Honest Answers About PhDs...

sakky · August 26, 2007, 2:09am

Of course most PhDs are planning on higher education…at least in the beginning. However, surely we all know that many people, having actually gone through the gauntlet of actually completing the dissertation, no longer actually want academic positions anymore. They’re tired of the academic politics and all of the other tasks they have to endure. At that point, they just want to finish their degree and get out.

Secondly, I should point out that PRACTICALLY ALL colleges and universities do not require that you have the degree in hand, nor do they even “prefer” it. Don’t believe me? Just think about the timing of the hiring process. Most candidates who go on the job market do not actually have the degree in hand. You usually tour the job market in the spring semester while you are finishing your dissertation. Hence, any job offers (tenure-track academia or post-doc) you get will almost certainly land before you’re actually formally done. But this should not be surprising - this is no different from how the vast majority of undergrad employers will tender job offers before the student has actually formally graduated with the bachelor’s degree.

Heck, some people that I know actually even started - not just garnered the job offer, but actually STARTED - their academic jobs while STILL not having completed everything. For example, one of my profs once related how he actually worked as an assistant prof for an entire year before he formally completed all of his PhD requirements and actually graduated. The understanding, of course, is that he would in fact actually complete all of those requirements as a condition for his keeping his job.

Sometimes, but the continuation charge is often times not much, and strictly speaking, you aren’t even really “continuing” (because you won’t be registering in any future terms), so most schools won’t charge you any continuation. I know Harvard and MIT won’t. Particularly, if you are using that ‘trick’ of just not clearing all your financial charges, then there are no ‘continuation charges’. Just some late charges. But if you rack up a couple dollars worth of late library fees, and you just don’t pay, really how much are the late charges going to be?

Sure. So then the answer might be for you to withdraw from your university while you complete those certifications.

Of course! There are many things you have to look out for. But come on. Just use a little creativity. If you are smart enough to get a PhD, then you are smart enough to figure out some creative options about how to game the system if necessary. That’s the point. PhD students far from stupid. To get a PhD means that you have to come up with some original research. You can do that, and yet you can’t figure out a single way to work the system? Really? Come on. You gotta have some more confidence in yourself and your own ingenuity.

First off, I never said that districts are rushing to hire PhD’s. Secondly, I have never said that anybody should obtain a PhD with the sole purpose of becoming a high school teacher.

But I stand my ground - teaching is in fact a fallback for PhD’s. That’s not to say that there aren’t hoops you would need to jump through to become a teacher. Of course there are. I have never said otherwise. Nor have I ever said that you would never need to apply your work ethic and your ingenuity to work the system. Of course you might. But my central point is that you can do it. If you’re good enough to get a PhD, then you’re good enough to do the things necessary to become a teacher. People should have a little more self-confidence in themselves.

ktcv · August 26, 2007, 2:28am

i work at barnes and noble. a guy who works fulltime in the music department has a phd in russian literature from Columbia. he makes 8.25 an hour

DespSeekPhd · August 26, 2007, 2:39am

I don’t think it’s wise to “work the system” in the way you propose. I think a person trying to do what you suggest, playing both sides, is likely to end up empty-handed.

Also, if you take a look though the ads on CHE, higheredjobs, and the AHA, you will note that, in fact, the majority of tenure-track positions ask for a PhD in hand. That isn’t to say that all of them do. But that is the reason fewer and fewer newly-minted PhDs have a tenure-track job in hand upon graduation. Most now work as a VAP for at least a year before moving on.

As much as I appreciate your attempts to be a motivational speaker, “you can do it” is rather trite and simplifies the matter a bit too much. of course a PhD has the ability to complete certification reqs. But is it a fallback? No - there are too many complications.

sakky · August 26, 2007, 4:18am

There’s a guy who got a PhD in political science. He did so after getting a bachelor’s degree not in poli sci or any social science, but in math. {Strange, huh?} It took him 11 years, on and off, to complete that PhD, as he withdrew a few times along the way. Upon graduation, he still hadn’t landed any academic positions He then bounced around in several low-paid post-docs for a few years, and still couldn’t land any academic positions.

