Friday, April 24, 2015

45 On working to a PhD

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.

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