It would be really interesting hearing what new concepts are being proposed. I would imagine this is an important part of researchers extending their branches.
In my son’s case, and I don’t know if this is typical, he gives the university 40+ hours per week. That included classes (during the years he was in the classroom), working in the lab, doing presentations and department work, etc. In other words, in exchange for tuition, access to the facilities to do the work needed for his degree, and a stipend, he’s essentially a full-time employee
In the case of Queen guitarist (and astrophysicist) Brian May, who was mentioned upthread, my understanding is that he had begun work on his dissertation in the early 1970s (his topic had something to do with the velocity of interplanetary dust; I’m no astrophysicist), and then left off his studies when the band became successful.
When he decided to restart work on his PhD in 2006, his dissertation topic was apparently still novel, as there had been little research done on it during the intervening decades.
Is there a place I can look up dissertation topics? I bet there is a lot of interesting idealistic stuff to be read.
It’s not hard to find something new. It is often related to grants the advisor has. An important part of the process, not mentioned so far, is a literature search where you find everything that has been written on your topic. That’s where you make sure your subject is original. Or explain how your subject differs in some important way from work already done.
That’s part of the proposal process. A decent advisor is not going to let someone propose something that would take 10 years to complete. It is usually pretty simple to divide up the problem into something you can do in few years. Hell, you shouldn’t do that kind of project while you’re trying to get tenure, unless you can spin off a lot of papers on it.
Are prelims the test of general knowledge? Illinois called them quals, and you had to take them your second year. You did get some retests.
They called the more detailed test about your specialty orals. I’m an expert having passed both quals and orals at two different universities, thanks to my first advisor dying on me.
When I was a TA I taught two lab sections per semester, so however long those were (maybe 3-4 h/wk each?) plus prep time, grading assignments/quizzes. So well under 20 h/wk. Probably closer to 10 most weeks. And I only needed one year of classes.
But most years my tuition and stipend were covered by grants. I spent at least 70 h/wk in the lab, with a shorter day on Saturday and taking Sunday off. Organic chemistry is just slow like that, so YMMV. Lots of weighing stuff, column chromatography, and working up NMR spectra that wasn’t too heavy on the thinking.
So yes, if you didn’t have grant money and didn’t want to teach, self-funding would save you that teaching time
Most universities would have something like that on the department’s websites, I’d imagine.
But I wouldn’t get too excited about it. Yes, PhD dissertations are required to be original research, but most of them are not particularly groundbreaking. In the social sciences, it is often a case of developing a new data set to apply to an existing question. In the physical sciences, it is often examining a fairly niche topic. Brian May’s study was on the properties of grains of dust floating around in the solar system.
Walk into any university research facility and look for posters on the walls showcasing the research being done there. Generally they’ll tell you who’s doing the work, who’s funding it, and the latest/most interesting results. When I was in grad school we had to update these posters annually. Some years ago I was in Boston wandering around MIT, and saw the same thing in one of their engineering buildings. My wife is tenured faculty at a Big 10 university, and I see the same thing in the building where her office is located.
Depending on what topics interest you, you can decide which building to head for on campus: chemistry, geology, physics, math, electrical/mechanical/chemical engineering, aerospace, whatever.
That was my experience as well. For a lot of my time in grad school it was basically a full-time job, and early on some of my spare time was also taken up by doing homework for classes. After a few years the classes ended and I got my evenings and weekends back. But then toward the end, I had to start putting in a lot of extra time to coax data out of my experimental rig and then put together a dissertation (people think the writing takes a long time, and it does, but it’s also amazingly time-consuming to create high-quality figures, schematic drawings, and plots). My research assistant salary wasn’t much - about $14,500 in the early 1990s, equivalent to about $29,000 today, and my tuition ate up nearly a third of that - but as long as you didn’t mind living economically (e.g. having roommates, driving a piece-of-shit car, and living in slightly crusty student apartments), you had a little money left over for beer and other fun. (I did also receive health insurance at little or no cost to me.)
Dissertations are not peer reviewed in the way papers are. At McGill, they are sent to one external examiner (in a different university) and one internal examiner (in the same department). Once the supervisor accepts the thesis, it is virtually unheard of to fail the examination. The only one I can think of was not accepted by the advisor (me, in fact), but the student insisted (as was his right) and it was failed by both the external and internal, neither of whom knew my reaction.
