A Week at Camp Dissertation

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Shane Moreman seems destined to be a graduate-school success story. He entered a Ph.D. program because he decided ideas were sexy. And he has just finished his first year on the faculty at California State University at Fresno, where he teaches in the communication department.

There's one little problem, though. He still hasn't finished his degree. His dissertation has languished as he has lost interest in the topic. Mr. Moreman just wants it done. And if he can't finish, he's still kicking around the idea of becoming a massage therapist.

His department has given him until the end of the year to complete his dissertation; if he does not, he risks losing his job. So he isn't taking a vacation before he starts teaching summer school. Instead, he has come here to the campus of Colorado Christian University in a suburb just west of Denver. The second floor of a campus apartment building has been converted to Dissertation Camp. No canoes, no s'mores, no basket weaving. Just writing. Oh, and coffee. Lots and lots of coffee.

The creator of the camp is Sonja K. Foss, a professor of communication at the University of Colorado at Denver. Officially, it's called the Scholar's Retreat, but the students often refer to themselves as "campers." First held in 1997, the weeklong retreat is designed to help students who are stuck in that dreaded All But Dissertation stage known as A.B.D.

In many programs, students are left to fend for themselves when it comes to writing the dissertation. It is seen as a rite of passage, a gantlet to be cleared before entering the profession. "We hear about professors who say you have to figure it out on your own," Ms. Foss says. "If you don't figure it out, they're saying, then you don't belong."

At the retreat, students are able to shed their other responsibilities and focus exclusively on their dissertations. Ms. Foss and her co-director, William Waters, an assistant professor of English at Northwest Missouri State University, serve as camp counselors, but also fill the roles of therapist, professor, and sometimes butler.

"We try to take away all their excuses for not writing," Ms. Foss says. So when one student needs a particular color of Post-It notes, they run to the store. Another needed chocolate cake. A third wanted frozen peas to ice her sore back.

In addition to eliminating the hurdles to writing, Ms. Foss and Mr. Waters provide something else most students can never get from their advisers back home: intense, all-day attention.

But does all that help amount to cheating? Mr. Waters doesn't think so, although he acknowledges that some students even ask them not to tell their advisers about the retreat. "Our response usually is that we can only help writers discover and formulate ideas," he says. "The articulation of those ideas is up to them."

Getting It Done

Mr. Moreman got up at 5:30 on this Tuesday morning to get an hour's worth of work in before the mandatory exercise period (all the campers run or walk a few miles each day). After breakfast, he brings all his notes to Ms. Foss's apartment for his private advising session.

Through memoirs, interviews and his own experience, Mr. Moreman, 32, is studying how people from mixed Latino-white backgrounds create their own identity. A student at the University of South Florida, he is especially interested in the "in between," where individuals embrace the concept of being a hybrid instead of choosing one background over the other.

Since getting to camp, he has been working on a chapter in which he reviews several memoirs and the language the writers use in talking about their identity. He has already spent hours cutting up different passages and sorting them into related piles. Amid dozens of envelopes and bits of paper, he's struggling to finish the task.

As he takes a short break, munching on animal crackers and sipping a Diet Coke, the frustration is evident on his face.

"You sound like you're getting sad," says Mr. Waters.

"I am," Mr. Moreman says.

"You're moving along," Mr. Waters tells him.

But Mr. Moreman is disappointed at the slow pace. "The deadline is the end of December and I'm not going to finish," he says.

Later in the morning, he jokes that he's in the wrong subfield. "Maybe I should have gone into org comm and studied how secretaries exert power," he says. And then he announces that he regrets even bringing this chapter to work on at the retreat. It's one he has considered throwing out anyway.

Ms. Foss gently tries to find a solution. "Does it feel better to keep going or to stop this chapter?" she asks as they sit on the floor amid piles of notes. "It will feel better to just be done. I don't care about this," Mr. Moreman says. "I'm tired of the topic and of the dissertation. I want this to get written so I can get the little piece of paper."

'Angst and Confusion'

The campers shell out $1,250 for a share of a campus apartment and the pleasure of having a strict writing schedule imposed on them. Why not save the money and just do a better job of managing time and distractions back home? Put your nose to the grindstone and all that.

It's not that simple, Mr. Waters says.

According to him, more than three-quarters of the scholars who come to the retreat probably would not finish their dissertations without the help. With assistance, though, most go on to complete their degrees. "They can go through a lot more angst and confusion with us," he says.

The day is divided into a simple, almost relentless, agenda. The eight campers wake at 6 a.m. and gather for their morning exercise in a nearby park. Afterward they meet in Ms. Foss's apartment for breakfast. (All the meals are included in their fee.) The kitchen counter is full of fruit, bagels, cereals, and yogurts. The coffeepot starts humming. Nearby, a table is decked out like an office-supply store: paper clips, folders, markers, scissors, reams of paper.

