Doctorate classwork

Factual Questions
1

I hope I don’t sound like a hopeless rube, but I’m not close friends with anyone with a doctorate. My question is, are there large, college classes filled with students earning their doctorate? High-level subject classes, just like undergrad, but for getting your doctorate?

I had the impression that by the time you got to that level, you have few, if any lecture classes. You are doing research, or perhaps meeting individually with your, erm, sponsor, or whatever the supervising professor is called.

The reason I ask is I was watching an episode of “Lie to Me” and the main character was speaking to a college class. Later one of the students says something about his dissertation topic. The class appeared to be an undergraduate class, from what they showed …but of course I know it’s TV and they could be getting it completely wrong.

It occurs to me that this question may vary by subject/major. Can anyone give me a brief overview about what you do in college when you’re working on a doctorate? (All I know is the woe I’ve heard from people finishing their dissertations.)

2

Each program is different. In Europe, doctoral students rarely have coursework at all. In North America, it’s common. But where you do have courses, they are usually small and more like seminars than lectures.

Students do frequently take larger lecture courses, occasionally to fulfill a requirement (though you can usually only do this a couple of times) and more often to get some necessary background knowledge. That means a couple of M.A. students, sometimes a Ph.D. student, in with all the undergraduates.

By the time you are working on your dissertation, though, you aren’t usually taking classes any more.

My experience was coursework; PhD exams; proposal defense; not writing the dissertation (this is the longest phase); writing the dissertation; filing. Most programs require a dissertation defense, as well.

3

Your impression was correct: At the doctoral level, you’re taking few to no classes. If you do happen to take one, it’ll be because the subject matter interests you, and will probably be a hyperspecialized course with only a half-dozen students. You’ll probably also have a seminar or three, but those will look very different from a normal classroom: You’ll have maybe a dozen people sitting around a conference table, and each week one of them will lead a discussion about some research topic.

That said, though, there are dissertations at levels other than the doctorate, too. A master’s program might require a dissertation, as do many honors undergraduate programs.

4

I got my doctorate in 1990. There was certainly course work involved, but never a large class of more than, say 15 people. In some cases, these were classes such as those you’d experience in graduate school, in that, typically, you’d be expected to read some selections, and you were expected to be able to knowledgeably discuss the material. There was usually a teacher who ran the class, but sometimes, one of us would be expected to do the driving. There were also classes in which you’d examine some aspect of a topic from a research point of view. That is, you’d be expected to focus on something and during the course of the semester, you’d report on your findings as you worked your way through the existing literature on that topic. This, because most doctoral programs are research oriented and you do need to get familiar with the various processes and procedures of that type of work, in addition to the subject matter, itself. Eventually, groups get smaller as people narrow their research and study focus, and you might just meet with two or three people during the course of a semester to examine some topic in extreme depth. And, finally, yes, you do then have a dissertation topic and your remaining classes are designed around it, and you may meet mainly with your dissertation director, but also with others who are doing work in a similar field. My doctorate is not a Ph.D., but rather an Ed. D. Programs such as an Ed.D. are designed not to create researchers and/or professors, but practitioners, so the focus may be quite different from a Ph.D. and the coursework and program structure may be quite different, too. This figures to be an interesting thread. xo, C.

5

Yep. I had to do a full thesis including original “research” for my masters in engineering. I put research in quotes because I wasn’t exactly inventing the wheel :smiley:

Coursework consisted of meeting a few times with about 6 students and the prof. He’d go over the topic at a high level, recommend references and then tell us to go write a 25 page original paper or sometimes a program and come back to see him if we had issues. Oddly enough their office hours for grad students always seemed to be at Little Joe’s bar on Thursday evenings, and if you were a smart student you bought the first round.

6

While I was doing my Ph.D. I took undergraduate courses in Spanish for my language requirement, but this did not involve large lecture courses.

Someone doing a Ph.D. in Ecology might want to take an undergraduate course in Biochemistry, say, if they didn’t have to as an undergraduate, if their research topic included toxins, pheromones, etc.

I did an Honors Thesis my senior year as an undergraduate, but I can’t recall anyone referring to it as dissertation.

7

I finished the course work part of my Ph.D. last semester, which amounted to one or two classes for the first four semesters. Most of my classes were small seminar type classes – one or two faculty, a dozen other grad students, and a massive of scientific papers to discuss.

I did take big undergrad lecture course on statistics as a foundation for an upper level applied statistics course related to my field.

8

I got my Doctorate in statistics at university of Maryland in 2000. The first 2 years of the of the program was entirely coursework 2-3 classes per semester. These were graduate level classes but similar in flavor to upper division undergrad classes, with about 20 or so students. After two years you would have to pass a qualifying exam on the subjects of your class work in order to qualify to began research. This wasn’t just a pro-forma, about half of the people who took the exam failed, and had to re-take it in the next semester. Once you began research you usually took one or two graduate level classes at a time on subjects that interested you but most of your work is in research with your adviser.

9

In my experience generally only the PhD (and perhaps other doctoral degrees) calls the major research a dissertation. At the masters and undergraduate level it is usually called a thesis.

