In December 2015, I graduated from Southeastern Seminary with a PhD in theology (with a focus on North American missiology). I’ve written before that the PhD experience was one of the most demanding and rewarding of my life. It stretched me in ways that escape easy description.
The stamina that is required to persevere through the dissertation phase is enough to sidetrack a number of great scholars, and I now understand why I have friends and colleagues who have done everything necessary for their doctorate except finish their final dissertation. Just imagine. You come to the end of seminars and papers and comprehensive exams, only then to begin work on something that will require 100,000 words of writing and literally millions of words of reading. It’s enough to send shivers down the spine of the most committed student.
Earlier this week, a friend who is about to enter a PhD program asked me a few questions about how I managed that season of life.
I hesitate to answer because, first, I’m not sure that I always managed it well or in an exemplary way. And second, because we are all different, we have different gifts and responsibilities. To say “here’s what you should do” seems woefully ill-informed if not designed for someone’s unique situation. It would be much better to work with the people who know you and your situation best—your wife, your family, your church—to get specific answers on most questions.
But what I can do is offer some counsel based on what worked well for me.
Is Everyone On Board?
For starters, it’s important that your family, your church, and your employer be on board with your plans. LifeWay prizes education and encourages many employees to pursue their degrees. I didn’t have to take vacation days to be on campus, and I had supervisors who gave me a day here or there to focus exclusively on schoolwork.
Time On and Off
Still, even without having to take vacation days as you work on your degree, you will have many nights and weekends devoted to the task. My suggestion is to build in rhythms of life where you know you will be “on” and times when you will be “off.”
For me, the time leading up to and after the seminars were “on” times, but when I would finish research papers and “close the door” on a semester, I would try to give myself a month or two of reprieve, where my work was primarily reading for future courses or for the dissertation. (I did find it helpful for my own sanity to find time to read fiction, historical biographies, and so on, just to vary up the books and reinvigorate myself mentally.)
Maximize Your Assignments
If you can, try to land on a topic for your dissertation early in your work, so that you can maximize seminar assignments to that end. The American model is strange in requiring so many seminars in the first place, so if the laser-like focus of the European model appeals to you, try to focus many of your seminar research papers on the topic you hope to do a full dissertation on.
That said, you shouldn’t think you will nail down your topic, write all of your papers as source material for your dissertation chapters, and then cobble it together for a final dissertation. That won’t work. Even if you have a general idea of what you want to write about at the beginning, your research will usually lead you in places you didn’t expect.
Research should change your mind. You are not looking to write something that you already know. You are looking to discover truth and argue for it persuasively. That discovery element, even if it begins back in the research paper phase, is vitally important, and it will affect your overall work. So do what you can to rely on your research papers as a base for your dissertation. But don’t chain yourself to a topic or an argument that you may, in fact, come to see as less exciting or, in some instances, even fallacious—merely so as to decrease your workload.
On that note (pun intended!), I never developed a special system for note taking. When there were sections of texts that I knew I would rely on for a paper, my wife would help by typing up sentences and paragraphs that I had marked, and putting them in a Word doc for me to use later. This was an easy way for her to help lighten my load.
Prepare for Spiritual Warfare
The one thing I wish I’d known before I started is just how much of a spiritual battle would be involved in pursuing the PhD. There are devilish traps everywhere. From the idea that more knowledge equals more maturity in your faith, to the ease with which one can fall into pompousness and pretentiousness in writing and criticism. . . . Or the low points of mental exhaustion, where your head literally hurts from all the reading and writing you’ve done. . . . There is a spiritual dimension to that struggle that I wish I’d anticipated beforehand, so that I could have better fortified myself spiritually for that moment.
The evil twins of pride and despair show up frequently, either causing you to throw your hands up and say, “This is terrible, and so am I” or to burst with excitement because you think, “This is amazing, and so am I.” The line between taking pride in your work or in yourself is thin. The ease with which we forget what a massive privilege it is to study truth in an institution of higher learning (and the stewardship we exercise in that situation) still haunts me. We so easily forget the spiritual identity we have received when we focus on the intellectual title we want to earn.
Know Your Limitations
A pastor friend told me before the start of the PhD that I would never study the same way again, that the rubber band of my mind would be stretched more than ever, and that I would study differently for the rest of my life, becoming an expert not only in knowledge but also in how to obtain the knowledge I need on a subject. The “how” of study not just the “what” is, indeed, a major result of going through the PhD process.
At the same time, rubber bands can be stretched so far they snap. So, a word of caution: you are human. Know your limitations.
Serve God, don’t try to be him. Seek Truth, not a degree, and may you find both!
