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Stage-Based Challenges and Strategies for Support in Doctoral Education
Stage-Based Challenges and Strategies for Support in Doctoral Education
Assignment: Essay Topic
Prompt: In the article “Stage-Based Challenges and Strategies for Support in Doctoral Education: A Practical Guide for Students, Faculty Members, and Administrators,” Pifer and Baker (2016) identified three stages of doctoral education, explaining each one and suggesting strategies to overcome challenges that arise in each stage. The excerpted reading below includes the explanations and strategies aimed at doctoral students in the first two stages of doctoral education: knowledge consumption and knowledge creation. Read through these paragraphs from Pifer and Baker (2016), and then compose an essay in response to these questions:
- Based on the challenges and strategies discussed by Pifer and Baker (2016), what challenges do you anticipate you will face in your doctoral program?
- What strategies will you apply to work through these challenges in your doctoral journey?
You must proofread your paper. But do not strictly rely on your computer’s spell-checker and grammar-checker; failure to do so indicates a lack of effort on your part and you can expect your grade to suffer accordingly. Papers with numerous misspelled words and grammatical mistakes will be penalized. Read over your paper – in silence and then aloud – before handing it in and make corrections as necessary. Often it is advantageous to have a friend proofread your paper for obvious errors. Handwritten corrections are preferable to uncorrected mistakes.
Use a standard 10 to 12 point (10 to 12 characters per inch) typeface. Smaller or compressed type and papers with small margins or single-spacing are hard to read. It is better to let your essay run over the recommended number of pages than to try to compress it into fewer pages.
Likewise, large type, large margins, large indentations, triple-spacing, increased leading (space between lines), increased kerning (space between letters), and any other such attempts at “padding” to increase the length of a paper are unacceptable, wasteful of trees, and will not fool your professor.
The paper must be neatly formatted, double-spaced with a one-inch margin on the top, bottom, and sides of each page. When submitting hard copy, be sure to use white paper and print out using dark ink. If it is hard to read your essay, it will also be hard to follow your argument.
