Habits to Finish Your Graduate Degree

Abstract Book of the 12th International Conference on Social Sciences, Humanities and Education

Year: 2026

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Habits to Finish Your Graduate Degree

Dr. Tanya Behrisch

ABSTRACT:

This presentation offers practical strategies for moving doctoral writing forward while resisting dominant narratives of efficiency, self-optimization, and academic perfectionism. Using narrative inquiry and a single case arts-based autoethnographic inquiry, the presenter reframes anxiety and rage as sites of productive scholarly inquiry and illuminates how moments of personal distress can disrupt modern, human-centered assumptions about control, productivity, and authorship. The presenter will ground her presentation in her struggle as a parent while pursuing her doctorate at a Canadian university. A series of visual images show the author engaging with paint, a found canvas and the more than human world outside her studio to produce a 1.5-metre painting that has been exhibited publicly in artistic and scholarly venues. Visuals demonstrate the author struggling with loss of control and surrendering while creating a surprising artifact with non-human agency to calm and reassure the artist. The presenter appeals to doctoral students that while we are imperfect, we can still produce legitimate worthy scholarly work. Participants are invited to “meet themselves where they are” and consider discomfort as integral to scholarly becoming rather than as failure. By foregrounding self-doubt, the presentation illuminates the potential for human frailties to provoke scholarly creation. Key practical takeaways include prioritizing mental health, using a writing coach to maintain momentum, encouragement to write badly and embracing an imposter identity within the academy. These tactics helped the author complete her award-winning PhD thesis in three years and can help students move towards finishing what they started.

Keywords: Writer's Block; Paralysis; Doctoral Education; Imperfection; Arts-Based Research