That is how D1’s interviews were structured. She would fly to the school, meet other applicants, meet the faculty, tour the labs, have meet and greets with the other lab members, etc. It seemed like a wine and dine weekend, but with the added pressure of meeting and socializing with your “competition” so to speak. D enjoyed the opportunity to speak with the older grad students in the program. At one school, which was within minutes of beautiful beaches, she commented on how nice it must be to be so close to the water. The third or fourth year student told her he had never been to the beach, didn’t have time to do anything of that nature. She crossed that one off her list mentally.
@bogibogi, I received my PhD recently (2014, in public health and psychology).
At most PhD programs, grades don’t matter very much. You do have to take 2-3 years of coursework, but high academic achievement is expected. Many programs give out three grades - As are expected, Bs mean you’re okay but need to step it up, and a C means you failed and need to retake the course. However, the grade inflation is pretty big - most students get As, maybe a few Bs. My director of graduate studies explicitly told us on the first week not to worry about our grades and honestly, if you had too many As that meant you weren’t spending enough time on research. Ha. You also have to pass a comprehensive exam or exams. How difficult they are and how many people fail varies from program to program; in mine almost nobody failed ever. (And if you did you usually just had to retake the part you failed, not the whole thing.)
Research progress is absolutely the measure of an excellent PhD student. From your first year you are expected to work on scientific or scholarly research of whatever the sort is in your field, and your achievements in this not only affect your department’s evaluation of you but also your ability to get postdoctoral positions and/or jobs after graduation. Publications are the king in academia - monographs and books in the humanities and some social science fields, and scientific journal articles in STEM and other social science fields. These days most PhD students are graduating with at least a few publications (and some are crazy and graduate with a lot). My postdoc had a policy that they would only take a student with at least one first-authored article (that means you did most of the work. Order of authorship is important in science.)
The qualities that I think are most important for doctoral students:
-Perseverance. Most important trait, IMO. Graduate school is long and full of little failures and setbacks; you have to be willing to push through all that.
-Resilience. See above.
-Intrinsic motivation. Being excellent and brilliant is now just expected of you (and your classmates are all excellent and brilliant, too). You have to want to do the PhD because YOU love the research.
-Creativity, in a scientific/scholarly sense. Success in academia is about being able to go beyond the plug-and-chug and think up new ideas, innovative ways to do things, different perspectives to examine things…you have to find a niche in the field and dig a little space out for yourself. The ones who get the grants and fellowships are the ones who can look at the field and see a gap and think about how they want to fill it.
-Technical skill, obvs. Even better if you have some special and in-demand technical skill or the willingness to develop it. You become known in the department for that; it keeps you present in professors’ minds when it comes time to forward job announcements or recommend for awards; and it helps you on the job market. Any student who is interested in an academic career should start at least browsing some ads and seeing what pops up pretty often in ads as an in-demand skill (keeping in mind that could change substantially in the 5-10 years between now and when they are on the market). In my field advanced statistical/methodological skills are always in high demand, and I happened to like math a lot, so I decided to develop a concentration in that area. Totally worked out for me.
These days, I also think open-mindedness to the vast number of careers out there is necessary for doctoral students, too. The traditional tenure-track faculty position is largely going away and being replaced by part-time contingent laborers. Only the very luckiest will get TT positions at great colleges/universities in desirable locations. So a student who is flexible enough to consider other kinds of careers will probably be the happiest, IMO, especially if geographic location is at all important to them. (At least in my case, narrowing my field of vision down to just academia was extremely frustrating and stressful for me because I also cared a lot about where I lived and the kind of school that I taught at. Once I opened my field of vision to consider industry, I was a lot happier, and ended up landing in a job AND a city I love.)
@juillet congratulations on your PhD and what appears to be a perfect job! Thanks so much for your informative response. I now understand a little better what will be expected of him as a student. I’ll be sure to pass along the information. Thanks.
One thing @juillet said made me think of this one: It’s good for PhD applicants to find out what the completion rate for their program is. I’m very happy to have gotten my PhD from the program I got it from, but if I’d known that there was a 70% washout rate—a number that they are quite proud of, by the way—and the stress that going through such a program would entail (which I’m certain cut a couple years off my eventual lifespan), well, I would have gone to one of the other programs that accepted me instead, and been equally successful but a bit less jumpy and jaded.
Unfortunately, most academic PhD students I know enter PhD programs with the primary intention of making a career as a tenure track and hopefully tenured academic and ties it very closely with their personal identity. Doesn’t help that many academic departments and academic advisors reinforce this by encouraging this line of thinking and openly disparaging/being dismissive of any consideration of jobs/career paths outside of the tenure-track → tenured college faculty. Some of those advisors would go so far as to regard those who pursue alternative career paths…especially outside of academia as “failures” and go so far as to not assist such students or worse*.
