Grad students enlist in dissertation bootcamp

At 9:00 yesterday morning, Tracy Musacchio was recovering from pneumonia. Yet there she sat at the Graduate Student Center, pen in hand and laptop open, plugging away at her dissertation.

Musacchio, an eighth-year School of Arts and Sciences graduate student, is participating in dissertation boot camp, a two-week program for graduate students designed to provide a conducive working environment for those straddled with dissertations - lengthy, research-based papers on a self-proposed thesis that graduate students must complete in order to earn a doctoral degree.

"I basically paid for the privilege of being locked in a room for four hours a day," Musacchio said.

Dissertation boot camp - which is run by the Graduate Student Center in conjunction with the Weingarten Learning Resources Center - began earlier this month and will continue through Friday.

The program provides a relatively strict environment in which graduate students can devote all of their energy to writing and can develop good project management skills, Graduate Student Center director Anita Mastroieni said.

"This isn't kindergarten," Mastroieni said. "No milk and cookies and nap time."

And there's no e-mailing, Facebook.com stalking or instant messaging, either.

From 9:00 a.m. to 1:00 p.m., boot camp rules are posted on almost every available surface.

Specific rules include no e-mail checking, as well as using the Internet only for academic purposes, Musacchio added.

Students are given 30 minutes of break time each day.

Participants - 18 students from five of Penn's graduate schools - are required to pay a $50 deposit at the beginning of boot camp. If students come every day, they get the money back; if not, they lose it.

But the strict protocol isn't stopping graduate participants from singing praises about the boot camp.

"I think the program is great," sixth-year Engineering graduate student Anne Bracy said. "You have limited breaks, limited distractions, [and] it forces you to work at a schedule, which is one thing you never have in grad school."

Graduate Center officials agree: It's about more than just the money and the structure.

Mastroieni pointed out that students love the sense of camaraderie developed by going through the grueling dissertation-writing process together.

"It's painful," she said - "it's a very solitary exercise. . We want boot camp to alleviate that."

Boot-camp members also meet with staff members from the Weingarten Learning Center in order to establish feasible organizational goals that will help students finish their work on time.

"We provide kind of a reflection and feedback on many of the management concerns that dissertations really embody," said Pat Thatcher, associate director for the Office of Learning Resources.

The end for Musacchio - who is writing about Egyptology - is located somewhere around the 500-page mark, and she expects to have a draft completed by this spring.

"I've been kind of putting it off until I was at a point where I was a little bit stalled," she said of why she was inspired to sign up in the first place. Now, however, she feels "pretty close to the end. I felt like I needed the kick of really working solidly."

Please note All comments are eligible for publication in The Daily Pennsylvanian.