But there can be some lecture courses for PhD students. In Economics, for example, the first year courses would generally be Macroeconomics, Microeconomics, and Econometrics. These course would have everyone entering the program plus other students from possibly other Economics-based programs. This year’s graduating class from Chicago was 24 students. Traditionally only about 60% of the entering class gets a PhD, so the entering class might have been about 40. Some advanced undergraduates as well as students from Chicago’s Business school probably also took those introductory courses.

10

The classes I was in, for Electrical Engineering, generally had a half dozen to a dozen students. Some of the early grad classes may have had a few more, but certainly under twenty. I believe we were able to take senior level classes as well, but those wouldn’t have large classes either.

In addition to the classes there was research, of course, and research “classes”. Those were titled something like “independent research”, and consisted entirely of you paying the University for the credit hours.

11

Doctorate programs differ in their requirements, but in the U.S. they (almost) always have a “qualifying” or “candidacy” period. These first one or two years will involve a start on research but will also have a mix of coursework, exams, presentations, and/or research write-ups. The coursework can itself be a mix of things that prepare you for the exams (“candidacy exams” or “qualifying exams”) or that fulfill a breadth requirement or whatnot for that program.

Especially at research-oriented universities, it is not unusual (and at some places, it is required) for undergraduate students to write a dissertation (usually: “thesis”). It’s much less extensive than a doctoral dissertation, but it’s still a small piece of real research conducted under the guidance of a faculty member.

12

However you do have to distinguish between Doctorate (professional) programs and PhD programs. A PharmD or DPT program is more classroom-based than a PhD in Biology for example.

Doctorate programs have ore classes and less research. PhD programs is the reverse.

This, of course, is a very broad generalization.

13

I’ll agree that the culminating project at lower levels is usually called a “thesis”, rather than a “dissertation”. On the other hand, though, I’ve also heard the term “thesis” used much more than “dissertation” at the doctoral level, too. That might just be a cultural quirk of the institutions I’ve been at, though.

And when I was speaking of doctoral programs, I meant real doctors, not physicians and the like.

14

Varies by discipline as well as by location. One of my uncles collects doctorados in the humanities (I think he’s got docs in Law, Journalism, Politics and Philosophy - I can never remember what the fifth one is in) precisely thanks to the lack of coursework requirements; OTOH for science/engineering disciplines there is more likely to be small courses or seminars, and medical ones involve a lot of courses (I almost ripped my sister in law’s head off when she kept referring to one postgrad course as “her doctorate” - it was a doctorate-level course but it was not going to give her a Doc, not without a ton of other courses and a research thesis).

My doctoral program (in the US) involved coursework but the load was… absurdly small from the point of view of every foreign student in the program (read: all of us except a token American). For the first term, we were expected to take a maximum of 6h of classes plus a 1h seminar every week; on later terms, the load was supposed to be 1-2 classes (6h max) plus that seminar. Two of us asked to be allowed to take 3 courses, thus raising the load to a horrible 10h all included… without realizing that, once we’d been allowed to do it* and not died from the effort, it would become the general requirement :smack: (we apologized profusely to our classmates when this happened). We’d had to take some exams to ensure we did not need remedial undergrad classes; several people did need to take some. And our thesis was called both thesis and dissertation, but it may have had something to do with the amount and procedence of the foreign sudents (most of us were Hispanic, in Spanish it’s tesis (doctoral) whereas an undergrad research thesis is tesis de licenciatura or proyecto).

  • Apparently the way to decide whether a course in a discipline was acceptable to someone from another, or whether a student could take three classes (two of them full repeats of his undergrad material and the third a partial repeat) without collapsing was by numbers. If one person asked, no. If two did, yes. I was told a course in Waste Treatment wasn’t of interest to a chemist: nobody else had asked to be allowed to take it (I attended as a “listener”).
15

Mechanical engineering PhD here, 1998. Grad school lasted about six years, during which time I got my MS and PhD. I had six semesters of classes, going full load most of those terms. At the highest levels (700-level courses) the subject matter was so specific that the number of students was pretty small, like 10-15, and there were no undergrad students present. At the lower end (400-level, and one 300-level), there were plenty of undergrad seniors in attendance, so that the number of students was maybe 50 or more, in a substantially-sized lecture hall.

Even while I was taking classes, I was working on my research project, holding a weekly one-on-one meeting with my faculty advisor, and having monthly meetings with my (corporate) research sponsors. Basically during “work hours,” I went to classes and then worked in the lab; at night and on weekends, I did class-related homework. Once I finished classes, my research took on the appearance of a full-time job, working 40-50 hours a week, with nights and weekends generally free. That is, until the final 9 months or so, when I started working more like 80 hours a week to get data, crunch it, and then churn out a dissertation.

Apart from the classwork and research, there were two hurdles unique to the PhD program.

