Science? Art? Mud-puddleography?
Oh, sorry I forgot to mention the subject. Modern British history (specializing in the English Reformation).
As someone who has only seen the inside of a community college ( for one semester, tyvm) what , exactly, does “defending your thesis” really mean. The highest degree in my family unit is, well, we have lawyer, but we don’t mention him. Everyone else has a master’s degree in something. ( Except me, the red headed stepchild.)
It conjures up knife fights and shoot outs in my mind. Maybe some kung fu action.
How hard is it to come up with your thesis and write on it until you are sick of it and stuff?
Those of you, except Duke, whom I get, say you had to fly for your defense, is this because the meeting took place other than where you studied or you were living elsewhere by the time it happened?
And, If I can ask a couple of very bold questions, how much did it cost you financially to get you to your PhD? Are you in the feild you studied and do you feel it was worth it?
I want to understand the higher branches of Academics so I can familiarize my children with it now, so they aren’t a farking moron like me.
From what I know of CS vivas in the UK (hopefully only sitting mine next year, thank God!), if you get to the viva, then there really should be no way of failing it. If you do get failed, then this reflects really badly on your supervisor, who should never have allowed you to sit it, anyway. The worst you can get is “major corrections”.
They usually only last just over an hour, here, too (and the external will usually have made a large part of their mind up as to whether you’ve passed or not before even arriving). Having said that, a guy in our department had an eight hour viva the other week!
Also, Hari Seldon, were you at CADE at McGill last week?
For the final defense in chemistry as I have experienced things in the US, prepare a 1 hour presentation on what I’ve been doing during grad school. Audience leaves. Committee asks some questions. Done. For the defense (we didn’t call it that though) that really mattered, which was at the end of the second year (later for most schools I think), we prepared a shorter presentation on our progress and where we thought things were going. Got interrupted constantly with probing questions to make sure that we had full mastery of the material.
I didn’t “come up with my thesis”. I joined a lab that had funding for several different large projects. I started working on one of those. I published papers as I went along. After 5 years it was time to move on to something else, as I’d demonstrated that I could be an independent chemistry researcher.
In chemistry, the lab (chemicals, equipment, and FUNDING) goes with the adviser if he or she moves. Unless you want to start over, you go too. You may transfer to the new school or you may stay enrolled at the old one. Usually no travel is needed, because everyone has stayed put.
Cost? They waived tuition, paid me >$25k/year, and paid for my health plan. This is standard. No one pays for a Ph.D. in chemistry. I had to teach 2 semesters (department requirement). If your adviser has no money, you may have to teach more. Try not to join a lab with funding issues.
Thanks, Ruken. Very informative.
I didn’t realize that if your advisor moves, you move with them or start fresh.
- Coming up with the topic. It depends on area, financing and such. At a great place the profs basically let you choose a subtopic within their field and as long as it leads to published work (which helpfully acknowledges their grant) they are happy. This was the way for me and at the first place I worked. In my area we didn’t need lab facilities etc. which helps in terms of getting reasonable funding. At other places/fields the prof has funding to do X and if you work for that prof you do X and that’s it.
Remember, it’s all about money. Just like everwhere else. (The notion that academia is some sort of “ivory tower” world is a politically motivated myth. It runs just like any other business.)
A great topic is one that will lead to something publishable within a reasonable period of time. (Of course.) A good advisor will know what will go somewhere and what’s a a dead end. It can be quite scary from a student’s point of view of not knowing how it’s going to turn out.
People vary in their ability to knuckle down and do the work. Some breeze thru it and others struggle and never finish. For me, the research was a snap. I had more results than I needed. It was the writing that was (and still is) a challenge.
I had 3 “results chapters” each leading to a conference paper while I was a student and then journal papers later. My best students did likewise.
My advisor would have been quite happy if I had stayed on longer and continued to grind out papers. Some profs are notorious for exploiting grad students as cheap labor in this regard. Not encouraging them to finish.
- I mentioned flying back to defend. I left “ABD” as they say: All but dissertation. I had done all the work except completing the writing. I had interviewed at 3 schools and gotten offers at each. (Even turning down interviewing at a famous place which was notorious for not promoting junior faculty. My mother was ticked at that.) The schools didn’t care that I wasn’t quite finished but things might not be so relaxed today. I finished writing during the year and went back the next summer. (Finishing a thesis during one’s first year as a prof is not exactly easy btw.)
I also flew in for defenses twice at a former school when my students finished. That place was liberal in allowing ex-faculty to stay on as advisors. Another place later didn’t allow it so I was just a regular committee member (and no flying needed in that case). So sometimes getting everyone in one place at the same time is tricky.
