- With luck he’ll actually be done by the time he hits 37.
I call BS. What English PhD can afford to do without $50 for decades?
(j/k)
I used to go to a seminar at Stanford where the students of a professor presented their work, and I was invited to the public defenses of his students. Just a talk, no big deal. Anyone getting a PhD should expect to present at conferences and so should be reasonable at public speaking. The seminar was partly for that purpose.
Anyhow, there were cookies.
The defense is a nice custom because it is a public acknowledgement of your completion. Nice you could be there for it.
It’s interesting (to me, at least) how different the typical PhD setup seems to be in the US compared to the UK.
I’m supposed to be starting a PhD programme in October; I already have my supervisors arranged, the project is broadly agreed (though there may be some fine-tuning later), there will likely be no formal classes (I think I have the option to sign up to audit some if it’s useful, but many students don’t) and there are certainly no exams, just assorted reports at various stages to ensure you’re on track and keeping up an acceptable standard, nor is there a general knowledge test, just an interview prior to the course admission.
PhD student teaching is unusual here, and is almost never more than what amounts to a guest lecture or two, no marking or setting work or anything like that.
It really depends on the type of program in the U.S. In some fields the progression is Bachelors degree > advanced coursework leading to a Masters degree > independent research leading to a PhD. In other programs the advanced coursework and independent research are a single program (Bachelors degree > PhD.)
At one point, when my son’s research hit a snag I asked him what would happen if it turned out to be unsuccessful. He said that since he had completed his coursework, the university would give him a Masters degree and send him on his way. He also told me under those circumstances it would be extremely unlikely that any other school would accept him into a PhD program, even with a Masters.
Even when someone enters a PhD program straight from a BS they usually can spin off a Masters on the way, just in case. You have the coursework anyway, and a Masters can be generated from preliminary research assuming the department requires a Master’s Thesis, which some don’t.
Research often hits snags. I’d hope a good adviser could head it off early, and some other project be found, assuming the snag doesn’t come from the student being incompetent. I know someone who depended on an accepted finding for his dissertation, only to find it to be false. It was not important enough for a dissertation, so he was stuck for another year while he worked around it.
Departments vary in their expectations. I have been chairing the PhD final exams at McGill for a number of years (I am retired so this is purely volunteer). Generally, they were open and fellow students, spouses, even parents, would often attend. The official committee consisted of five professors, one from another department plus the chair (me). The candidate would present of lecture based on his thesis and then get questioned by the committee. Observers were then allowed to ask questions, but they virtually never did.
One thing that really struck me was that in the engineering departments, the thesis invariably consisted of a bunch of papers stapled together with some glue. The papers were multi-author and the student had to carefully delimit his contributions to the joint work. Theses in math are never like that; they consist of a long (usually) project. And then a paper is extracted from them for later publication. A colleague of mine once described a thesis as a paper by the advisor written under adverse circumstances. And added that he didn’t mind writing the thesis: what bugged him was having to explain it to the student afterwards. I should say that none of this applies to my students. Even the poorest of them did his own work, although I had given him a roadmap.
My dissertation defense (British: Viva) was waived when I passed my qualifying exams, so when I was done I just filed and that was it. I’ve never heard of anyone else having it waived, though I’ve often heard that they were pro forma or even celebratory. I think my chair anticipated (correctly) not wanting to be in a room with a couple of my other committee members.
My wife is an ABD from a Japanese university who brought along all the boxes and boxes of her research material when moved here to Taiwan. Eventually, she finally gave up and is not in another type of work. Her advisor had been willing to let her keep her name on the records for all those years, and they didn’t seem to have a formal process of kicking people out.
A co-worker of mine attended a PhD program at a university where they would give you a Master’s degree upon passing the qualifying exam (no thesis necessary). So she got one Master’s degree after passing her exam and then she decided to switch to a slightly different area. She passed another qualifying exam, got another Master’s degree and then completed her PhD. Then several years later she decided to enter a completely different Master’s program and thus she ended up with 3 Master’s degrees and 1 PhD.
Odd, all the defenses I went to at Stanford were based on one project. (I didn’t read the dissertations so I don’t know for sure they were pasted together papers, but I doubt it.) Mine certainly wasn’t, but that was before the days of cut and past and good word processors.
