I hate to ask the person in question so I will ask some perfect strangers. If a person graduated college 20 years ago and in passing conversations over the years says, " I am still working on my PHD". What does this actually mean? It has been about 20 years? Does it mean he takes occasional classes? The person in question is a very nice person with high credibility so I am not being critical, I just don’t understand the process. I have a strong hunch it is associated with his hobbies, but he is tight lipped about it.
Most likely it means that he is still plugging along on his dissertation. The classwork for a PhD is pretty much complete after the first 2-3 years. The bulk of the work is getting the dissertation done. Its possible that if the is only working on it part time that it could take that long, but I think after 20 years most advisors would say finish it up or get out.
When I was in grad school, you had to complete the dissertation within ten years of advancing to candidacy (I think), or else you would lose your place and have to reapply to the program. In general, universities don’t like people taking a ridiculous amount of time for their dissertation (though YMMV as to “ridiculous”—mine was five years from advancing to candidacy, which is probably a few years longer than I really needed).
After 20 years, “I am still working on my PhD” probably means “I still haven’t admitted to myself that I’m never going to finish my PhD.” That’s how I’d interpret it, anyway.
It took Brian May 37 years to complete his PhD. At 20 years I would say there’s still hope.
Brian was a bit busy doing other things (you know, being the lead guitarist for Queen) during those years, so he does at least have a valid excuse for taking so long.
That would make sense. It’s something he is working on part time, not as a full-time career.
I know in Brian May’s case, since he stopped working on it for a couple of decades, he had to review a lot of research that was done in the intervening years and had to amend his thesis accordingly. If the person in the OP is dragging their feet enough, they could be perpetually behind and constantly playing catch-up due to other changes and discoveries occurring within their field of research.
I read a book once about ABDs - all but dissertation. The people in the book were getting PhDs in education, and were working while their dissertations sat on the very back burner. So, they weren’t getting paid by the department they were in. I don’t know if they had to pay for the “working on your dissertation” course that is most of your supposed load your last year or so.
So, perfectly plausible.
I am a little suspicious he is suffering from paralysis of analysis. He tends to be a perfectionist and with raising a family doesn’t have a lot of free time on his hands.
I’m not very familiar with the academic field. Can a dissertation involve a paper on a long term research project? I’m thinking of somebody like Gregor Mendel. Mendel wasn’t working on his PhD but his scientific paper on genetics was based on ten years of experiments that couldn’t be sped up because growing several generations of pea plants takes time.
Some research takes a long time. But any given academic is working on multiple projects at once, and rare would be the academic who doesn’t have anything that could be brought to a publishable state in a decade. Even if a full experiment will take a very long time, there’s still going to be a lot of preliminary work, that can be published before the experiment concludes, and possibly even enough for a thesis. Remember, a PhD isn’t supposed to be the end of a career of research, but the beginning.
I’d interpret it in approximately the same spirit as if he had told me many times over the years “I’m writing a novel.”
When one of my PhD students passed 7 years, they required him to retake his prelims, which were oral. I decided to accompany him (I had moved on by then) to the exam and he was so rattled he couldn’t recall the mean value theorem (taught in calc 1). But they passed him anyway, he completed his thesis and got a job in a community college.
Schools differ, but I would take working on a PhD after 20 to be aspirational, not realistic.
I actually don’t hear him mention that anywhere near as often as he used to. He plans to retire at 55 (9 years from now) from his regular job and then go to work at a local college. He may just want to have it for credentials when he goes looking for work.
It’s my anecdotal experience that many graduate students don’t actually take classes full-time, and the research part of the program can be open-ended.
My son graduated from college, worked in the field for years, then went back full-time for his PhD five years ago. The first two years were mostly classwork, the last three were pure research. He’s doing the final polish on his dissertation now and will defend it later this summer. Assuming there are no glitches, he’ll get his PhD in the fall - if the calendar breaks right, he may even get it before he turns 37.
My son’s work involved multiple generations of mice. Mice take about 6 weeks to reach sexual maturity, then can reproduce in about four weeks, so you can easily get 5-6 generations per year. However, some of the research he participated in under his department head relied on results from 30 or more generations. And that research depended on the changes from one generation to the next, so the department could only update their data those 5-6 times a year.
Even so, to the OP’s point, I think advisors would urge a candidate not to take on a project that would take a decade just to collect data. That’s what post-doctoral fellowships are for.
