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

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