READ UNTIL THE COWS COME HOME

Reading is a pleasure, a land to get lost in, and reading is a given if one is writing a dissertation. It is reading with a purpose, reading to discover information relevant to your topic. We read to learn what those who have studied this problem have seen and said about it. We read to satisfy the word hunger within us, to discover, to examine, and to find out. I believe it is this same hunger, turned sideways, that urges us to add our own voice to that of those who have already spoken. We have a conversation with the works we read, as in, “Yes, but what about this…?” and “I think that’s only part of it.” Our part, your part, is to say the words that have not yet been said on the topic that you or I choose.

Finding that topic may be tricky. Before you settle on THE TOPIC that will be your dissertation, you will grapple with many possibilities, and probably with many permutations of those possibilities. Do you want to write about leadership and change? Well, what ABOUT leadership and change? This may be the big umbrella of your interest, but the parameter of your focus will most likely be something small in scope, specific and manageable. What type of leadership? What change are you talking about? Who will change and why?

Notes and Noticing

Make notes on each reading. Use sticky notes or index cards or a notebook. Use what works for you. Notice what works for you. It may be a combination of approaches. Some people use a voice-activated recorder. This is great for those who have time in the car with thoughts in their heads, and much better to manage while driving than a paper and pencil.

Notice more things about yourself and your reading habits. Are you a bookstore person? A library person? A borrower? A keeper? (If you are the last in this series, I suggest you buy rather than borrow your books!)

While researching the history of community colleges, in preparation for writing about the future leaders of those colleges, I found myself traveling back to the founding of America’s first universities. I read of their influences and differences from European institutions. In the course of reading this history, which was fascinating in and of itself, I discovered that the practice of having a governing board was borrowed from the Scottish system. In contrast, universities in England used a system of leadership by rotating faculty members who typically served for a short term and then returned to their teaching role. This feature of governance type (governing boards), it turns out, is a crucial one in the present dynamics of running a college. Had I not read the history of colleges back four centuries to the founding philosophies and structures of American universities and colleges, I would have missed this key point illuminating an aspect of the topic I was studying.

Where Are the Cows?

You may become immersed in research, losing entire days or weeks to the pursuit of knowledge. Groggily, at some unknown hour, you will lift your head from the dim interior of the book you are reading and wonder, “What time is it?” and “Where am I?”

Then, depending on how far you are from home, you will either walk or drive or scuffle off to bed, only to wake the next day and do it all again (or go to work first and then do it all again).

As you are walking around, letting all of the wonderful, confusing, excessive, and contradictory information you have been reading for months overwhelm your senses, ask yourself, “Where is the cow that will come home with me?” In other words, in all of this reading, reflection, and mental journeying, where is the path that leads to the story you want to tell and the study you want to do? What are the questions that seem so clearly to you to be in need of asking and answering? Where is the issue with your name on it?

Here is a moment I urge you to take for yourself. Look down the path, and ask yourself what you can study, immerse yourself in further, bury yourself in if need be, and then resurrect yourself from several months from now, with the prospect of enjoying it? Are you talented? I have no doubt that you are. Are you intelligent? Again, there’s little doubt of that, for you to be where you are. Are you responsible and committed? Also, yes, given that you are dedicating an enormous amount of time and energy to something you said you’d do a year or two or three (or more) ago. Are you excited about the prospect before you? Is there something you really want to know? These last two are the questions you, not I, must answer.

I realized that if my topic were to keep my full interest, there would need to be uncertainty and something I genuinely needed to find out. I also thought that if it didn’t bore me, I would be much more likely to write about it in an interesting way, and therefore I would also be likely to hold the interest of my readers, including my hoop-holding faculty (who would pass me through to candidacy), my chair, my committee members, and my outside reader(s). If I’m excited and not bored, I reasoned, there’s a better chance they will be interested, too.

And that’s the way it turned out. I wish the same for you. So ask yourself, what mooo–ves me? What cow (issue) can I take to heart? What cow will come home with me? And then read and wonder and make notes and make stacks and read some more until one cow lifts her head and says “me.”