The Hare…The Turtoise…or the Hartoise

I have a classmate whom I admire greatly.  He’s a part of our sister cohort at BenU’s Springfield campus, and characteristically he’s almost my antithesis. Although we are very similar in personality type, he’s more planned, rigid, and uncompromising. Qualities that I certainly appreciate on one hand and loathe on the other. Why? Because I am more spontaneous, fluid, and … also uncompromising—but in a very different way. Every so often, we engage in critical debate over the structure of our program, content of class assignments, and other pressing issues in a PhD student’s world. Tonight, we dueled on the subject of dissertation topics.

Now, our cohort is a few months ahead of Springfield’s. As a result, I like to think of myself as more of an expert than he is, and I take pleasure in “schooling” him from time to time. However, with his head-strong personality, we often find ourselves on the same playing field at opposite ends of the spectrum. We both entered the program having a good idea of the area that we were most interested in studying. I was resolute on researching high-performance Millennials in the post normal workplace, while he thought to do something oriented more in the HR realm. We thought we had secured our paths, but as we learned more in class, we found that our interests began to broaden.

Recently, we both altered our dissertation topics, and he shared with me “BY GEORGE and GREAT SCOTT, I HAVE IT.” I was extremely excited about his change in direction, and I do believe that he has an amazing topic. He also supported me in my alteration as I began to focus on life stage instead of generation to broaden my audience. However, as we began to dissect and question one another’s area of study, I quickly learned that he felt he’d found the topic he’d be sticking with for the next 3 years. To this revelation, I scoffed and shared… “You haven’t even scratched the surface of our field. You can’t possibly be sold already.”

I went on to share that my approach was all about letting it come to me. To this revelation, he probably re-pictured me as a flower-loving, tree-hugging, tye dye-wearing hippie OD professional. And, I can see why. But I feel that by allowing myself to absorb information as it comes to me, I have a better opportunity to choose the most relevant topic and research.

As we ended our phone call (so that he could enjoy dinner with his girlfriend), I thought to myself, “Is it really either/or?” As I pen this blog post, I believe the answer is really both. While slow and steady may win some races and fast and bumpy may win others, discovering your PhD dissertation topic requires absorption of as much material as possible—but in a limited period of time to ensure decisive work that leaves time to conduct research. After reflecting, I believe that by melding our perspectives together, we will find balance as we soon embark upon our second year of study.

From a practitioner’s viewpoint, the lesson in this post is for you to seek win-win situations when working with co-workers and managing up with supervisors. From a scholar’s perspective, your task is to ingest information until you’re 85 percent full and be satisfied enough to make the next jump into your research.