In our previous post, Part 1 of Dissecting the PhD, I mostly described a simplified analogy of looking at higher education. Here, I’ll talk more about the PhD. As I mentioned in the last post, in a doctoral program, you have a lot more liberty to ask your own questions, do various kinds of research/tests, and ultimately share your answer to the question with the world at large. The most technical aspect of that, by and large, is determining how to answer your question. That’s what research is all about, and understandably, this creates most of the variation from discipline to discipline (Political Science, Biology, Finance, Africana Studies, Sociology, etc.). For the sake of consistency, this post will take the following sequence:
Asking a question
Doing a test (research)
Sharing your answer
ASKING A QUESTION
Early on in the program, students usually have approximately 2 years of coursework (a bit longer, in the social sciences). This is critical for building a deep understanding of subject matter in the discipline. It’s here that students will have the opportunity to come up with their own questions. Seminars are discussion based, with each meeting focusing on an instrumental research article in the discipline, so you’ll have an opportunity to hear other students’ questions, as well as share your own. Because they’re discussion based, and there aren’t really any assignments (my seminar this semester had 1 paper that we worked on 14 weeks), you don’t get out anything if you don’t put in anything. All students push themselves to deeply examine the readings, so they have more enriching discussion in class and can ask better questions that they can later research. That’s just the theoretical side of the coursework. There’s also the statistics/research methods coursework as well, so you’ll have the more technical skills required to design research, conduct research, and interpret the data from your research. The coursework is useful, but only to the extent to which you use it to advance your research. That is, getting A’s on statistics exams is wonderful, but what’s more important is learning how to use class material (statistics, as an example, or experiment design) for your research. No university will hire a PhD student because they got A’s on all their statistics exams. That’s basically irrelevant; we’re not in undergrad anymore. Amazing research & average grades > average research & amazing grades.
DOING A TEST (RESEARCH)
After 2 years or so of coursework, for the remainder of the program, you’re focused on research. Admittedly, you’re doing research during your coursework phase as well, but following completion of your coursework, you’ll be focused almost exclusively on doing research. Most of that time is spent working with faculty to assist them in completing their research, and you’ll use that to develop some of your own research projects. Finally, in your last year and a half (approximately) of the program, you’ll pursue a (rather large) research undertaking that more or less showcases your capabilities as a researcher. But more on that later. The best analogy I can use to shed light on the research aspect of the PhD program is that of an apprenticeship. I’ll use an example from the Bible, to bring it full circle.
In Biblical times, those interested in developing a deep understanding of the Bible would seek out rabbis and express interest in being their disciples (disciple = student). Rabbis were people who were experts in the scriptures. In seeking out a rabbi, not only were you recognizing them as knowledgeable concerning the scriptures, you actually were saying you wanted to BE like them. You wanted to live out the scriptures the way they did. It was a fairly intimate relationship, and you would spend years with them, learning the scriptures and examining their lives. In case you haven’t caught the parallel, this culminates in our relationship with Jesus, where in being his disciple (student/follower), we express our interest in learning from him and living life the way he did. Interestingly, when Jesus died, his principles and values were carried on to the next generation, through his disciples (hopefully they learned something in their apprenticeship!) I like this example, because it highlights an important distinction in being a student, in the sense we define it today, vs. being an apprentice. A student comes to the teacher, gets the grade, and is on their way. An apprenticeship is a much deeper relationship, where you learn your entire craft from your teacher with the interest of working the way they do. Consider another example, like becoming a tattoo artist. Tattoos are art, after all, and art varies tremendously from artist to artist. If I go up to a tattoo artist and I ask to be THEIR apprentice, it means I want to do tattoos like them. I could learn from anyone who’s a tattoo artist, BUT I want to do tattoos like theirs, which is why I’m seeking to be their apprentice. In general, I find apprenticeships are a lot less common today. You could perhaps say that PhD students are the last of a dying breed. Of course, people don’t usually think of apprenticeships when they think of PhD students, but that’s not to say the metaphor doesn’t hold. I digress.
So, I know this will sound crazy, but just think of being a PhD student as training to become a tattoo artist. Research is somewhat like art: it varies tremendously from researcher to researcher. Two researchers can have similar interest and pursue them in very different ways, in the same way two artists can draw the same thing but take very different stylistic approaches. It’s extremely nuanced. These nuances make selecting a PhD program very different from selecting a masters or bachelors program, where the content is driven by the professor and will be more similar across students. Because students decide the research they want to do, each students’ experience in a PhD program is very, very different, depending on the questions they’re pursuing answers to.