The first hurdle was the PhD qualifying exam, which took place after my first two years (I had just completed my MS at that point, so this was more like the start of my doctorate program). This was basically the equivalent of four rather challenging undergraduate class final exams; we took it as two 2-hour exams on a Tuesday evening, with the remaining two a couple of days later. For us, the subjects were heat transfer, fluid mechanics, thermodynamics, and “general engineering.” In some cases the problems didn’t have obvious or specific solutions, or would have taken too long to solve, or required some assumptions to be made. In such cases, you were expected to explain your reasoning in writing. They were only partially testing your knowledge of the subject matter; the other part of the test was to evaluate your judgment, your ability to work toward a solution without having all of the facts firmly in place, or your knowledge/awareness of how unspoken factors might affect the answer to any given question. I studied for about five weeks for the qualifier, three weeks of which was during winter break. I actually enjoyed studying for it. I reviewed my undergraduate class files for the subjects, and solved all of my old homework problems again (since I had the answers in front of me). It went fast, since I wasn’t having to write legibly or show my work for a grade; I was solving them to check my own understanding. I also was able to review topics I didn’t understand very well the first time through; whether it was maturity or just a second pass (or both), I understood things much better when I was done. The grade was a simple pass/fail, you never learned your actual score. The scuttlebutt was that the scores of examinees fell into three categories:

-people who performed so badly the profs had no real choice but to fail them;

-people who performed so awesomely the profs had no real choice but to pass them;

-people who performed somewhere in the middle, allowing/requiring some discussion among the faculty as to whether they wanted these people to be in the program. In some cases examinees in this category were passed, but were required to take remedial coursework.

The second hurdle was the preliminary exam, which I took care of after completing my coursework. This was a document of just under fifty pages (and a live presentation) delivered to the faculty team who who later formed my defense committee. It explained what my research was, reviewed relevant literature/publications (this was the bulk of it), and showed why my work was unique/novel/important, and what gap(s) it would fill in the field of knowledge.

The deal with both of these was that you could fail one of them and retake it once, but you couldn’t fail both of them. I knew a couple of people who choked on the qual the first time through, and they were nervous because they knew they would only get one shot at passing their prelim exam later on. I also knew of one fellow who failed the qual twice and was ejected from the program.

16

Yes, a broad generalization, but pretty accurate based at least on my experience. The PhD is the top of the food chain in academia. You can earn a “Doctorate” in any number of areas of study and the requirements vary widely. Back in the day (1970’s) there were a bunch of folks floating around with ABD after their name; John Smith, BA,MA,ABD – it meant Smith finished the coursework and took the exams but didn’t finish the dissertation. (All But Disertation) Always thought it was kind of silly advertising that you didn’t finish what you started. I have a Doctorate, but not a PhD. Started but just got tired of going to school and had a family to support. About the only smart thing I did was to complete the requirement for what at that time was called an “Advanced Graduate Certificate.” It’s another piece of paper I could hang on the wall and list on my résumé.

17

Agreed. I could be said to be “ABD”, but in practice, that’s almost exactly synonymous with “MS”. There’s no way I’d actually stick the letters after my name.

And Machine Elf, this is the first I’ve ever heard of a 700-level class. At my school, 100-400 was undergraduate (first digit roughly corresponding to year), 500 was graduate level, and 600 was nothing but PhD reading and research. The 500 level was the highest that you’d get something in a classroom, and not even all of that.

18

PhD biology:

Year 1: took a few classes (2 fall, 2 spring), rotated through 4 research labs to pick what lab I wanted to join, attended departmental seminars (outside speakers, 1/week) and departmental student presentations (1/week). Student presentations were either a research article (years 1-2) or your research (years 3-). All faculty, grad students and post-docs attended. Presented once. Chose my lab and began developing my project.

Summer: developed my thesis project, wrote and defended my thesis proposal, which served as our comp exams. It was a written proposal like a grant proposal and an oral presentation and defense in front of 3-5 faculty members.

Year 2: Took 1 seminar style grad class (mostly analyzing papers in the literature) fall and spring. Attended seminars and student presentations. Presented. Every other minute was in the lab.

Year 3: Took 1 seminar style grad class in fall. Attended seminars and student presentations. Presented. Every other minute was in the lab.

Years 4-6. All research, going to conferences, giving departmental talks. Last six months was writing my thesis, preparing for defense and finish lab work.

19

I had a few. Here’s a list of all the ME courses at UW-Madison; there were a whole bunch past the 600-level. PhD/Doctoral thesis credits were 890/990.

20

I like the way you think. :smiley:

Mine is from 1980, and I have experience in two schools, since my adviser died on me at the first one. Since grad students come from a variety of undergrad schools, coursework at the beginning is to get everyone up to speed on what was considered important at that school and to get ready for quals. Not a full course load if you are working as an RA or a TA, and pretty much all in your field unless you have some sort of requirement. When I taught honors intro to CS one of my students was an English PhD student learning PL/1 for her language requirement.

After quals the coursework drops and most classes are seminars where you read papers and report on them. Your dissertations counts as a class which you take every term until you finish.
So, if PhD student is defined as someone in grad school intending to get a PhD, they take a few classes. If you define it as someone who has passed quals, not so many.