Jeanne Hoffman. Welcome to this Kosmos Online podcast. I'm ...

Jeanne Hoffman. Welcome to this Kosmos Online podcast. I’m Jeanne Hoffman. Today I’m talking with
Institute for Humane Studies Program Officers Dr. Bill Glod and Dr. Phil Magness about choosing your
dissertation committee. Welcome gentlemen, thanks for joining us.
Dr. Bill Glod. Thank you.
Dr. Phil Magness. Yeah, thanks for having us.
JH. How much does this process of picking your committee vary between schools and disciplines?
PM. Well let’s start with just the United States system. As a standard rule of thumb, most universities
require 3 to 4 members on a committee. This really varies by university, it’s often set by the governing
body, the board of regents, and what the minimum standard should be for obtaining a doctorate. There
are 3 to 4 different models that are used. The most basic, standard and probably typical model is a
committee of 3 to 4 members that are within the department the person is graduating from. That’s
going to consist of a chair who is your main point person, your research director, and 2 to 3 auxiliary
members that are on the committee because they bring something to your dissertations. Some
departments do require an additional academic from another field of study. This is especially true in
interdisciplinary programs but also some universities do so just as a rule, so you may be doing a political
science dissertation and you may have a chair and 1 or 2 other members from your committee that are
within your own department, but, say you’re doing a statistical-heavy dissertation, you go over to the
math department and find a statistician. Beyond that, there’s a model used by some schools where it
will be 3 or 4 members from your university plus an external reader, and I think we’re going to get into
that in a little more detail, but the external reader is a faculty member from another university who’s an
expert in the field you happen to be writing on.
BG. In my own personal experience, it was a pretty straightforward process. I approached my chair
about doing a topic and he was all-ears, kind of gave me an informal go-ahead. Once you get the goahead
from a chair, in lots of cases he or she will typically select the other readers on your committee,
the auxiliary readers. That may differ, in some places you may be able to select all of your readers, not in
my case, but in a lot of cases it’s a no-brainer, there’s not a lot of controversy because the other readers
will be professors in your department who specialize in the field that your topic is subsumed by.
PM. Again, depending on the department, the auxiliary members of the committee tend to fall into one
of two categories. The first being a kind of disciplinary specialist, that’s a person who’s an expert on a
very specific topic that may be of value to your research. Say you were studying American politics, you
may want to bring in a presidents expert to your committee. The other is a methodology specialist, the
guy who knows an econometric technique, or a statistical technique, or an archival research technique
in some of the softer disciplines.
JH. Do most schools require an external reader, and how do you go about asking someone?
BG. A little background: I think it’s often an excellent idea to invite an external reader even if it’s not
required, especially if he or she is a big name in your field. Oftentimes your dissertation topic is

something you’ll end up knowing better than anything on your own committee, your own home
department, so it’s good not to feel like you’re restricted to the knowledge of the people who happen to
be in your department. It’s good to cast your net wider and recruit external readers even when it’s not
required, and if your committee’s okay with it I say go for it.
PM. By all means, the external reader is a chance to add expertise, add prestige that you otherwise
wouldn’t get in your own department. Maybe you know a specialist that is also doing research in your
field, they could be an ideal candidate of someone to approach as an external reader. Another route to
go about finding one is to ask your committee chair. The committee chair should be at the high end of
his or her discipline in his field and would know who the other experts are who bring some issue
relevance or some research relevance to your dissertation, so you’re kind of getting your dissertation
before another set of eyes outside of your own department. If your department has a reputation of
maybe having a niche, maybe it’s very strong in Austrian economics but you want to see how the
dissertation fares in departments that come from a different outlook on a topic, that may be an
opportunity to get that additional reader, that additional level of feedback that otherwise wouldn’t
always be there in your own department.
BG. When it comes to inviting external readers, of course I think it’s important to go through your
advisor first, you don’t want to go over their head first of all [laughter], they’ll be like, “who’s this guy,”
right, but your advisor may have good reasons for or against external readers in general or against
bringing in a particular external person. Your chair often has local knowledge, counting in favor of a
reader who you weren’t familiar with, or she may have knowledge of a particularly bad reader that
looked good to you on paper, so do confer with your chair beforehand. Moreover, let your chair, unless
you already have a good relationship with the external person, let the chair be the one to broach the
topic with the invitee, they will likely have more of a relationship with your chair as being a fellow senior
professor, than with you, who’s a fairly novice grad student that they may not know. I think, all in all,
well-respected external readers are a boon to your dissertation, not only in terms of what you can learn
from them, but also as a signal on your CV of the caliber of people whose tutelage you were under. I
know one philosopher who had three external readers in addition to three readers from his home
department, and in addition these external readers had been engaged in a scholarly debate with his
committee chair on some of the very topics his dissertation covered, so that was a great dialectic for him
to have.
JH. You both sort of stressed the importance of talking to your chair and people in your department,
what are some of the biggest mistakes you’ve seen students make in picking their chair?
PM. I’d say not doing their research in advance, not figuring out what the style that particular chair is
going to bring to the committee, different chairs have different expectations of their students, some
chairs are very hands-on and want to see dissertation chapters turned out on that schedule and
reviewed on that schedule before heading on to the next stage of research. Others are looking for more
of a big picture, you deliver a finished product, they send their comments on the whole thing back to
you and you make your revisions. Chairs also differ in the amount of time they want to invest in a
particular student, and as a graduate student that’s pursuing a Ph.D., you want to find a chair who takes