So then he decided to become a technology consultant. After only a few years, his clientele included the most senior management of such firms as Apple, Motorola, and Texas Instruments, and he was making half-a-million dollars a year (and this was during the early 90’s, so that would have been equivalent to about $750k a year these days). But he wasn’t through yet. He decided to form a software startup company that specialized in making web development tools. 2 years later he sold that company for a 9 figure sum, making him a millionaire many times over.

Am I making this up? Don’t believe me? The guy’s name is Charles Ferguson. His startup company, Vermeer Technologies, is now known as Microsoft FrontPage; Ferguson having sold his company 2 years after it was founded to Microsoft for $133 million, and which obviously made Ferguson into a multi-millionaire. {In fact, even to this day, 7 years after the acquisition, if you ever use Frontpage, you may notice some of the files that you create will be prefixed with the initials “vti”, which is an artifact that stands for ‘Vermeer Technologies’. } You can read all about it in his autobiography ‘High Stakes, No Prisoners’.

<a href=“http://www.amazon.com/High-Stakes-No-Prisoners-Internet/dp/0812931432[/url]”>http://www.amazon.com/High-Stakes-No-Prisoners-Internet/dp/0812931432</a>

Now, in case you’re wondering how the heck all of this happens - i.e., how does a guy with a PhD in political just “become” an extremely highly regarded and well-paid technology consultant, well, let me fill in some details. He didn’t get his poli-sci PhD at just ANY school, and not even necessarily from the usual highly-ranked school. He got it at MIT. MIT is (perhaps surprising to some) a quite good poli-sci school, being ranked #10 according to USNews. But more importantly, one of MIT’s greatest strengths in the political science dept.- and Ferguson’s dissertation topic - is technology policy. Specifically, Ferguson’s topic of study was high-technology competition between the US and Japan, and in the course of completing his PhD. While completing his PhD, he worked part-time for Congress in formulating technology policy, in high-level consulting roles at various tech companies, and played an important role in the formation of SEMATECH (the alliance of US semiconductor firms that was created at behest of the Federal government to meet the strategic challenge from the Japanese). Before he had even graduated, he had already been published or quoted in such periodicals as Harvard Business Review, Time Magazine, and Foreign Policy.

{What makes Ferguson’s story all the more ironic is that his entire research agenda - and most of his early publications - were completely and utterly wrong. For example, in his infamous 1988 HBR article, Ferguson wrote that the US technology industry would inevitably be swamped from the competition without heavy government aid and intervention, as the Silicon Valley-style entrepreneurial style of capitalism was bound to fail agains the deep-pocketed oligarchies of Asia that were heavily backed by their governments. In fact, * the exact opposite* happened. The Silicon Valley style of entrepreneurialism proved to be completely triumphant, not only against Asia, but against the rest of the world, with companies like Cisco, Yahoo, Google, Ebay, Sun, Electronic Arts, etc. turning back the challenge from Asia to become dominant throughout the world. In fact, Ferguson later admitted that he had badly underestimated the potency of the Silicon Valley-style entrepreneurial model. Yet that didn’t stop him from becoming an extremely highly paid consultant and then software entrepreneur himself. }

So, why am I talking about Ferguson? What does he have to do with this thread. Simple. I am talking about him to show you that * your future is in your hands*. One might say that getting a PhD in political science will provide you with no marketability in the real world, or at least not in the business world. But Ferguson made himself marketable. Specifically, he chose to study a specific topic that was highly marketable. Morever, the way he went about pursuing his PhD - meeting members of Congress, working in high-level business consortia, publishing in high-level business journals like HBR and getting quoted in mass-market publications like Time Magazine, hobnobbing with the business school students and faculty at Harvard Business School and the MIT Sloan School of Management - made him even more marketable. And the first book - Computer Wars - that was published right after his post-doc became a highly popular book in industry (even though, like I said, much of it turned out to be wrong). Hence, even before Ferguson had even really entered industry, he had already established himself as a leading tech pundit, with a deep and distinguished network of contacts he could call upon.

