Stage 18: Getting Closure

Why this stage is important: Celebrating your achievements, honoring those who have helped along the way, understanding moments of anger, regret and miscommunication along the way will help you ? the "new PhD" or EdD ? in clearly articulating and freshly pursuing new goals for research, publications, teaching and community service.This stage is important, in large part, because you can use it to mindfully enter into new professional areas, roles, and responsibilities.

Devote the necessary time and energy to write a long letter to yourself.Read on for some questions to consider, for some discussion about why to write this letter and for some resource suggestions.

1. Questions to consider:
   • What are the milestones/goals you've reached ? and how will you celebrate these?
   • How will you thank family and friends who have in their many ways witnessed and supported your work as a graduate student, a scholar and researcher in the making?
   • How might you sift through moments of regret, sadness and/or grief (which are inevitably a part of graduate school as a life changing endeavor with complex sets of relationships with communication and interpersonal glitches) so as to learn from, leave behind or otherwise move into next phases of your life without these as burdens?
   • How will you mark the changes in relationship with those who have ? as chairs, advisors, writing support group members, peer/co-researchers and research study participants ? been central to this specific project but with whom you may have no future or a different future professional relationship?
   • What next dissertation-related publications and presentations might you pursue in order to bring your ideas to conversations beyond local disciplinary circles?
   • Looking at the big picture of graduate school, what feedback, mentoring, and professional conversations have you found helpful? not helpful? What have been the biggest ups and downs of the process generally? What of these would you like to hold onto in your own practice and what would you change so that the downs might be erased, the ups be more regular?
2. Why to do this:
   Doing this writing and coming back to it at key points in your early professional life (and beyond, I'd say), one recent "dissertation finisher, noted "will help shape you into the advisor you'd like to be when it comes to directing dissertations yourself, and they will also remind you what it was like to be a graduate student finishing your dissertation." You will have reflected on this experience, set out ideas that can become an action plan, and planted a reminder of how the dissertation and graduate school processes feel from the inside.All of these, perhaps and hopefully, will allow you to move gracefully in to and graciously in future professional roles.Putting off celebrations, thank yous, making new relationships of old one or dealing with regrets will not make for easier next steps.
3. Resources to consult:
   Job Search Tips and Tools
   Managing Your Dissertation and Beyond (see especially the sections beginning with "The Study and Getting Closure)
   Transforming a Dissertation into a Book (a bibliography offered by UNC Press)

©2008 by the Regents of the University of Minnesota -- Twin Cities. University Libraries. All rights reserved. Appropriate Use of Computer Workstations and Electronic Resources If you have any comments about this web site or page, please let us know! Last revised: September 13, 2004 URL: http://www.lib.umn.edu/help/disscalc/stage18.phtml The University of Minnesota is an equal opportunity educator and employer.