Then there are people like my wife’s friend, who worked full time, was married (later divorced) and had a kid. As a teacher, she had her summers free, but even then could only manage about one classroom course per year. Her research consisted of a year-long field project, then writing a dissertation based on those findings. I think she was about 40 when she finally got her D.Ed.
I had on PhD student who took 20 years to finish. He did his course work quickly and well, then life got in the way. He was married and had 4 children when he entered the PhD program, worked full time, and had much going in with family and work. He timed out of the program after 7-8 years, but I agreed to keep working with him, and the university has a protocol for letting people come back to defend the thesis. He did a good job of it, too. The big thing is, the thesis has to demonstrate the author has kept up with the literature. No one is going to give a physics degree to someone who demonstrates E=mc2, and history degrees have their own requirements.
I came here to post about Dexter Holland, lead singer of the Offspring. He started his PhD in the early 90s, then dropped out to pursue his musical career. I think he went back to work on it part time and got his PhD in molecular biology in 2017.
How much time does a grad student spend on doing work in exchange for a stipend and free tuition? I know grad students work as TAs, but if a grad student is independently wealthy hes not going to need to do things like be a T.A.
How many hours a week would that save the student on work? Like if the average grad student works 80 hours a week, one who is independently wealthy maybe only works 50 (as a guess) hours a week. So if they’re doing it part time, thats 20-30 hours a week.
I knew someone like this. They left school because of a military service commitment, but maintained that they were still “working” on their dissertation. This was however a rationalization, as they never really put in any effort to make forward progress. It was a good 15 years before they finally admitted to themselves and others around them that everything else in their life was a higher priority, anything novel about what they had been researching back then was no longer novel, and their familiarity with the work had faded to the point that it had become difficult to be insightful about it anymore. It also didn’t help that their advisor had actually died during that 15-year stretch, and the network of students and faculty that they associated with in school had scattered and moved on to other things.
Once you’re out of the environment that was conducive to making progress, and the resources that facilitated progress have melted away, the odds of successfully completing your degree go way down.
I have a friend who has been working on her dissertation for longer than anyone else I have ever heard of. I’m reluctant to say how long, but it’s a REALLY long time. And all she needs to do is finish that dissertation. It’s not her fault that a host of really rotten things happened to her while in pursuit of it. But she’s still enrolled, even after all these years, and it’s all she has to do. I keep telling her to send me chapters from it and I’ll critique them.
I would like to see her finish up. It would be obscene to spend all that time on it and have it come to nothing.
I was reading a little this morning on what a dissertation actually was. I really only had a basic understanding of it. One thing that struck me as interesting was that they were required to offer a new concept on something. I would assume that these things are peer reviewed and depending on the reviews either work their way up the latter or die on the vine. It made me think about how many dissertations may be valid great pieces of work but may not have gotten good reviews? Is there a process to defend your work at that time and also into the future?
Every once in a while, that novel gets written. My friend used some time during the pandemic to self-publish a novel she started writing over 20 years before. She never gave up on it. In that time she had continued to attend writers’ classes, retreats, and workshops. She hired an editor, then a writing consultant (who turned out to be a fraud), then another editor. She kept plugging away. When she finished, she got a pretty good response and now she has self-published two more. I’m impressed.
The general process is that when the student feels the dissertation is complete, he or she submits it in writing to a committee of professors at the university. It is either approved, or send back with recommendations for improvement and resubmission. There is also an oral presentation of the results to the same committee, but this is often perfunctory.
They may be cases where a great piece of work is overlooked by a clueless committee, but they are probably rare. The student has the option of seeking out other experts who can support the work in such a case.
A dissertation proposal can also be an important part of the process. The student and their advisor will come up with a topic and proposed research, and then take that plan to the committee. That is the time for the committee to critique the topic and proposed research. It might be too ambitions, too narrow, not new enough, poorly thought out, or the research won’t answer the proposed question, etc.
This is supposed to prevent things like the committee at the final defense saying the whole thing was a waste of time. A student can certainly propose something good, and then fail to follow through, but a good advisor should prevent that from happening.
The other thing is that exactly how the dissertation process works will be different at different institutions, different departments within institutions, and across time in the same department. For example, one department might accept five separate papers as a dissertation, while another department might require the dissertation be a single cohesive work.