Welcome to Wang's Dissertation Community

If I am your dissertation chair (see the table at the bottom of this page), this course serves as our shared advising space. You'll find all advising tools, deadlines, procedures, and expectations here. If you'd like to request a meeting with me, please include a list of clear, specific questions as your meeting agenda. I do not hold meetings without a specific meeting agenda, because having a clear, specific set of questions allows me to prepare in advance and ensures that our conversation is focused, productive, and respectful of both our time. General requests like "I'd like to talk about my theoretical framework or research questions" are too broad to support a productive discussion. My goal is for every meeting to be productive. In many cases, questions like these can be answered more quickly via email, so you're encouraged to start there.

Meetings are expensive for everyone involved in terms of time. They require syncing schedules and often interrupt the sustained attention that scholarly work demands. Reading, thinking, and writing are the work. Deep thinking takes time and sustained attention, and writing is often the best tool we have to clarify our own ideas before bringing them to others. You're encouraged to start with email whenever possible, as many questions can be resolved more efficiently, or even better, refined through the act of writing them out.

As your dissertation committee chair, my role is to guide you through the dissertation process. This includes providing individualized feedback on your comprehensive exam answers, prospectus manuscript, and dissertation manuscript. I do not meet to brainstorm your dissertation ideas, design your dissertation research for you, or pre-approve your comprehensive exam answers, prospectus presentation, or dissertation defense before you formally submit or present them to the full committee. You are expected to demonstrate your independent scholarly thinking throughout these milestones using the knowledge, tools, and skills you've learned and developed in the doctoral program. My role is to support, not substitute for, that independent scholarly process.

If I am your committee member or not on your committee, you're still welcome to use the resources and tools provided here, especially Dissertation Buddy, a custom GPT I built to assist doctoral students in the dissertation process. However, I'm unable to meet or provide individualized feedback unless I'm formally serving as your dissertation committee chair. Please consult your own chair for guidance or feedback on your dissertation-related matters, as expectations, requirements, and procedures may vary across faculty.

Each faculty member's dissertation advising load is assigned based on the principle of fairness to ensure that advising responsibilities are distributed fairly across the faculty in the GSU Educational Leadership program.

Writing is a process of learning, thinking, reflecting, and clarifying and communicating your understanding. Don't conflate the output of writing (e.g., AI-generated word strings based on high probabilities) with the actual human labor of writing, which is how we come to know, question, and ultimately create. The process of writing is the very process by which your thoughts take shape. You can ask Dissertation Buddy to help you clarify and scaffold, but don't ask it to think for you. The learning process is a process of wrestling with ideas, making sense of complexity, and developing a new understanding.

So yes, use AI tools to clarify. Use them to scaffold. But the writing itself, which is the difficult, slow, reflective work of understanding, thinking critically, and building arguments, is where learning lives. Don't skip it. And don't fake it.