Getting What You Came For

Peters, Robert L. Getting What You Came For: The Smart Student’s Guide to Earning a Master’s or Ph.D., (New York: The Noonday Press, 1997).

Peters covers graduate school from deciding to go in the first place to completing the degree, offering valuable advice at every step along the way. (Skip the section on whether or not you should go to graduate school if you’re feeling down—it includes some depressing, if accurate, assessments of the job market.) Of particular interest to the dissertation writer are the chapters entitled The Doctorate: History and Hurdles, Managing Yourself, Choosing and Managing Your Thesis Committee, The Thesis Topic: Finding It, The Thesis Proposal, The Thesis: Writing It, The Thesis Defense, Dealing with Stress and Depression, The Social Milieu and Swimming with the Mainstream: Returning Students, Women, Minorities, and Foreign Students. The book is based on interviews with graduate students, faculty members and counselors, and the real-life experience of the interviewees is particularly helpful. Peters offers a friendly and encouraging style, sound and realistic advice—and a sizable dose of humor.

From http://www.unc.edu/depts/wcweb/handouts/dissertation.html