The PhDs I hired also had very well defined projects which they knew - I quizzed them on it.
The only exception was the case where the student was a holdover from before the department was upgraded. The other students extensively edited his thesis, and he was fourth author on the papers that came out of the work.
In economics, dissertations are often two or three seperate works stapled together. Sometimes the title is simply “Three essays on the economics of …” But, it’s always the students’ own work, guided by their committee members.
My grad school (as well as others I was affiliated with) had a “time-out” rule. In that case 7 years as mentioned above. So your first year classes drop off your credits first. Then your qualifying exam. Then your thesis proposal. Supposed to do these things over.
There was one student who was suckered into running the computer lab for several years. Had to really rush things at the end to finish in 8 years. The big surprise to us all: Got something like 2nd place in our field’s Dissertation of the Year Award.
Never heard of someone going longer at any place I was at. But keep in mind a key fact about academia: everything can be appealed. There’s a good amount of leniency about. So someone appealing to a faculty panel to keep some old credits or qualifying exams might work.
OTOH, my field is Computer Science. If you snooze you lose in keeping up to date.
FWIW: My thesis was 3 papers. Two appeared in journals and one was superseded.
In my field (education), there’s always concerns about the rigor of student work, as people assume that doctorates in education “aren’t real.” At the same time, many of our degree candidates are professionals working full time, so it is not uncommon for them to do courses in the summer to “catch up.” I think the average time to degree in our department is 4-5 years.
I have occasionally joined a committee (or even chaired a dissertation) for a student who has been working on their degree for a long time. I joined a committee of a student who was in his 8th year. Brilliant guy, but he got a promotion at work and his chair retired. I later learned he was ABD in another Ph.D. program and just left to start ours!
At our university the graduate school tracks students and their coursework, qualifying exams, etc. eventually “age out.” Waivers are possible, but generally, if a student successfully proposes their dissertation topic and moves into candidacy, they get the time that they need. They get two years to submit and defend the dissertation, and can get a one year extension fairly easily. Beyond that, our department’s graduate studies committee can grant extensions, but we always depend on the chair’s judgment - if they vouch and advocate for the student we usually fall in line.
There is one program that tends to have many late students, again because they are often full time professionals and many times are advanced to prominent roles in their field as they’re in the doctoral program. I heard that some of our colleagues look at this disdainfully but it’s simply the way the field works…
At my grad school, it was normal for PhD students to get a “Masters en route”. Which I did indeed end up falling back on.
And in my experience, a thesis defense is always celebratory (and yes, you invite family and other loved ones who won’t have any clue what you’re talking about). It’s possible in principle to fail a defense, but if that happens, it’s because something has gone very, very wrong: If a student is going to fail their defense, the advisor and committee should know that well in advance, and delay the defense until the student is actually ready.
I went to my son’s defense last week. My wife and I were the only two “civilians” there - everyone else was a member of the committee, former instructor, graduate student or, a nice touch, a couple of coworkers from his previous non-degree research job across town who came to wish him well.
The questions were, as I expected, incomprehensible to me, and mostly seemed to focus on the details of his program rather than any real discussion of his results. Except for one grad student who couldn’t resist asking, “Based on your data, would you hypothesize that. . .” followed by some words I absolutely did not understand. My son looked at her, paused for one full second and answered, “No.”
I was away in the wilds of Utah, and my family was on the East Coast, so I didn’t invite anyone to my defense. I celebrated that night by going to a Crosby, Stills, and Nash concert at Park West (now-defunct and resurrected ski resort)
I heard about one guy who managed to fail his thesis defense. He just didn’t show up. There were clearly other issues involved there. I’ve never heard of any other cases. By the time you get that far, it’s hard to imagine not going through to a successful conclusion. Three professors don’t like getting together (and boning up on an arcane topic) just to slam a student.
Oh, and since I haven’t mentioned it yet, congratulations to Superboy.
Young Mr. Clark reports that his dissertation has been officially accepted for publication, which means he has completed every requirement, and is now entitled to use the term Ph.D.
I’m not buying it until I see something in writing!
Shouldn’t that be ‘Young Dr. Clark’ ?
(Congratulations to him!)