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

[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!