- Cost? I maybe wrote checks totalling something $250 for the whole thing. If I had done certain things better it would have been essentially $0. I got paid by being a research assistant. (And a teaching assistant when going for my masters.) Tuition fees are always waived or covered for such people. Summer money was especially nice. We saved up enough money to make a down payment on a nice house at my first position. (At some places, the area near the school was rundown but gentrifiable. So I’ve known a lot of students who bought houses for cheap and then sold them for big bucks later. Some bought even more than one and became landlords.)
My brother who got his PhD at the other famous place was in a field with no funding. He just barely got by on a tiny fellowship.
If you are smart and disciplined, it can work out okay.
If you are paying significant money for a PhD, you are doing it wrong.
It worked out well for me for a while, but I’m no longer in academia. I’m still a “computer guy” but having a PhD is now a hinderance rather than a help. There are a lot of stupid people in charge of hiring. (They love the undergrad students I just taught since they clearly know more than me. Whaaat?)
To get published is it in a trade publication or something so minute that only a small sector read?
I’m not familiar with the term “trade publication”, but in chemistry you generally want to publish papers in peer reviewed chemistry journals. The more general journals tend to be perceived as better and are harder to publish in. For instance, publishing in Science or Nature is seen as a big deal. Next would be The Journal of the American Chemical Society or Angewandte Chemie, both general chemistry journals. After that are more area-specific, like Organic Letters or The Journal of Physical Chemistry B.
People will publish review articles in some of these or other journals, or they’ll write book chapters or even books, but this isn’t as important because you’re not producing more results or pushing the frontiers of human knowledge. You’re just writing about it.
ETA Science and Nature are general science journals, so there are usually only a couple of chemistry papers in each issue, if any.
Whatever CADE is, I wasn’t. I came in one day (Monday, I think) and didn’t see anything special. Basically I come only to check mail and, during the term, for a Tuesday seminar.
Okay, what’s a viva?
The defense itself was easy. The worst part was having to fly back just to stand for the formality.
Since my program required my Ph.D. dissertation to be accepted for publication as three papers BEFORE I could graduate, and since as I was standing before the faculty with one published paper and two in press (and published the month after I graduated), what could they do?
Answer: still try to be all smart-sounding and try to nail me, and so on, like you’d expect… but standing there with three publications, and knowing it was in the bag, it was really almost more of a bore (something I had to do before I could start drinking) than anything else.
(P.S., it also taught me an important life lesson that I’ll pass on to you aspiring academics: No matter what your school requires you to do–teaching, service, whatever–what you really need to do is publish, publish, publish! Yes, even if you are at a “teaching” or “regional” university!)
CADE = big computer science/logic conference that was at McGill last week.
Viva voce = oral examination at end of PhD.
Wow. That sure is a disciplinary difference! I’m in sociology in the US. We are not encouraged or expected to publish from our dissertations until they’ve been defended. We also tend to use conference presentations to get feedback that’s used to revised papers so they can be submitted for publication.
The biggest hurdle in our program, I think, is the defense of the dissertation proposal, rather than the defense of the dissertation itself. Still, the dissertation defense is not rumored to be much fun, hard questions may be asked, and substantial revisions may be required. The committee is made up of five people: the advisor and four other other profs, at least one of whom is from a difference department. They are private meetings - no audience allowed. They typically last around two hours.
You know, I’ve seen a lot of variations of academic terminology* over the years but this thread is the first place I’ve ever seen the term “viva voce” like this. Weird.
*My favorite variations is that at some places being put on “the dean’s list” is very good and at others it is very bad.
I had never heard the term “viva” before this thread. Is this a non-US term?
It’s what they are called in the UK. “Defence” is never used.
That’s because it’s spelled “defense”!
You make a presentation about it, and answer questions on the finer points from your committee.
I’m good at coming up with ideas, so no problem. I had the general idea of what I wanted to do at the first grad school I went to, and switched schools when my advisor died and no one there was very interested in it. My PhD consisted of a compiler and a new computer language, so I overlapped coding and writing, both of which I like to do. I didn’t get tired of it, but a few years later I got offered a job at RCA supervising a government contract with my university extending my work, which I turned down because I had moved on. I also knew all the problems. I proved my point, but it wasn’t quite production ready.
I worked very hard to be done with the thesis and the defense before I moved to my job, and told my adviser my employer required me to be done (which was not quite true.) So I didn’t have to go anywhere. My wife, on the other hand, had to fly back to defend her Masters, because there was a lot of politics in her department, and they decided it was best to defend when the obnoxious professor was away for the summer.
I got paid a stipend my whole time in grad school and also got tuition waived, and was actually able to save money the first place I went. I guess I gave up potential earnings, but I’ve more than made it back over the past 30 years. I’m more or less in the same general field (computer science) though the particular branch I worked on has died. I guessed it would, so I got a job doing something else, but stayed active in it for a few years afterwards. It was definitely worth it, since it enabled me to do the research stuff I enjoyed, even in industry, and is kind of the minimum expectation for some stuff I’m involved with.