Have you experienced fear or disappointment and, after reflecting on the experience, realized that your anxiety
or performance was affected by the unknown rather than the known? Knowing and understanding the realities
of any situation or expectation allows you to prepare accordingly. According to Marshall et al., (2017), one out
of two doctoral students will not complete their capstone. They conducted a qualitative study to understand the
factors that contributed to the delay or expedited completion of the capstone among doctoral students.
One of their findings was that some doctoral students had unrealistic expectations of the capstone. They did
not understand what the dissertation or capstone involved or how much time it took, for example. Rather than
use these findings to add to your anxiety, fear, or pessimism, what if you instead used them to align
expectations with reality? By doing so, you can set yourself up for success through foresight and planning.
In this Discussion, you reflect on what you have learned in this course while realistically examining myths and
actual expectations in order to have a clearer view of the path ahead.
To Prepare
Read the Marshall et al. (2017) article and review their findings.
POST
Post a response to the following:
**Explain how you will manage your expectations throughout your doctoral journey. As part of this analysis, be
specific about your expectations for growth in each of these areas:
*Doctoral coursework
*Scholarly writing
*Empirical research
*Capstone or dissertation progress
**In 1–2 brief sentences, describe the myths you had or have about the DSW capstone project.
**Explain how these myths have been debunked (or not) after learning more about a DSW capstone project.
**In 3 sentences, describe at least two lessons you learned from reviewing and learning more about the
published DSW capstone that will assist you in planning for your own.
**In 2 sentences, post a reflection on one or more of the following:
Reflect on your learning by explaining what new knowledge surprised you.
Share challenges and best practices that you have discovered.
Ask questions to learn tips or strategies from your colleagues.
Discuss other items relevant to the topics covered in the past 6 weeks.
Capstone Topic: Reducing Recidivism of people on probation and parole.