I’m not sure why, but the New York Times report on shortening the time to a Ph.D. is currently the most e-mailed article on their site. My hunch is that thousands of MBA grads are getting high on schadenfreude right now.
If it’s the grad students, or future grad students, passing this article around, I can see them taking away four main points:
- Go to a rich school with good funding so you don’t have to teach much. (Of course, never pay for a Ph.D.)
- Develop a close relationship with your advisor.
- View the dissertation as a training exercise, not your magnum opus.
- Stay plugged into an academic community while finishing your thesis (I know there’s a post on this at orgtheory, but Wordpress blogs are still blocked in Turkey so I can’t doublecheck.)
For those on the brink of applying to grad school, you can really shorten the journey by reconsidering the whole thing. Start by reading Burke’s Should You Go to Graduate School.
5 comments ↓
“View the dissertation as a training exercise, not your magnum opus.”
With my master’s thesis, my advisor said, on several occasions, “Pick a topic you care a bit about, but don’t *really* care about. Trust me.” So naturally I picked something I loved. Looking back, I tagged on a whole extra year to refine my youthful angst. Well, I also improved my writing ability–but surely there was a more productive way to do that. This time I promise to do better.
That’s interesting advice. Have you found it hard to make a list of topics that fit in that category?
I finished in 5, but only because the PhD felt a bit like running across hot coals. If I stopped, my feet would start to burn. After setting the Wallace Hall carpeting on fire a couple of times, I decided to go for the finish line.
Dang, I didn’t realize you finished that fast, A.A.! Way to go.
Hmm, not really. I think I meant to communicate that my prof stressed not picking a topic that might turn into an all-consuming life project. To keep it a bit of an academic exercise–of course one that you’re interested in, but not one that will be emotionally difficult to finish.
My new advisor just said sort of the same thing: on the one hand, there’s nothing worse than working on something you don’t care deeply about. But on the other hand, if you get too involved and enmeshed, and try to write your magnum opus as your diss, you might never finish. What do I know? Not much. But he claims to have seen it happen more than once.
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