have discussed and shared ideas with faculty and learning colleagues in a scholarly and respectful way, especially when you disagreed with a point. This has helped you develop your ‘argument’ skills—stating the facts and the theories, and backing them up with your experience and developing ideas and combination of theories.

No matter where you are at in your program, you can vision your process. 
You can review your subject matter and related content. 
You can see yourself participating in the dissertation defense and crossing the stage, getting hooded.

To accomplish this program, you need to see the end, the finish line: the defense of your dissertation and commencement ceremony. 
You need to know the route, the subject matter content  and the collegial interaction with faculty and learning colleagues.
You need to review the what you have learned, what you want to learn.  To connect the content, and identify where the holes are.
And, you should be thinking about how this dissertation and the knowledge you learned throughout the program informs your work as a scholar practitioner.  What is next? 

And when you get to the defense, you know the content of your dissertation.  You know what you wrote and why you wrote what you did.

How are you preparing for the independent research stage?  How are you preparing for the comprehensive exam and the dissertation?
Do you vision the defense and walking across the stage  commencement?