Someone in your cohort WhatsApp group mentions they’re three chapters ahead. You close the laptop and don’t open it again that day.
Cohort comparison is one of the most common, least useful things MBA and DBA students do to themselves during a dissertation — and I want to be specific about why it’s misleading, not just unhelpful, because the specific reasons matter for actually letting it go.
What a Chapter Count Doesn’t Tell You
A chapter count is a single number standing in for a genuinely complex, multi-dimensional process, and it flattens out almost everything that actually matters. It doesn’t tell you how much of that chapter will survive the next round of supervisor feedback — plenty of “finished” chapters get substantially rewritten later, which a raw count doesn’t capture. It doesn’t tell you whether their research design turned out to be straightforward or is quietly heading for a methodological problem they haven’t discovered yet. And it doesn’t tell you whether they’re writing quickly because the topic is more contained, or because they’re already deeply familiar with the domain from years of prior professional experience in exactly that area — familiarity you may not share, on a topic you may have deliberately chosen precisely because it stretched you.
Two students both at “chapter four” can be in entirely different positions. One might have a settled, defensible structure that will hold. Another might be about to discover, at data analysis, that their instrument doesn’t actually answer their research question — a problem no chapter count would have revealed in advance.
Why the Comparison Persists Anyway
Chapter counts are visible and easy to state in a WhatsApp message; the underlying quality, risk, and defensibility of that progress are not. Humans reliably default to comparing on the visible metric, even when they know, on reflection, that it’s not the metric that actually matters. This isn’t a personal weakness — it’s simply what happens when an easy-to-state number sits next to a genuinely hard-to-communicate reality.
There’s also a specific asymmetry worth noticing: people tend to share progress publicly far more readily than they share struggles. A cohort chat is, structurally, a biased sample of good news. The person who mentioned being three chapters ahead isn’t mentioning the chapter they’ve since had to rewrite twice, or the ethics approval that’s stalled for six weeks. You’re comparing your full, visible-to-you reality against other people’s curated highlights.
What to Track Instead
The more useful question isn’t “am I behind them.” It’s “what’s the next concrete task in front of me, and is completing it genuinely moving my specific research forward.” That question is answerable, actionable, and entirely within your control — unlike a comparison to someone else’s process, which tells you nothing you can actually act on.
A practical habit: keep a simple running note of what you’ve resolved or clarified each week — a methodological decision made, a theme finalised, a chapter section that finally holds together — rather than a chapter count. Progress measured in resolved uncertainty, rather than pages written, tends to be a far more honest and far less demoralising signal of where you actually stand.
FAQ
Is it possible to be genuinely behind schedule, not just imagining it? Yes — but that’s assessed against your own plan and your own supervisor’s expectations, not against another student’s pace. Those are two entirely different comparisons.
Should I leave cohort group chats if comparison is affecting me? Not necessarily — cohort support can be genuinely valuable. It’s worth noticing specifically which kinds of updates trigger comparison for you, and muting or scrolling past those, rather than losing the group’s broader support.
Next Step
If cohort comparison is eating into your confidence more than it’s helping your actual progress, that’s worth talking through. I offer a free 15-minute introductory call.