Comments on: Dissertations

By: mike

mike — Sat, 16 Aug 2003 02:39:22 +0000

I’d like to make a quick point on the issue of how long graduate students should take to complete their degree. I must admit, however, that as I am just beginning grad school, this line of thought is really going on not much more than a vague impression. Anyway, let us say that the average PhD student is finished with all of her course work, her AOS and AOC exams, and her prospectus after 3.5 years. Now, it certainly seems reasonable to me that 1.5 years is enough time to write a decent dissertation, but it also seems reasonable that a student would want have almost finished her dissertation before engaging upon a job search. I’d guess that the search process is quite time consuming for many students, and might be overly burdensome to deal with while trying to get substantial portions of the dissertation written. Furthermore, it is probably far more difficult to defend your ideas in job interviews, before most of it is written. Thus it seems that taking a sixth year, for many students, might be very beneficial.

By: Brian Weatherson

Brian Weatherson — Fri, 15 Aug 2003 13:22:43 +0000

I don’t remember a Steven A, but I could be forgetting someone because one of the odd features of Monash at the time was that about half the graduate students were called Steven or Stephen. I really should remember people anyway, but that’s my excuse if it’s a bad forgetting.

By: Walter

Walter — Fri, 15 Aug 2003 05:00:37 +0000

Sorry for the off-topic, but…Brian, did you know a Steven A. while you were at Monash? He would have been working on critical/cultural theory.

By: Brian Weatherson

Brian Weatherson — Fri, 15 Aug 2003 04:10:06 +0000

First, I should note that I’ve already been told by some email correspondants that my claims about how often dissertations are cited were, er, somewhat exaggerated. So take this all with a grain of salt. I think it’s really important to complete a PhD in minimal time because after you do you’ve got a chance to start earning cash money, to start working towards tenure and a full professorship, etc. Being in grad school is hazardous to your wealth, being an academic usually isn’t. If there were some evidence that an extra 2 or 3 years in grad school improved your career prospects, it may be worthwhile. But I see very little evidence of this being true. It isn’t as hard to get a tenure-track position in grad school as is often reported. Earlier this year I looked over the placement records for several departments, and concluded that while it’s not trivial to get tenure-track positions at top PhD granting departments, it’s not as hard to get work as in other disciplines. Given the factual error I made at the top, take all this with a grain of salt, but my impression is that the quality of the best chapter or two of a dissertation does a lot more to perk eyebrows than the quality of the dissertation as a whole. Having said that, most of my reasons for thinking it is so are somewhat anecdotal, so don’t go changing career plans on my say so!

By: Walter

Walter — Fri, 15 Aug 2003 03:41:11 +0000

Well, as Brian mentions, “you should choose graduate schools who make a point of getting their students educated and placed on the job market with all due haste. Getting a tenure-track position in philosophy is extraordinarily difficult these days, from what I hear. Of course, I also heard it was important to spend time getting your dissertation topic “just right”, so it would perk the right eyebrows at the universities you were thinking of teaching at, which runs somewhat counter to the idea that your dissertation isn’t that important. But if you’ve really got some “very good” papers, then those could certainly perk the right eyebrows too. Hoping this is possible for an undergrad as well.

By: Micha Ghertner

Micha Ghertner — Fri, 15 Aug 2003 03:22:09 +0000

Oops, lack of lowercase “h” typo.

By: Micha Ghertner

Micha Ghertner — Fri, 15 Aug 2003 03:19:31 +0000

Why is it so important to complete a philosophy PHD in five years or less?

By: Stentor

Stentor — Thu, 14 Aug 2003 23:13:03 +0000

The idea of someone not publishing their dissertation strikes me as strange (and hence the idea of frequent citations of dissertations not by the author does as well). In geography (well, in Clark’s program, at least), your dissertation basically is your first few publications. My professors consistently tell us that we should write our dissertations so that they can be broken up into publishable articles with as little effort as possible. Turning it into a book isn’t encouraged (though I believe it is in anthropology). Perhaps this has something to do with the need to go out and amass a body of empirical data to work on before a typical social science publication?