your research seriously, that takes an interest in your topic. That makes it a lot easier to communicate
with that person, it avoids a lot of the pitfalls of falling into the neglect trap. Falling into a situation
where you aren’t getting feedback in a timely manner, a lot of that’s just accomplished by deciding who
you want to work with in the first two-to-three years of grad school, in your coursework.
BG. I agree with all that. I think one of the mistakes people make is asking their chair at the last minute,
without first establishing a mentoring relationship with this person. I’ve said this elsewhere: it’s really
important that you develop a mentoring relationship with a faculty member from day one, early in your
career stage. Very often that person will end up being your committee chair if their research interests
are congruent with yours, but you don’t want to launch into the dissertation stage unfamiliar with the
person who will basically be your head coach for the next couple of years. I think another mistake
people make, Phil went into this some, they treat their dissertation as just another grad school
assignment. Your advisor is there to frame your dissertation, to comment on your papers and chapter,
but he or she may vary quite a bit in the level of oversight they bring, so either way you need to take
charge. The chair, it is not their responsibility, and it shouldn’t be a presumption on your part that
they’re there to give you all the structure, you have to set your own deadlines. On a related point, you
don’t just want a nice chair, who will tell you what you want to hear and will make the whole
dissertation topic smooth and easy. It may not be fun at the time, but you want a chair who doesn’t pull
punches, who will be willing to give you the occasional scathing critique of what you’ve written because
that will make you a better scholar. Finally, I think a lot of people neglect to pay attention to the
placement record of different faculty members of their department. If you are looking for a chair this
knowledge should be available through your department, but it’s also qualitative knowledge available
through other, more senior graduate students in your program. “What is this chair like to work with,
what success have they had, what’s their track record in terms of placing their former students in jobs?”
If it’s someone who’s never had graduate students before or never been able to really place them well,
that should give you serious pause in considering this person as your chair.
JH. What other advice would you gentlemen give current students to avoid common pitfalls?
PM. It kind of goes back to what I said earlier, use your first two or three years of graduate school to do
your research. When you are sitting in the classroom, you are taking in the teaching style, the research
style of the department before you. At the same time, know that the faculty there are watching the
students. If you take yourself seriously, produce high-quality research for your coursework, that is a
signal that, “Hey, this is a student I want to work with. This is a somebody that I would be willing to
serve on his or her committee.” Take your courses seriously, use that as an opportunity to kind of
familiarize yourself with your department and the different offerings it has.
BG. Sometimes a particular course paper will be the seed for a dissertation. I would like to mention
briefly about the prospectus, the sort of proto-dissertation. The prospectus is what you defend as sort of
a proposal, an outline of what your dissertation will be, usually takes a draft or two, where you outline
your intended dissertation. Then, you meet with your committee to defend the prospectus. Usually
they’ll pass it, sometimes they’ll require some revisions here or there. At the prospectus defense, you’ll
probably be told lots of things you need to do differently that you weren’t really aware of going on. That

may feel a little bit overwhelming, but it’s ultimately for the best. They’ve been through this, they’re
specialists in knowing how to write good dissertations. Nonetheless, you’ll probably be surprised that
the finished dissertation will look much different than the outline you had going into the prospectus
defense.
JH. Well thank you both Dr. Magness and Dr. Glod for joining us.
BG. Thank you.
PM. Thank you.
JH. And for more career advice, visit kosmosonline.org. Connecting the network of liberty-advancing
academics, and this is Jeanne Hoffman signing off.