As a Ph.D Candidate in the second semester of my fourth year of study with my admission scholarship quickly running out and my desire to finish my degree increasing exponentially, I’ve been working on developing a plan to write my dissertation. For the past 4-5 months, I’ve flip-flopped back and forth over which chapter to start with; I’ve also started reading for all of them and stopped, turning back to my data instead for inspiration. These months aren’t lost time by any means - among other things, I’ve come up with chapter titles, have a paper in progress because of a conference presentation that I did with my data set, and have figured out how I want to present my dissertation - but I recognize that continuing on without a solid plan won’t help me to make the progress that I want to make.

So… where to start?

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