If you’re a PhD student, or thinking about becoming one, you can do the same. Obviously I don’t expect you to be like Ferguson. What I am saying is that there many things you can do to improve your marketability. For example, if you are indifferent between 2 research topics, then choose the one that is more marketable. For example, instead of researching some obscure poetry genre from hundreds of years ago, research modern literature, especially on those authors that are still alive and actively writing, and even better, those that are popular to the masses.

For example, I’m quite certain that one could perform some quite impressive research on, say, the works of Toni Morrison, an author that is not only respected by academia, but is also highly popular with the mass market. You could contrast her work with that of other up-and-coming authors who have been influenced by her. It would be even better if you could actually MEET these authors and interview them as part of your research. That helps you to build your network of contacts. You could then also investigate the commercialization of these authors’ works. For example, instead of just presenting papers that are of interest only to academics within your particular field, write some publications that are of interest to the business community, i.e. the commercialization and marketing of Toni Morrison’s novels. Join the Media/Entertainment club of your university’s business school and hobnob with future publishing/media executives.

Look, that’s just one example. But my point is this. Universities offer fantastic resources that you can leverage to shore up your marketability. But you have to be willing to leverage those resources. You have to be creative. You have to look for opportunities and seize them when you find them. Ferguson certainly did. You don’t even necessarily have to graduate. Sergey Brin and Larry Page decided to drop out of grad school to commercialize their research. We know it now as Google.

The OP said that he would only consider schools of the caliber of Harvard and Yale. Well, schools like that offer such a breadth of resources that if you spend 4-6 years there, you should be very marketable indeed. It is, if nothing else, a stellar networking opportunity. Think of it this way. MBA students at both Harvard and Yale pay a small fortune in part to be able to take advantage of the networking available at those schools. You’re able to go to Harvard and Yale * for free<a href=“on%20your%20stipend”>/i</a>.

sakky · August 26, 2007, 4:53am

Ha! Considering the caliber of the people who actually do end up getting hired in the school systems (i.e. all those mediocre teachers back in my high school), I rather doubt that the system couldn’t be worked, and worked well. Again I ask - how exactly did all those teachers get hired in the first place?

Is that right? Remember that we are talking about schools of the caliber of Harvard and Yale here (as the OP said). So let’s talk about it.

Here is the placement of the 2006-2007 class of the Econ PhD’s at Yale. Looks pretty darn good, doesn’t it? I only see 3 post-docs (and 1 person who went to strategy consulting, 1 who went to banking, and 1 who worked for the Fed). And even one of the post-docs doesn’t really count as a true post-doc as that person apparently got a dual-appointment, a post-doc at Oxford and a assistant prof job at UCSD. The point is, the vast majority of grads got tenure-track offers, and more importantly before they had the degree in hand.

<a href=“http://www.econ.yale.edu/graduate/placement/outcomes.htm[/url]”>http://www.econ.yale.edu/graduate/placement/outcomes.htm</a>

Now, I know what you’re going to say - that that’s Econ - and has nothing to do with the humanities. Fine. Here is the placement data for the last few years of the English PhD’s at Stanford. Again, looks pretty good, does it not? Yes, some post-docs. But also many people who got tenure-track jobs. In particular, note how many 2007 grads got a tenure-track offer before they had the degree in hand.

<a href=“http://english.stanford.edu/graduate.php?content=placement&order_by=year_appointed&order=DESC[/url]”>http://english.stanford.edu/graduate.php?content=placement&order_by=year_appointed&order=DESC</a>

How about another example? Take the English PhD’s from Berkeley (you have to scroll down to it). Again, looks pretty good. Only a minority of post-docs in the latest class. Plenty of grads got tenure-track positions, before they had the degree in hand.

<a href=“http://english.berkeley.edu/graduate/[/url]”>http://english.berkeley.edu/graduate/</a>

To complete the analysis, let’s look at a school that is less prominent. Take the English PhD program at Rutgers. Again, looks like quite a few people placed without having the degree in hand.

