Getting a doctorate by research is probably
the most challenging pursuit any of us will possibly contemplate. In my
experience, it is an ultimate test of character, rather than of intelligence or
knowledge. It’s what most of the young people at my institute are engaged on,
and what many others (including a few retired ones!) may get interested in. Here’s
my own take, from doing a PhD in the University College of North Wales, Bangor, during the 1980s;
things may be a little different in other places, in other times, but maybe my
experience may be of some interest or even guidance to someone struggling with
this great undertaking!
A doctorate is a sort of crowning
achievement of one’s academic career. Conversely, it is not an essential
qualification for a satisfying professional life. Practitioners in the field
may even harbour a thinly veiled contempt for the PhD, as practical experience
is deemed to be more valuable to society than mere academic learning. In fact
doing a PhD is sometimes viewed as an escape from the drudgery of a mundane job,
a way of extending adolescence, as it were. It separates out the ‘men’ from the
‘boys’ in popular parlance (if the sexist bias can be condoned!). It is true
also that sometimes an academic stint is a welcome break from the frustrations
of a job or career, especially if one is getting shunted to the backwaters or waiting for the next promotion.
One has to accept that doing a PhD is one
of the most difficult and challenging undertakings a person could think of, and
so the choice between the drudgery of the regular job and the relative freedom
of an academic life has to be made with full fore-knowledge, even if it is
going to be a temporary commitment. The difference between practicing in the
profession and doing a doctorate is that the doctoral aspirant has to identify
his or her goal and purpose all by themselves, not to speak of working out an
acceptable theoretical framework, methodology, exhaustive survey of the state
of knowledge, and the actual field work. The practitioner, on the other hand,
usually has these main aspects of the job already laid out and defined;
responsibilities are clearly specified, operational practices are spelled out,
and standards also clearly laid out. So the individual has very little to add
except a work plan. A normal job is also
usually not an isolated undertaking, as there is usually a team and an
organization to take you along and forward, and any deficiencies in individual
members are nicely made up by complementary qualities in the others. The system
carries all of us along.
Doing
a PhD, on the other hand, is one of the most painfully isolated and
isolating endeavours a person can take up. It is not for nothing that the scholar
is popularly imagined as locked up in an ivory tower, agonizing over some
intricate problem or pondering some great mystery. Usually, of course, the
scholar is breaking his head over some obscure arguments or trying to make
sense out of someone’s opaque writing. The PhD scholar has to master the bulk
of work in his chosen field and topic, then think of something new in it, and
develop it into a study and thesis.
Before this, of course, the aspirant has to
zero in on a field and topic. For a person just out of a master’s course, this
may well be the most challenging hurdle. This is why it may indeed be
advantageous to get into the real world first and work a few years in the
field, even if there is an underlying intention of doing the PhD at some point.
The years in the working world give substance and life to the dry theories
studied in college, and also give time to understand the priorities and
identify some promising avenues for expanding or extending what one has studied.
If one keeps alive a sense of curiosity and self-observation in the field,
certain problems or issues or situations may present themselves that can be
fruitfully developed into a thesis. The PhD topic and title then formulate
themselves, over the course of the few years spent working in the field, without
the intense search that characterizes the first year of a fresh graduate’s
attempt. One’s approach to the field of specialization may also shift, maybe
from science to management, or technology to psychology, and so on. In some
cases, the very field of interest itself changes: it is not at all certain that
one’s career will develop in the same subject as the first degree!
If you do join the PhD programme without a
clear conception of the topic, then be prepared for a longer induction period,
which may entail at least a year of assiduous reading, in greater depth and
width compared to your undergraduate days. This means, that you will read in a wide
variety of topics within your broad area of interest, but pursue certain
selected topics to greater depth. All
the basic literature in your field will be a part of this initial grounding,
but you will also take up more detailed work in some topics, perhaps referring
to journal papers, even visiting the field to look at some aspects first-hand, or
having discussions with learned people. It will be difficult to keep a focus
during this period, but I feel this will the most valuable part of the PhD
experience, that will provide a base for much of your future work, looking
beyond the narrow focus of the PhD thesis. This initial period of learning is
like an ‘internship’ or ‘apprenticeship’ that will give you the academic
maturity needed to formulate your research work, even though you may find that
much of the work done during this initial, exploratory phase, will not actually
find a place in your final thesis, but may be useful much later on as you come
back to it to follow up individual lines of interest in later years.
Toward the later part of the first year of
reading, hopefully certain ideas will
start occurring to you that you feel can be worked into a cogent research
proposal or outline. Perhaps some modification occurs to you in the assumptions
or construction of the models people have been using in your field. Perhaps a straight application of the existing
principles can be made in a new geographical region you are familiar with that
may throw new light, and so on. Or perhaps you are thinking of contrasting
situations that can be studied to test some hypothesis (case studies are
useful, since controlled experiments are usually not possible in sociology or
institutional studies).
Intense reading is difficult to sustain
over long time periods, and you will have to do it in short chunks of an hour
or two at a time, followed by some different activity (or a bit of relief with
your fellow-scholars at coffee!). In my case, the peer group (overseas
students, most of them working professionals back home) used to have a rollicking
time over extended coffee hours… the PhD scholar is a pitiful specimen, and
people tolerated our whiling away hours in small talk, gossip and joking about
English culture (our Celtic hosts loved to join us in rolling the heads of the
Saxons!). The brain is often working best when you have given it a rest…
over a long period of months, your ideas
will arrange themselves into some sort of a cogent structure.