- Academic advisors have been known to try sabotaging the careers of PhD students they developed a strong dislike for due to reasons ranging from academic disagreements to the student taking/considering a career path the advisor concerned strongly disapproves of.
Gosh, cobrat, I will never cease to be amazed by the plethora of horrible human beings you seem to know.
I will echo dfb’s advice. At the recruitment day for the program I picked, they were very proud of the near 100% completion rate that we have for PhD students. Only 2 students have dropped out in the last ten years and one was because they found a job with a non profit that they loved more than grad school (can’t remember the reason for the other one).
IMO, spending time with the students is the best thing you can do. They seem to be brutally honest and upfront about the workload and other things. The one thing that was really important to me when I chose a program was the relationship students had with the faculty. Were students seen as collaborators or research minions? I needed to be somewhere with a really supportive and open faculty. (For others, this isn’t important but it was to me.)
From the few of those very Profs I’ve chatted with about PhD programs in their department and their perspectives, PhD students who consider/take alternative career paths other than their preferred “tenure track → tenured faculty” path are in their view “not serious”, are taking up an advising spot a student more passionate/“serious” about the field*, and thus…“wasting their time” and resources allocated by department/advisor’s own grant funds for the support of the main mission of the PhD program in their perspective…the reproduction of an new generation of research scholars in their field(a.k.a. production of advisors’ “mini-mes” in the academic research sense)
Not saying I agree with them as some aspects of their thinking are very problematic and misguided.
Especially considering the serious glut of PhD graduates and near graduates scrambling for scarce tenure-track positions nationally and worldwide in many fields…especially those in the humanities and social sciences.
- Defined as being dedicated to becoming an academic pursuing the tenure track -> tenured faculty and contributing the research and publications in the field.
In my experience, getting into grad school is kid’s play compared to staying motivated to finish the degree, given the passive-aggressive attitudes toward the students once these accepted students are enrolled and actually attempt to write their dissertation. Talk about mixed messages. They couldn’t do a better job of telling the students to Get Lost. I’m tired of all the nightmare stories I have heard directly from students of all ages (recent students and students long ago). Neurotic-psychotic advisors, AWOL advisors, hostile advisors, uncommunicative advisors, and precious few grievance or ombudsman resources for the students, who, though capable and even gifted, too often end up feeling isolated and discouraged. Alarmingly high dropout rates in many programs. I find it unacceptably scandalous and such a waste for a highly ranked university to offer a program it apparently has no intention of actually supporting. And note that I am talking about all kinds of fields: humanities, sciences, etc.
As this thread has turned into an excellent, spot-on treatise about the life of a PhD student, I will add my two cents to this treatise. The PhD program applicant needs to know this degree is at its heart is about the relationship between the PhD mentor and the student. Sure, the student will interact with other students, lab members, and faculty, but the project, completion of said project, and the next job depends mostly upon that single mentor.
Choose the mentor wisely… ideally identifying a few potential mentor candidates before submitting the application based upon research interests but especially by gathering information during the interview process. As mentioned upthread, current students are a wealth of useful information for obtaining scuttlebutt on your potential mentors. Are these mentors onerous dictators or intellectually nurturing souls? What about funding… do these mentors actually have sufficient funding for you to complete a PhD project? Are they accepting new students, or are their labs at capacity? Do students in these labs go to national meetings to connect with others in the field? Where have students of these mentors gone after graduate school? How many students of these mentors actually graduate with a PhD and not the Masters consolation prize? How long does it take… 5 years? 6 years? 8 years?!
Despite what I just wrote, all is not lost if your potential mentor choices at application time turn out to be dogs. Hopefully, the program is large enough that a great mentor will be identified and turn into a lifelong mentor and collaborator.
And DH complains about students who show up at the lab late, spend time on Facebook instead of keeping up with the journals, get more involved in planning their weddings than writing their papers…
That said, I was surprised to see that my son’s girlfriend (1st year PhD candidate at Columbia in history) is already working on her dissertation and spent a fair amount of winter break doing research. I thought you could just do classes and figure out what you were going to write about afterwards, but that really isn’t the case at all. She already has a general idea of what she wants to study.
Sounds like your DH would sympathize with the advisors who kicked a couple of cousins out of PhD programs because they prioritized spending every weekend at their mom’s dinner parties at her insistence that said advisors felt they were giving short shrift to the PhD program and their own time/efforts. And if his students were like those cousins…I wouldn’t blame him.
Some PhD students do come in more than ready to hit the ground running.
However, she does run the risk of finding out her topic may no longer be viable in a few years due to factors as other more advanced PhD students or academics completing dissertations and/or publications which cover so much of her initial dissertation topic her advisor may force her to drop the topic and start with a new one as it’s no longer viable as an “original contribution to the field”. This happened to several friends in PhD programs.
