After over six years of grad school, I’m only days away from my dissertation defense, and am trying to prepare as thoroughly as possible! That means reviewing my dissertation, and practicing speaking about my research and writing to get ready for the kinds of questions my committee might ask me.

**Content warning for passing reference to literary texts discussing sexual violence from 28:18 – 33:08 **

Usually, I want to present a video that shows my genuine work process, but makes it as coherent and cohesive as possible. And usually, that means editing out any points when I stumble over my words or lose my train of thought. Otherwise, my videos would be twice as long – and besides, who among us enjoys watching back moments where we sound less polished, smart, and confident than our best selves?

But a big part of the reason I make these dissertation vlogs is to show a realistic and transparent version of what working on a PhD looks like. And right now, it looks like me trying to put together a strong answer to the same questions over and over again until I think I got it right. So sometimes in this video I trail off, or repeat myself, or get frustrated and lose my composure. But this is just the process I’m having to go through to reach that finish line! And as always, I hope that anyone watching can find something interesting, useful, or relatable in following along as I work my way through the PhD journey.

Because this video mostly shows me practicing answers to potential defense questions, you’ll hear me talk about my research a lot more than usual! If you want to hear some more context for what I research and how I arrived at this topic, you can check out my Dissertation Deep-Dive video here.

Thank you for following along with my dissertation process and giving me an outlet to talk about writing, research, and academia – and if you have any advice for a person in the final two weeks of defense prep, please, please share!

0:00 Intro
1:09 My Defense Prep Approach
7:00 17 Days to Defense
21:05 15 Days to Defense
22:27 14 Days to Defense
23:27 13 Days to Defense
34:28 12 Days to Defense
35:18 Reflecting