Degree completion

[rebeccmeister]

A conversation with bluepapercup is deserving of a wider conversation. She was hoping to finish her master's degree this spring, but recently had to decide to postpone her defense until the fall. So much of the process has been out of her control, such that it's inspiring to see her determination to finish.

In the midst of it, I'm thinking about some of the things I wish I'd known more about back in the day when I started graduate school. I also wonder how many people actually finish their academic work "on time." My guess is, not many, and those who do often miss out on other important life experiences. What does it mean to be "on time," anyway, when it comes to high-quality scholarly contributions?

A lot of people apply to graduate programs and then start them without asking certain critical questions of the program:

1. What's the average time-to-graduation for participants? Departments generally won't share this information with you unless you pry it out of them, because the numbers usually aren't as zippy as they'd like. I talked to a Biology faculty member about this at some point in the midst of earning my degree - she said the TRUE national average for time-to-completion for biology Ph.D.s was 8 years. This pegs it closer to 7 years, but still. It still makes me scratch my head over the overly optimistic paperwork I received upon arriving in grad school, which had me scheduled to graduate in 5 years. If only they had told the ants about that.

2. Related - what's the attrition rate for the program, and why? Specifically, is it because they don't give anybody any money, or enough money?

3. What careers do people from the program pursue after they graduate?

What questions would you add to the list?

Comments

[rebeccmeister.livejournal.com]

Actually, I'll kickstart this with further commentary on this whole "time to completion" concept. How do you think about dissertation-writing (or thesis-writing) relative to writing and publishing journal articles?

Each journal article is its own little beast, with its own special disposition. Some of them might be beautiful, smooth sailing, from start to finish. Most of them won't be. There are things people can do to encourage better progress, but especially if the work is empirical, part of the fun/challenge is that the outcome is unknown. If it was known, well, that would be boring, wouldn't it? An unknown outcome is likely to generate some serious head-scratching. How long will that head-scratching take?

Well, let's put it this way. If you submit a manuscript containing a whole bunch of half-baked head-scratching, (1) it probably won't get accepted (and if it is...won't it embarrass you further down the road?), and (2) you risk pissing off some journal editors/reviewers who have to put time and thought into how to respond to the junk you sent them.

But deciding when to press the "submit" button isn't always clearcut, either. Overall, men tend to fire off manuscripts prematurely more frequently than women do. This, then, affects publication rates. Which gets us into a bunch of other topics.

[bluepapercup]

Other immediate thoughts (and I will add more this in another comment as I think of them:

1) How many of your students are continuing on directly from their undergraduate education and how many are returning students? This really affects level of understanding of life-school (+/- work) balance in the department, in my experience.

2) What percentage of the students are working 25 hours or more a week at a job outside of school?

This is the one I could not have known until I was already deep in the process and talking to grad students at other schools:

3) If the department is at a non-PhD granting institution, what is the level of effort that is expected of students to be granted a Masters? There is a real and known problem where schools that have no PhD program tend to expect a level of work out of their students that is closer to a PhD "lite" than a simple Masters. I'm not prepared to say if it's a good or bad thing in a vacuum, but it is something that department need to own up to and be more explicit about.

[rebeccmeister.livejournal.com]

Those are definitely useful additional questions, and they make me wonder how my younger sister's program is progressing. Though I believe she's in a coursework-based Masters program, which is a completely different beast from a thesis-based Masters!

[annikusrex.livejournal.com]

These are not so much questions that have aha answers, but more getting a feel for the business of academia. I recommend finding out how many PhDs the program (and research institutions generally) grants versus how may they hire (and how that breaks down into tenure-track and postdoc), whether the department has been relying on adjuncts for teaching at all and where they earned their degrees, whether the grad students are unionized and what the union's issues are, how many years of postdoc work are customary prior to tenure-track hires, what the program looks for when they're hiring in terms of publications, etc...

When I was doing my MA in English and considering a PhD, realizing the number of classes taught by grad students and adjuncts (and thus displacing tenure-track hires while funding grad student educations), the number of years it took most students to earn PhDs (I think I remember it being 8 when I was there), and the scattered places people were taking poorly paying jobs (it was a public school so my professors' salaries were published on a web site) was eye opening.

[rebeccmeister.livejournal.com]

Yes, those are valuable points as well! The situation isn't quite as bleak in Biology, but students considering graduate school really do need to have a realistic idea of what will come next. When I started graduate school, the economic climate was quite different from when I finished. I used to naively tell people it was a great idea, but now I try to make sure they sit down and think things through pragmatically. It's the difference between the "follow your dreams!" mantra and "Have a goal, but be realistic."

Many people also don't know much about the academic hierarchy when they sign on - I can't tell you how often I have to explain what a postdoctoral researcher is.