<a href=“Page cannot be found”>Page cannot be found;

So again, it seems to me that practically no schools actually require that you have the degree in hand. Look at the placement records above. Some of the schools in which people were placed are top-tier. Others are no-name schools. For example, I had never even heard of Ohio Wesleyan before. Yet they evidently made an offer to somebody right out of Berkeley before they had actually completed the degree. In fact, if I go to the Cal alumni database (<a href=“http://cal.berkeley.edu)%5B/url%5D”>http://cal.berkeley.edu)</a>, I notice that that guy STILL doesn’t show up in the list of alumni, which means that guy STILL hasn’t finished his Berkeley PhD. Yet that didn’t stop Ohio Wesleyan from giving him a job.

Just think about what it would really mean if you were a school that were to truly require a degree ‘in hand’. What that would basically mean is that your school would always be cut off from the job placement roadshows of all the new graduating students at all the schools, because by definition, none of those new students would actually have degrees ‘in hand’. We can look at it the other way. Why do universities even bother to put their graduating students on roadshows if most jobs aren’t open to them anyway (because they don’t have degrees ‘in hand’)? Why waste everybody’s time?

Oh, it’s a fallback allright. Obviously nobody is saying that there aren’t any complications. Of course I am simplying the issue. Of course I am being somewhat trite. But not by much. You can do it, if you want to do it. It’s not that hard. Like I’ve always said, the easiest way to fail at anything is to believe that you can’t do it. You can get a PhD from a top school, yet you can’t figure out some way to become a teacher? Come on.

unalove · August 26, 2007, 10:44am

FYI, Rutgers has one of the best grad programs in English in the nation, according to USNWR, so I don’t think it’s your average-joe state school in the way you want it to be.

DespSeekPhd · August 26, 2007, 12:38pm

Sakky, you’ll obviously believe whatever you want to believe. I rather resent your comment about the caliber of teachers in the school system - the vast majority of teachers I have known and worked with have been very, very good. If you can’t understand the definition of a fallback, that’s not my problem. If you prefer to promote game-playing and dishonesty, that’s also your problem. I’ve done my job in telling people what is involved. Anyone who wants to question what I am saying? Speak to the Dean of Education at your school. Ask whether a PhD will help or not in the job hunting process. Ask what the certification process is. Additionally, speak to your major advisor. Go ahead and ask about job hunting before you get your PhD. Also look at job listings for your field.

It’s really unfortunate you had such “mediocre” teachers, sakky. Perhaps if you’d had better teachers (or if you had respected them enough to learn from them), you’d be able to make better arguments. As it is, I imagine the problem was less withe them, and more with your inability to accept and understand anyone else’s expertise. As WilliamC has said (and as I have observed over the past couple years), you think you are an expert in everything. Unfortunate.

jmleadpipe · August 26, 2007, 7:24pm

Deepseek, don’t you think it would help your cause if you didn’t answer sakky’s thought out, rational, and extremely exhaustive posts with passive aggressive barbs that have nothing to do with the thread in question? I get the feeling you are someone who does not take well to being proven wrong, or even disagreed with, but Sakky has pretty much had your number from page one in this thread. Just give up already. Resorting to name calling really isn’t going to make this board any better.

DespSeekPhd · August 26, 2007, 9:29pm

Actually, I’ve been answering them. They aren’t well-though out or rational posts. I haven’t been proven wrong, but I have no issue with being disagreed with. Small-time anecdotal stories don’t really qualify as rebuttal.

mathtastic_nerd · August 27, 2007, 1:56am

“Small-time anecdotal stories don’t really qualify as rebuttal.”

Thats exactly what jmleadpipe is referring to; your posts, not sakky’s. You talk about your expertise and your experience with applying to teaching jobs, which can easily be seen as anecdotal. If you disagree with sakky please post a rebuttal (id like to hear some responses to his posts), but there is no need to talk about sakky and his teachers or your expertise; show data if possible.

