I told a student this last week, and they said it was helpful and they are going to tell their friends, so I figured it might be worth posting here.

I am advising all doctoral students to come up with 3 different dissertation plans right now.

Tier 1: "normal" life

Tier 2: significantly restricted/delayed data gathering. Tier 1, but later, or fewer people

Tier 3: a dissertation you can write using ONLY remote resources.

You should also decide *now* what your decision points are for moving from Tier 1 to Tier 2 or 3. Make those plans, write them down, and tell your committee.

The reason I'm saying this is that no one knows what's happening in 1 or 6 or 24 months. You don't want to be in a situation where you're just in limbo waiting to hear about whether you can travel or get into this or that archive or whether this or that org will be up & running.

A certain amount of uncertainty is unavoidable right now, but that doesn't mean you want to just wait indefinitely for things to firm up and find yourself 2-3 years later stuck in a place you didn't want to be. Make a plan/flow chart/if-this-then-that decision tree.

when I was planning my dissertation, I told a mentor about financial constraints for travel. he encouraged me to try to do a chapter that could be done completely from the crib. it was the first time a prof ever told me it's okay to make research choices based on practical needs.

to give credit where credit was due, that mentor was @johndiamondphd. and that chapter became Chapter 2 of Ghosts in the Schoolyard, written entirely from archival texts, books, and documents I could get to without paying for a plane ticket.

much like delicious black bean soup you make because that's what's in your pantry, a dissertation you write using the resources at hand can turn out just as good or better than what you would have done under different circumstances.

brb getting soup

a cool story about black bean soup research! https://twitter.com/merylalper/status/1250883480550100994?s=20

more black bean soup research https://twitter.com/meredithdclark/status/1250867881035870208?s=20