By 8 a.m., most campers have disappeared into their own rooms for the first writing period. They break at noon for lunch at a local restaurant and return to the apartments for another long writing period. They break again for dinner and manage to squeeze in another writing period before their brief "social hour."

Campers are encouraged to be in bed by 10 p.m. But there are no lights out or bed checks.

Ms. Foss has helped 35 of her own students get Ph.D.'s over the years. Each year she sees students who have gotten approval for proposals that aren't very well developed and aren't very clear, which makes for a poor road map. "They think they're ready to write, but often they're not," she says. So she and Mr. Waters spend a lot of time sharpening and refining the students' original proposals.

Marianne Di Pierro, the director of the Graduate Center for Writing and Proposal Development at Western Michigan University, is a believer in Ms. Foss's and Mr. Water's technique of intense discussions to flesh out the dissertation idea. She invited them to hold a similar retreat in 2001 for Western Michigan students, but she knew she couldn't afford to keep offering weeklong retreats.

Since much of the time was spent on honing proposals, her center now offers "dissertation-proposal conferences." Students come for a two-and-a-half-hour session with Ms. Di Pierro (Mr. Waters and Ms. Foss have participated in some as well). Students and their professors often fail to communicate about the actual process, she says. These conferences give students a concrete idea, she says, "as opposed to going in with nothing but the blank sheet of paper."

Slogging Through

Just before lunch, Mr. Moreman is struggling to figure out how one of the memoirs fits into the schema he is developing. Then, with help from Ms. Foss and Mr. Waters, he has an insight. The author of this memoir doesn't fit. The schema needs to be adjusted. He isn't actually embracing the idea of being a hybrid between white and Latino; instead, he's just asking about the possibility. The burden Mr. Moreman felt earlier seems to lift noticeably.

"I don't think I've worked this hard on a paper," he says.

"Isn't it fun?" Ms. Foss says.

"No."

But as the group breaks up for lunch, Mr. Waters says moments like those, when students realize something doesn't fit but haven't quite figured out how the parts could go together, can be roadblocks. "If that had happened at home, alone, he would have rethought the whole project and taken a week off."

Instead he takes off just an hour or so for a burrito.

Finding the Passion

At lunch, the other campers finally take a break long enough to talk about other things: in-laws, music, and Mexican food. Most around the table have already moved on from graduate school, but the Ph.D. remains unfinished business, hanging over their heads.

Andrew J. Gooding, like Mr. Moreman, has a faculty job but hasn't quite completed his degree. He teaches at Marshall University, but is still trying to knock out his dissertation as a student at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. He's one of two campers staying for two weeks at the retreat, determined to get a draft of his literature review done.

A rhetoric scholar, he is studying World War I memorials. But for years, this one chapter has been his albatross. He has written four drafts already, one of which was an ungainly 140 pages.

The retreat has given him a focus he didn't have before. As his two weeks near an end, and after working on developing a logical framework for the chapter, he's finished his best draft yet. And it is just 20 pages.

His camp roommate for the two weeks has been Julia Hobson Haggerty, an environmental-history student at the University of Colorado at Boulder. She arrived at the retreat in crisis mode, she says. Earlier this year, after being A.B.D. for three years, she cleared her desk of other work for the first time. She thought she would finally be able to go quickly. But she couldn't.

"I would wake up every morning, seeing this sheer wall to climb," Ms. Haggerty says. "I came here to save myself."

It worked. At the retreat, she has become the most productive camper, ripping out chapter after chapter. She'll leave with a full draft of her dissertation on a valley near Yellowstone National Park. "It's helped me reconnect my passion for my research," she says.

The Eureka Moment

By the afternoon, Mr. Moreman and his two camp counselors have moved from the living-room floor to the kitchen table. Little strips of paper keep getting shuffled around the table. They're hoping that some brilliant, heretofore unseen relationship will emerge. The trio has been at the task for hours, and they are getting punchy. Slight jokes now elicit giant belly laughs.

But about an hour before the other campers emerge from their writing lairs for dinner, Mr. Moreman strikes gold. He stops opposing white and Latino, instead grouping them together against the idea of being a hybrid. Now he's seeing all the similarities between choosing to be identified as white or Latino and how they differ from choosing a third way.

It is a crucial change, and he is invigorated by it. "I've never been so free of academic theory," he says.

"I know," Mr. Waters says. "This is how you do original stuff."

After three days, lots of little scraps of paper, piles, and envelopes, Mr. Moreman has found a structure for this troublesome chapter. "I've been struggling with it for three years," he says. He has worked on it in seminars and classes. He has read everything he can on the subject.

"And this is the first time I've really had clarity."