The way students go about selecting a PhD program is probably similar to how an aspiring tattoo artist goes about selecting an apprenticeship. I imagine you don’t Google “top tattoo shops in the US”. No such luck! Instead, you would need to determine the style of tattoos you’re most interested in, find artists who do that kind of work, and find out if their tattoo shop has any apprenticeships. Your ultimate goal as an applicant to a PhD program, then, is to be a student at a university where you can be an apprentice to faculty members that do the same kind of research that you would like to do upon graduation, or similar at least. For a tattoo apprenticeship, I would imagine you would study the portfolios of various tattoo artist, to see if you like the work they do. Similarly, when you apply to PhD programs, you’ll have to read the research being done by professors at different universities, to see if it resonates with you. You may see a university with several such faculty you’d like to be an apprentice to. You should apply! Conversely, you may see a university and think, “None of these professors seem to do the kind of research I think I’m interested in.” In that case, you wouldn’t apply to that school (no matter how good of a school it may be).
I imagine apprenticeships are hard work. It’s like starting a job while you’re trying to complete your training, at the same time! PhD programs are no different. In order to support yourself during the apprenticeship, most schools/programs will 1. Offer a 100% tuition waiver and 2. offer students a living stipend. In a lower cost college town, the stipend would be around $15K and in a more expensive city (like Boston, NY, SF, etc.), they’re a little over $35K+. It’s not income and it’s not a salary (for your sake that’s good, because income would be taxed differently). It’s simply a small stipend for living expenses. It won’t cover much beyond that. Schools know in the absence of 1. waiving tuition and 2. offering a living stipend, their apprenticeship wouldn’t be as attractive, meaning faculty members won’t have students helping them complete their research (bad news). For that reason, they’re willing to forego collecting money from PhD students & actually offer them a living stipend instead. In fact, most PhD programs earn $0 in revenue. The tuition that’s charged to bachelors and masters students are used to fund the doctoral program. It’s the only degree offered by a university that will post a loss (negative profit) every year, and every administrator is generally okay with it. The apprenticeship is that critical.
After serving as an apprentice to Professors for a few years of your PhD program, in the final stages of your apprenticeship, you have the opportunity to demonstrate mastery of your craft. Under the supervision of your faculty members, you can pursue your own comprehensive research project, from start to finish. Revisiting the tattoo example, this dissertation represents your opportunity to show the world the uniqueness of your creative vision. Since you’ve been an apprentice to specific faculty over the past several years, your project will likely share some similarity to their work, but it represents a vision of how you’ll produce art. You can then use that piece of art as you interview for positions at various universities. Universities will either look at the tattoo that is your dissertation and say “Wow, that’s beautiful.” or “Meh, it’s okay.” Or “That looks awful; where on earth did you learn to do tattoos?!” You get the idea.
SHARING YOUR ANSWER
Finally, research is about answering questions, but an equally important activity is sharing your answer. If the question was worth answering, then the answer is certainly worth sharing. In the academic community, this is done through publishing papers in academic journals and presenting those papers at academic conferences (or similar settings). As you would imagine, it’s very intellectually demanding to write on the level sufficient for the expectations of academic journals, where every reader has a PhD. It’s a grind, for sure. In a similar fashion, there’s an art to presenting your paper at a conference in less than an hour in a clear, concise, and non-technical way so it makes sense to all the researchers who didn’t spend the dozens of hours working on it that you did. As a student, it’s a particularly enriching (and slightly nerve wracking) experience presenting a theory to a room full of experts in your field, while you yourself are still learning the ins and outs of your discipline. It comes with the territory though.
BRINGING IT ALL TOGETHER
To summarize, PhD students ask questions, do tests (research), and then they share their answers with the world. This exercise is being done by PhD students in EVERY academic discipline. When I tell people I’m doing a PhD in business, the first thing they usually say is, “Wow, I didn’t know you could do a PhD in business.” Of course you can. In the absence of that, we just have these baseless anecdotes about business that aren’t supported in any way, shape, or form, by the scientific method. How are female leaders perceived in the workplace? How do product recalls effect the status of a brand? When the majority of a hospitals’ physicians are contractors, is the quality of healthcare offered effected? When a public company has bad news, is the affect on the stock price dependent on when they share the information? When employees are offered unlimited vacation time, do they vacation more or less? These are research questions… answered by researchers. Every academic discipline, business included, needs people who will perform this exercise: ask questions, do the tests (research), and share their answers. It’s how you keep a discipline alive and how you continue moving the field forward.
I hope these 2 posts were helpful for dissecting the ins and outs of a PhD!
Nnamdi