One friend who finished her PhD a couple of years back in Poli-Sci at an elite U(Top 8-10 program) ended up having to start a completely new topic well after she started her dissertation research/writing stage partially for that reason. Ended up extending her already lengthy time in the PhD program and was a miserable experience for her even with a very understanding and helpful advisor.
NONE of which would apply to the many examples I have of dedicated, hard-working students whose advisors treated them as if they were carriers of a pandemic.
This has really been an enlightening discussion. Thanks everyone.
@dfbdfb may I ask what jaded you? Even if my kid has the academic chops, frankly it’s the potential “politics” that concern me. Could this be what you are referring to?
@epiphany, your posts are a bit concerning. In your opinion, are the problems a symptom of poor mentor/mentee match-ups? Or is it a systemic problem?
@cobrat doesn’t so much know horrible people, as it is that lots of faculty in PhD-granting programs see their successes as being graduates placed in college faculty positions, and graduates who go elsewhere as failures and even, possibly, wastes of time and effort. This is a very widely-recognized problem, but the attitudes are still held to even by many people who give lip service to it being a problem. (And a pretty huge problem, given the horrors of the current academic job market in most fields.) It’s going to require a huge cultural shift in graduate education, and to be honest will probably only be solved by a lot of current senior faculty dying off.
As for what jaded me, @bogibogi, it was a combination of things, really. Some of it’s the paragraph above, but the wider issue that that may stem from is how deeply entrenched the myth of the meritocracy is an graduate education and academia generally, when there’s actually a lot of just plain dumb luck going on. I mean, I finished grad school the year before the academic job market in my field cratered, and I landed directly into a tenure-track position; if I’d graduated a year later someone with my record almost certainly would have been lucky to get a visiting position or even a postdoc.
There’s also the fact that there are departmental politics. I ran afoul early on of a faculty member who held a good deal of power, which nearly got me squeezed from the program early on. I had know way of knowing that what I did was going to be taken badly, but the faculty who were supposed to be mentoring me did, but didn’t care to expend energy on an early-stage student. (Which I’m pretty sure is an accurate assessment, given what I saw happen to other students later on.)
Fortunately, there were bright spots. One of the most empathetic, caring people I know was faculty there, and I’m certain I wouldn’t have made it through without such people. The other students—well, there were a few who were cutthroat, but most of those in my cohort and the ones nearby who made it through the gauntlet made a pact to never put any of our students through that sort of hazing ourselves, and I think most of us have generally lived up to it.
But yeah, on the whole? I was accepted to five programs, and went for the one that was simultaneously highest prestige and tied for the best financial package. If I’d gone for the program that was equally good financially but a very slight notch down the prestige scale, judging from friends of mine who went through that one at the same time as I was in grad school, I probably wouldn’t have as negative a view of graduate education. But who knows? Maybe I wouldn’t be as nice to my own grad students in reaction to that—so perhaps it all balances out in the end.
@bogibogi
In my opinion and the opinion of experienced others (people who either barely endured – having almost dropped out of-- PhD programs, as well as those who did drop out), it is a systemic problem. Look, institution, if you don’t want to service the degree, don’t offer that degree option. Over. Out. Much better than wasting thousands of fellowship dollars, thousands of student and advisor & professor hours making a pretense out of it. Or, perhaps the institution could signal which profs are not interested in seriously mentoring PhD candidates. Such profs may not earn priority hiring status for that choice, but at least there won’t be lukewarm (or much worse!) attitudes acted out against the students. Or, here’s a concept: Don’t hire people with Major untreated Personality Disorders. Such are not an asset to any organization.
THIS:
It’s interesting that they don’t see the complete dropping out of all advanced degree programs and disillusionment of students as a waste of time and effort. Newsflash, faculty: It is a waste of time and effort. It’s a scandalous waste of human capital. The fact that the administrations of these institutions haven’t stepped in and evaluated this waste is even more scandalous.
^The issue (at least in the sciences) has to do with competing interests. On the one hand, there are too many PhD graduates compared to available academic slots (not so sure about total… academic and non-academic… positions available to PhDs). In an ideal world, this poor job market would cause graduate programs to limit the number of PhDs produced. However, graduate students are CHEAP LABOR, and there’s no shortage of applicants. Labs typically need graduate students to complete projects with the funding available to the faculty member. This is a major disincentive for any science graduate program to reduce the number of PhD students.
@dfbdfb, thanks so much for your response. This is a beautiful thing:
@epiphany a lot of what you write is quite disheartening. I’m not sure how to process that information.
If I had the power, and based on what has been said here, I would encourage son to seek a different career path. However, his heart wants what his heart wants so there is no denying him with this pursuit. The only thing I can do is share this informative thread so that he can go into it with his eyes wide open. Hopefully he’ll be one of the lucky ones where everything works out.
In my experience as an applicant, candidate and graduate, I saw two consistent concerns from those running my PhD program regarding those applying:
- Are the applicant’s research interests and strengths a good fit for the dept?
- Will the applicant successfully complete a dissertation?