ABSTRACT
As the conclusion to this weighty Doctoral Companion, we want to reconsider the purposes of doctoral studies. Readers may think that it is odd that we have placed these comments at the end, but we have done so precisely because this is what we want readers to remember as they close the book. Many of today’s doctoral students, we think, are faced with three myths during their study – that methodology is a matter of technique, the point of the thesis is to add new knowledge, and the task of the researcher is to disseminate knowledge in both scholarly and public fora. We will address these three myths and offer some alternative ways of thinking about what it means to do scholarly work.
