I am considering a MS in chemistry but I may want to go back for a doctorate some day after that. In school one of my instructors has an MS and when she wanted a PhD she had to start from scratch since nothing transferred from her M.S…
Is there a list of programs in the US that offer MS to PhD transfers? Do they offer transfers outside the college (ie MS at ball state applies to a PhD at Iowa state, etc) or would they just be transfers within the college? Does anyone know where I could find this info?
I’m not sure about the lists you want, but in Canada, at least, there most certainly are options to begin an MSc and to tranfer into your PhD after one year without doing a Master’s thesis. http://www.gwc2.on.ca/ The GWC"squared" shared department between the universities of Guelph and Waterloo are one example. McMaster allows this too, as does McGill, and I believe Universite de Montreal and Universite de Quebec a Montreal, based on quick research I did myself.
I know you’re not in Canada, so that probably doesn’t interest you all that much, but consider a few schools you may want to attend and look up their School of Graduate Studies or equivalent, or look into the specific chemistry department. Whether schools transfer credits between each other is entirely up to the individual school, AFAIK. If there is joint research between two institutions, then it might happen, but if the new school doesn’t have the facilities to let you do your old work, you might have to begin anew with something else.
The thing is, though, “transfering” from an MSc to a PhD in terms of classes or time put in doesn’t make much sense in terms of what each level is trying to acheive. The idea of your PhD work is that you either build upon previous research to discover/establish some novel information, or you begin a new branch of research. To use previous work in order to not do new, required work kind of undermines the concept of “master” or “doctor” of the subject, doesn’t it? In the case of your instructor, odds are her work simply couldn’t be continued since a certain course of research had been completed, either by herself or another person. You can’t re-discover something someone else has already done.
Doing it the other way around is quite common. I did a chemistry postdoc in the US and plenty of the first and second year PhD students in our group left with an MS after changing their mind on the PhD idea. This was on the east coast, and they were all snapped up immediately by the pharma companies to work as graduate chemists. Just to point out that if you got on to a PhD program, you wouldn’t necessarily be locked in for the long haul.
I don’t really understand what you’re talking about with respect to “transferring” things from an MS to a PhD. A doctorate is always started from scratch, in research terms. I guess American students do have to do these cumulative exams as part of their PhD or MS, which may be transferable in some fashion; but they are a sideshow to the main research events of a doctorate.
Really, I would be surprised if a PhD program did not accept coursework done at another institution. I suspect, Wesley, that either a) your instructor got his or her Master’s degree from an unaccredited institution (which might be, for example, some overseas institution), b) he or she waited for a long time in between the two degrees, triggering a disallowance based on total time taken, or, most likely, c) he or she is specifically talking about “starting from scratch” in research, not in coursework.
Just as an example, I looked up the Chemistry Department for my local University. In their graduate guide, they say:
So do the math: A master’s degree from another university gets you credit for 18 credit hours of coursework.
Nope. She got her M.S. at UNC at Charlotte. She is redoing all her graduate level courses and she started her doctorate right after she finished her masters (she decided she wanted a full doctorate). Maybe she just got unlucky, who knows. But if I did a MS and wanted a doctorate i’d like to think that the 24 or so hours of coursework I did will transfer.
zut, I work at the University you are quoting that from. I think the 18 hour talks about what we affectionately call The Rackham Ransom and doesn’t necessarily have to do with what will transfer, or how many credits you will have to take before advancing to candidacy. It has to do with how many credit hours you’ll have to take and pay for before you can graduate. It’s a weird thing here.
I’m guessing that having the MS will indeed cut one’s coursework, but it may not be a standard 18 hours for everyone.
