Picking a dissertation topic scares me.
I chose to pursue a PhD in Health Services and Policy Research to help me on journey to become a primary investigator and lead policy and program evaluations to improve healthcare. I think a PhD will build my methodological tool kit and help me to become a well-rounded researcher. However, the specialization required to write a dissertation and complete a PhD scares me.
Having lived in both the United States and France, I feel somewhere in between cultures and unsure about where in the world I want to live and build a career in the future. Furthermore, I am unsure about what jobs in public health will be available in four years, when I expect to graduate. Due to this uncertainly, I do not know which skills will be helpful for my future career. For example, if I were to pick a dissertation topic related to my graduate research assistantship position at the Veterans Health Administration, then would my work generalize to working in other countries, which have different health care systems? Furthermore, I am passionate about the areas of sexual, reproductive, and maternal health, but how can I be sure whether there will still be research positions available in this subject area when I graduate in 2030?
How can I pick a topic and specialize in a generalizable way?
I am writing this Voices blog post to speak to other students like me, who may be struggling with picking dissertation topics and building a research portfolio that highlights deep subject area knowledge while also appealing to a wide pool of potential future employers. While I have yet to pick a topic, I have learned to embrace and integrate my wide variety of research experiences and develop transferable or generalizable competences. In aggerate, my experiences, highlight that I am an emperial researcher that studies how health systems can be strengthened and improved to better serve vulnerable populations.
For instance, I gained competence in analyzing and extracting meaning from large administrative health datasets through my work through quantifying quality of cancer care among Medicare beneficiaries and predicting risk of long COVID based on patients’ electronic medical records. Since then, I have used these skills to measure the impact of federally qualified health centers, contraceptive access programs, and international pandemic prevention projects. All these projects span public health issues, populations, and analytic methods and highlight my versatility as a researcher who can thinking across boundaries. I have learned both hard and soft skills that are generalizable. This makes me feel confident about continuing to build on and synthesis prior learnings and about applying my experience from ostensibly different populations, health systems, and methods to new areas.
Finally, I must remember that my dissertation topic will illustrate my skills but will not define or confine me. Like all emerging world leaders, I have the power to frame, narrativize, and derive meaning from my experiences. My breadth of experience is a strength and my unifying purpose to improve health systems.
When it is time for me to pick a dissertation topic, I will continue to think about how to integrate all the skills that I have learned so far and what skills I can grow and generalize from the dissertation process.