DespSeekPhd · August 27, 2007, 3:27pm

My expertise extends across several states, certification processes, and from within teacher training, which is meant to be as broad as possible. I have already rebutted, and I see no reason to continue. Anecdotal refers to taking a small sample (i.e. I knew some teachers who got a job, so all must be able to get a job; or if you look at this one school district, you can see…) and generalizing it. My knowledge comes from schools of education, deans, principals, teachers, and professional organizations across the nation.

This is silly. I’ve been a certified teacher for several years. If you want to know about a field, you ask someone who has been IN the field. You don’t ask your doctor neighbor to diagnose your plumbing problems. You ask a plumber. If you choose to take advice from the doctor, you live with the consequences.

jmleadpipe · August 27, 2007, 3:44pm

I know several teachers, my mom, dad, and my sister being only three of them, and nothing they say gels with what you are saying in this thread. Sure, they may be extremely abnormal cases, and the fact that they all easily go jobs teaching, even my dad who was “weighed down” by his PhD, may in fact be anecdotal and out of the ordinary, but I have the sneaking suspicion it is not. Sakky did the right thing in this thread. He presented specific cases he was aware of to buttress his arguments, but also used stats and a wealth of ressources to drive home his points. DeepSeek, for the most part, used her own experience and then resorted to name calling when her arguments were refuted.

peter05 · August 27, 2007, 4:46pm

sakky,

Not to belittle your argument about the merits of having a PhD in hand as a prerequisite for getting the job (because I do agree with your point on this one), I did not understand your point about Ohio Wesleyan and I even think that your point about no name schools is rather misinformed and discounts the strength of the rest of your argument. Placements to any academic institutions are a function of your dissertation topic as well. Now, if you never really heard of Ohio Wesleyan, I start to doubt if I should believe what you really know about US academic institutions.

sakky · August 29, 2007, 7:35pm

My point about Ohio Wesleyan is simple.

Here’s the logic. DSP asserted that most universities “require” a PhD in hand for you to get hired as an assistant professor. So I wanted to investigate this assertion. Ohio Wesleyan as an example of an average university (however you want to define the term ‘average’). Yet Ohio Wesleyan apparently offered a job to a new assistant prof right out of a PhD program, which means that that job would almost certainly have to be hired before the PhD was actually formally granted.

Hence, that and the other examples I provided strongly question the assertion that universities actually require a PhD * in hand* for you to get hired. I don’t think you do. In fact, the logic does not seem to work. Think about the academic job hiring cycle. People who want an academic position will usually go on road shows in the spring of their final year of their PhD program, where they will present their job market papers. It is during that time when universities will decide whether they want to hire any of these new graduates. If you do get offers, it will probably tend to show up around the Feb/March/April time frame. However, you won’t actually RECEIVE your PhD until around May or June. What that means is that those who do get offers as a result of their roadshows are getting them BEFORE they have the PhD IN HAND.

Lest you think this is surprising, the same thing happens in most sorts of hiring. For example, when I was an undergrad, I had numerous job offers before I had actually graduated and had actually formally received my degree. I would say that many (probably most) college grads experience the same thing. Master’s degree - same thing. Most people had nabbed job offers before they had actually formally graduated. You don’t wait to get your degree AND THEN try to get a job offer. You try to secure a job offer WHILE you’re still in school.

I said it before, I’ll say it again. Why even have those academic job-market roadshows if “most” universities prefer to have the PhD in hand? By definition, those people on the roadshows don’t (yet) have their PhD’s. So if they can’t be hired anyway, then why waste everybody’s time by putting on those roadshows? Logically speaking, this doesn’t make sense.

I’ve used the term ‘no-name schools’ in several contexts. Which are you referring to?

Yes. So? I don’t see where I’ve said otherwise.

Heh heh, first off, I’m very very happy to compare my academic biography to anybody’s.

Secondly, if you don’t want to believe what I know, then don’t. Nobody has a gun to your head. Heck, if you don’t want to read my posts, then don’t read them.

sakky · August 29, 2007, 7:45pm

And conversely, you’re obviously going to believe whatever you want to believe. So what’s your point?

I have never said that there aren’t some teachers who are good. But I think you now admit implicitly that some are not. Yet they somehow get hired anyway.

