Welcome to a special version of the Student Spotlight – Aspen Employee Edition! Dr. Sheila Unwin is the Executive Director of Curriculum Services at Aspen University. She completed the Doctor of Education in Leadership and Learning with a specialization in Organizational Leadership in August 2024. Read on for some valuable insider advice from Shelia about how to approach doctoral studies while working full-time.
I have two pieces of advice for anyone starting a doctoral program. These are based on my own experience and your mileage may vary.
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When I started my doctoral journey in January 2019, I was confident that I could sail through the program with little changes to my daily life. I would do a little bit of reading and writing each night and that would be that. Right after I started, a friend invited me to play a role-playing game which would take roughly 2 hours a week and I said, “Of course, that sounds like a lot of fun.” Little did I know that 2 hours would be more like 5 and to play successfully I would need to study my character to understand what it was capable of doing. Within a month, I had to back out of playing. It was taking too much time and starting to cause me stress. I really didn’t have the bandwidth to play. It made me take a look at the haphazard approach I was taking to my education. |
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What worked for me was to limit my social engagements when I was in class. Additionally, I set a schedule for myself. Each week, I began by reading the textbook chapters and additional resources. Once that was done, I would work on the two discussion questions as they usually feed into the assignment. I would have both written before either was due. Then the assignment. The discussion questions would usually take until Wednesday to complete. I would then tackle the assignment on Thursday and Friday. I tried to complete the assignment before going to bed on Friday so that I would have the rest of the weekend to spend with friends and family. This meant that sometimes I would go to bed at 11 pm while other times I would be up at 4 am on Saturday.
In addition, I set a hard stop with work because I knew I could otherwise continue with work tasks until late into the evening. This hard stop could fluctuate by 30 minutes or so, but could also be upended by an emergency. Generally speaking, I would stop every workday at a specific time. I would sometimes work on my discussion questions or assignments during lunch in order to make every moment count.
This schedule provided me with time to look ahead at the upcoming discussion questions and assignments and start mulling them over in my head. Additionally, it allowed me to be diligent in my studies while also having a life. The schedule changed a bit when I began working on my dissertation. I worked later in the evenings throughout the week and more often on the weekends. I could see the end in sight!
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One of the biggest pieces of advice is to start thinking of your dissertation topic early. Going into the dissertation I had a bit of an advantage; During the second class of the program, I had an epiphany and was able to determine the focus of my research. From that point on, whenever I had the opportunity to write about the topic or incorporate it into my assignments, I took it. When it came time to start my dissertation, I had compiled roughly 70 sources in a spreadsheet. Each tab was a different sub-topic of my focus and listed the APA reference information, which course and module I used it in, and a brief summary of the article.
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One of the most difficult sections of the dissertation is often the Literature Review, but because I had been working on it for four years already and had the information organized it was a piece of cake! I did have to make some updates as some of the articles were outdated by the time I started writing my dissertation. To complete the Literature Review I only had to assemble information and fill in gaps to write a compelling analysis of my prior research. |
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