Then in the usual course of things, a paper is written based on the results and submitted to referees before publications. But that’s a different process.
Theoretically, it’s always a single topic, but yes, a lot of theses are, as they say, “written using a stapler”. In such cases, the student will come up with a label of some sort that encompasses all of the papers being stapled together, write a couple of pages tying them together, and call it one topic.
Any given school library will have copies of every dissertation from that school, and much of the content of a dissertation will end up in academic journals of that field (either before or after the dissertation itself is published), but I don’t know of any single central “clearinghouse of theses” or the like.
At Purdue Aerospace Engineering, we have quals…both topic area and mathematics, which are done first, about one year into your PhD program.
Then, by the end of your second year, you do your “prelims” or research proposal, to the committee of professors you’ve chosen, proposing your research topic. They get to put their stamp on the research topic and direction, or even flat out reject the topic and ask you to try again.
Then, no less than one year after prelims, you can submit your dissertation and do your defense, also called final exam, which is not perfunctory at all. It’s really serious.
FWIW I just did my defense last Friday and passed. (Yay) I went back to school at age 46, and would have been done in 5 years if not for my focusing for a year on teaching, and then covid hit, then my advisor left, etc. etc. Fortunately I have managed to mostly wrap things up within 6 years.
But…I’m currently collecting feedback from my advisors on some issues that need fixing, so it’ll be another week or more until I am well and truly “done.” As my chief advisor reminded me, it’s a process.
ETA: Aaaand…yes, it’s possible to still be working on your PhD, but if it’s been a super long time and they’re not actively working on it, then you may feel the need to ask, will they find a way to get it done?
True In economics, and probably in other disciplines, the PhD thesis is very often the equivalent of three academic papers bundled together; the idea being that the successful candidate will submit them to journals after completing the degree.
Or has already published them. My roommate was advised to leave a year’s worth of work out of her dissertation because it hadn’t been published yet.
This can be an issue in both directions, though. The dissertation is supposed to be original work, so while some of it can be published, as a rule most of it should not have been, or at least published in different form.
Meanwhile, the journal I work for has rejected material from dissertations because we can’t publish previously published material (violation of copyright: you don’t necessarily own the rights to your own dissertation).
The balance on dissertations between original and original and new changed just after my defense. For me, I was encouraged to not publish certain things if I wanted to include them as part of my dissertation, rather then just cite them.
Then the faculty decided encouraging students to not publish was a stupid idea, because it messed up incentives. Afterwards, students could include any original work in their dissertation, even if it had previously been published as a standalone paper. This immediately led to allowing a group of papers, whether published, in-press, submitted, or unpublished, to be bundled together as a dissertation. Along with appropriate wrapping text and explanations of why everything goes together.
Interesting. I would think that this would cause a lot of copyright issues; I know we wouldn’t be happy to find that something we published also appeared in a later dissertation, though we are always very happy to work with graduate students and publish a couple of pre-dissertation articles every year. In one case we were okay with it because our article was in English and the dissertation was in French or Portuguese or something, and we felt that was different enough not to be a copyright issue.
But pressure to publish has certainly increased: I get a number of desperate pleas from grad students in various countries saying they need a publication in a certain level of journal to complete their PhD. I’m sympathetic, but that doesn’t cut any ice with us.
Only if journals choose to make it an issue; I certainly haven’t published in any that do. Springer Nature, AAAS (Science), ACS, Elsevier, Wiley all at least did allow it. Some ask that you register the use. And some schools ask you to get permission anyway.
ETA FWIW mine was largely a cut-and-paste exercise. And nobody felt a defense was worth the bother.
In a couple of weeks my son will have to provide a “public defense” of his dissertation. That involves presenting to an audience (not just the committee) and answering questions. In practice, that means he’ll be speaking to some mildly interested grad students and colleagues, and perhaps some of his old instructors who are curious as to how he turned out. He’s invited my wife and I to attend, where we expect to hear him talk about research we aren’t familiar with, using terms we don’t understand, and addressing arcane details we can’t grasp. We’ll just sit, try to digest the abstract, and nod along politely.
I guess it’s a custom from long ago. Fortunately, my son is pretty comfortable with public speaking to a peer audience.
How old is your son?
The joke amongst English Department PhDs is that the bowels of their University libraries are full of hardbound volumes of theses. One “Doc” said he slipped a $50 bill inside his, went back decades later, and it was still there.