And if you can’t understand my arguments, or just don’t WANT to understand them, then that is not my problem .

Oh come now. And what about you? I would say that your stance is highly unfortunate.

I don’t know - seems to me I’ve done pretty well academically. Seems to me that I’ve learned quite a bit from my teachers, regardless of their quality. If you really want to get into it, we can compare which graduate programs you’ve gotten into vs. which ones I have amd we can assess which of us has ‘learned’ more.

I am promoting nothing. I am simply reporting what the possibilities are. I am not telling anybody what to do or not do. I simply believe that people should be given all the information possible and then decide for themselves what to do. It would be a matter of censorship to not even want people to know what the options are.

This part I agree with. I would also ask you to find out who in your local school district have been hired as teachers. Look at their qualifications. Go to the certification websites of the states that you may want to teach in, and ask yourself whether you could do it or not. Talk to some school principals and ask them what it would take for you to get hired. Do ALL of that. Then make up your own mind about who is right, me or DSP.

Hmmm, well, you know what they say about those who live in glass houses.

sakky · August 29, 2007, 8:02pm

Ah, but this is not a ‘plumbing problem’ that we’re talking about. We are not talking about the actual tasks that comprise the job of a teacher. We are just talking about what it takes to get hired as a teacher. Similarly, while I might expect a plumber to know how to fix my sink, I wouldn’t necessarily expect him to know how to * get hired* as a plumber, simply because he wasn’t the one actually doing the hiring. Heck, I would probably expect him to exaggerate the difficulties of getting hired as a plumber just as a matter of self-validation. After all, from a simple psychological standpoint, everybody is incentivized to tell themselves that their job is harder to get or do than it actually may be. {Just like when Muhammad Ali went around telling everybody that he was the greatest boxer of all time, he probably suspected that that claim was not true, but it was just something he needed to tell himself to give himself the confidence to win bouts. }

But look, the bottom line is this. These are all matters of opinion here. I don’t pretend to have all the answers. And nobody else should either. The value of a discussion board is to hear a wide range of opinions. By hearing a wide range of opinions, readers can decide for themselves what the real truth is. Furthermore, like I’ve always said, you shouldn’t take the word of me or anybody else here. Go and find out some information for yourself. Talk to your teachers in your old high school, especially any that have recently been hired, and try to ascertain how hard was it for them to get their first job. If you’re in college, then try to make contact with alumni from your college who have become teachers, and ask them how hard it was for them to get hired.

Look, before things spiral out of hand, let me reiterate that I still respect DSP’s opinions and I think her experiences should count for something. While I obviously don’t respect her name calling, I still think she brings a valuable perspective to this board.

On the other hand, I also believe that my opinions should also be respected. Like I said, the whole point of a discussion board is to read a wide range of opinions. Why even have a discussion board at all if only one opinion is ‘valid’?

peter05 · September 1, 2007, 9:12pm

sakky,

I do not disagree with your point that most schools do not require that you have the PhD in hand. Despite me agreeing with your claim, I do not understand, nor do I think that it helps the logic of your argument, to claim that Ohio Wesleyan is a no-name school. If your point is to show that schools do not require PhD prior to hiring, take a sample out of all the new hires, get the number of how many of them actually did not hold the doctorate and post the percent. Since it will be, according to my speculations, high enough that should be convincing enough. Do I suspect that this number might differ across liberal arts colleges and universities? I’d certainly say yes. Ohio Wesleyan is a liberal arts college (not a university despite its name and despite your point) and as a liberal arts college, Wesleyan, I suspect, has an even high number of academics who get hired and do not have the PhD at hand.

Regarding my claim that hiring is a function of your dissertation topic, your school name…I said because to the extent that either one of these two factors makes you an even stronger candidate, not having a PhD before you get hired, might be even more strongly discounted by the hiring committee.

What is your “so distinguished” academic biography that you flaunt in such a blase fashion?

sakky · September 3, 2007, 5:26pm

Let me put it to you this way. Be honest - how many people have heard of it?