By this time, therefore, you will find
ideas forming in your head that can be naturally and easily developed into
small notes or outlines for a study or paper. This is the time to start
writing! And if you can get feedback from your supervisor or trusted colleague,
all the better. Some of these topics may appear really boring at the outset,
because you have to collect a lot of detailed material, but once a certain mass
of material has been so collected, the subject will start getting a life of its
own, and begin to appear more interesting and feasible. As it gains substance,
it will start appearing familiar and viable!
We will expect this process to lead
naturally to one or a couple of serious research topics for your PhD thesis.
This is the time to start putting together all the basic literature and sources
of data, and even drawing up a tentative chapter list, and designing tests,
surveys or experiments as the case may be. These can be tested in the
exploratory phase, some field data collected, then fine-tuned and agreement
reached with the supervisory team. The second year, then, will be engaged in
serious work on the core topic or couple of topics, collection of data or field
surveys, collation and analysis. At the same time, you may have to reorganize
the literature and background material to reflect the topic you will be
focusing on. Hopefully, by the third year, you will have enough material to
write up in a systematic and rigorous way.
Here’s a couple of hints to make the
writing process a little easier and faster. First hint: during the initial, reading, phase, bookmark any
quotations that strike you in any way. In the old days, we used to literally
create a physical bookmark, i.e. a slip of paper, on which we would write out
the quoted sentences. This is done now with computers, obviously, and you could
even scan the page or paragraphs required and save them a file. Now the real
hint here is to record the exact reference to the source when you enter the
quotation, just as if you are citing it in a paper, complete with year,
edition, publisher, and page numbers
because after a year or two, it may become difficult to trace the actual
source publication. In other words, get
it right the first time around! It will save you endless searching later on
(which will take time away from your researching!), even if much of the
material you collect is not used in the actual thesis (it may be useful to you
many years down the line, when you are writing your other papers!).
The second
hint: don’t start your writing with the introductory chapter! Of course,
you could draw up a list of section headings for the chapters, to keep you from
overlooking any important aspects over the course of time, but usually, if you
sit down to write your Chapter One, you will find either that you are unable to
start (writers’ block), or that your introduction goes on and on until it
reaches an encyclopedia size! The alternative, which I am suggesting based on
my own experience, is to leave the initial chapters in an outline state for the
time being, and concentrate instead on your actual work and analysis, from
which will emerge your main conclusions and suggestions for policy and future
work (the last chapter!). So, contrary to our management gurus, I am suggesting
that you put the last thing first!
After you have the draft of the final part, you will feel more confident, and
you will have a good idea of how many pages you will have for the introductory
portions. Since you wouldn’t want your thesis to exceed some 200 to 250 pages
(max!), you will be able to draft your introduction, lit. survey, methodology,
etc. in the most efficient manner, saving time and effort that you could put to
better use in polishing up your later chapters.
When I was in the initial phase at Bangor, my supervisor
told me that the British system didn’t give so much importance to guiding the
scholar, as to the individual’s own ideas and initiative. According to him, he
would be lucky to see his guide once at Christmas every year, so we should
count ourselves lucky that we were able to see and talk to our guides almost
every day during the coffee hour! Even though we were able to see them, we
would find it difficult to initiate serious academic discussions; this is
understandable, since we had to first go through the basic reading phase before
we were in a position to actually benefit from any discussion! This gave us
enormous freedom, but kept us awake nights wondering what we were doing! I
even got my hands on a book by Phillips and Pugh, How To Get a Ph.D. A Handbook for Students and Their Supervisors,
to help me understand the process in the UK! I guess it comes down to your
particular situation and style of functioning in each case (this book even has
a chapter on how not to get a PhD!). I notice that the approach is different in other systems, and in my current institute, for instance, I find much closer supervision throughout the PhD.
A final word: this business is a test of
character, because you have to have the grit to stay with the process until you
are over the hump and coasting to the finish. The biggest hump, in my
experience, is settling on the actual topic. If you register without a clear
idea of this, you will have to go through that initial phase of reading widely
and deeply to get a hang of the field and its possibilities. If you have come
back to academics after a few years working, you may have a better idea of the
area in which you want to work, and your reading may then be much more focused
and detailed in that area; you may also have a certain body of information and
even specific data that could make it easier.
Sometimes, because you are basically
applying someone else’s thinking to your chosen area of focus, you may yourself
not have a clear picture of your own work. That was the case with my PhD
thesis; indeed, because I got what I thought were less than satisfactory conclusions,
I had been a bit puzzled and deflated all these years, until I got a flash of
intuition of the real meaning of my thesis just a few weeks back (after over 30
years!)… if you’re interested, look up my article here: http://forestmatters.blogspot.com/2015/02/13-applying-economic-analysis-to.html.
The point is, that it takes time for ideas to develop, and even more for
understanding to mature. The PhD award itself only certifies your basic ability
to hang in there for a few years and complete the project; it is merely a
license to go forth and practice, and does not make you an ‘expert’, which can
only come from years of activity in the field.
References
Phillips, Estelle M. and D.S.Pugh. 1987. How To Get a Ph.D. A Handbook for Students
and Their Supervisors. Indian edition, 1993, published by UBS Publishers’
Distributors Ltd., New Delhi, by arrangement with Open University Press,
Buckingham.