The reason why I invoked Ohio Wesleyan was because previously in my argument I had also discussed schools like Harvard and Berkeley. Hence, I had to demonstrate that my arguments stretched across not only the most famous and prominent schools, but to less prominent ones like Ohio Wesleyan. Otherwise, I was sure that somebody was going to punch back with “Well, sakky, you are only talking about what happens at the top schools, what about the non-top schools?”

Uh, I don’t think I need to show that point. I think what I presented is quite sufficient. Again, why do these doctoral programs even put on job talk road shows for their students if those students haven’t yet actually graduated? It becomes a matter of timing. You actually formally graduate around May or June, yet those who are successful in their road shows will have already received tenure-track offers before that time (usually from Feb-April).

Nor do I think that the statistical analysis that you are requesting is necessary. After all, nobody asked DSP for statistical analysis for her assertions (that you need a PhD in hand). My argument is based on simple intuitive logic. Most positions out there will consider somebody straight out of school (as opposed to after post-doc), and most schools have profs who have never served post-docs. Now, I agree that post-docs are helpful, but are rarely truly required. You can obtain tenure-track positions without post-docs, and many of the best students do. But what that usually means is that those students are actually getting those offers before (by a few months) they have actually formally received their degree. Again, it is a matter of timing.

Uh, I hardly “flaunt” it. I bring it up only in rare occasions. And I am hardly ‘blase’ about it. Like I said, if you want to know, you can email me. I don’t publicize it. That’s hardly a case of ‘flaunting’.

WilliamC · September 3, 2007, 6:55pm

There seems to be some confusion here about what it means to “have the PhD in hand” and when it is that the PhD degree is actually awarded.

First, as to “graduation”. There is no such thing for PhDs. the PhD is awarded the moment that the candidate successfully defends and the paperwork signed and filed. (Or, if revisions are required, when they are approved.) It has absolutely nothing to do with the May/June ceremony where kids get their BAs. Yes, many new PhDs will walk and shake hands with the deans and so forth. That’s a purely ceremonial occasion. They became “Doctors” when they shook hands with their committee and the paperwork was filed. I know people who have defended in early fall, the second week of January and one who managed it in mid-summer. All were entitled to the title “Doctor” when the approvals were signed. (Only one actually attended the May commencement.) Here at Penn it is traditional to greet an instructor who has successfully defended with a hearty “Good Morning Doctor X!” the first class period following the defense.

Incidentally, even defense is mostly ceremonial - no reasonable advisor is ever going to allow an unprepared candidate to get to that stage.

Second - you will (in my field at least) NEVER see an entry level job description that simply says “PhD in hand”. EVER. The actual wording is “PhD in hand by [DATE]” or some similar expression.

The reason for this is simple. Job search for entry level academic positions begins AT LEAST a calendar year before the job is scheduled to begin. That means that most candidates will not yet have defended and been approved when the interview season rolls around for the simple reason that MOST defenses happen during the academic year. A significant number of candidates will have received their PhDs the spring, summer or fall BEFORE the interview season in my field. Others will be coming off post-doc positions or will be finishing other committments.

As a result, although a candidate might not “have the PhD in hand” when a job is offered s/he will by [DATE]. Or…

So, what if someone interviews and DOESN’T have the PhD by [DATE]? Most often, the hiring school will set a deadline by which the defense MUST have occured. It is also possible that the job title will be reduced (i.e. from asst. prof. to instructor) AND the date will be set. If the new hire blows it, s/he’ll be out of work and seriously handicapped in terms of future job prospects.

Why even give the new hire a break? Because the school has scheduled several (usually 3 or 4) classes that the new hire must teach. Most departments are completely maxed out - that new hire MUST teach. Period.

This, BTW, is the way it works at ALL schools regardles of where they “rank” in some popular magazine’s survey.

Simple intuitive logic fails when the fundamental assumptions are wrong.

Professor_X · September 3, 2007, 7:51pm

At every university at which I (and my good friends and colleagues) have been employed, the system operates in precisely the way that WilliamC has outlined.

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