Jump to content

PhD: Bad Idea, Terrible Idea or the Very Worst of All Ideas?


Datepalm

Recommended Posts

On 21/09/2016 at 9:14 PM, Eyelesbarrow said:

I have been in touch with the PhD administrator of the School of Business and Management of the uni. She accepts the applications and checks to see if the admin requirements are there, among other tasks. She also prepares the long list.  But I am not sure if she makes the decision on what to put on the grade equivalent, which is now my main worry. Unless the faculty has its own calculation. But it appears not because she said it's set by the uni and they follow the Naric calculations. 

I'm kind of resigned now to the visa situation - pick your battles and all that. I also understand that this has a lot to do with T May's immigration pledges. Anyway, I have registered for an IELTS exam in Oct. 

Ugh, good luck - I mean, it won't be any trouble for you, but it's just four hours of your life you're never getting back. Even if the secretary is filling out the forms, surely the actual admissions decisions will be able to look past bureaucratic muck? Or would it knock you out of getting to their consideration alltogether? Crap situation, hope it all gets fixed without recourse to tearing your hair out...

I keep wondering whether to keep studying for the GRE or just wing it - the score will be pretty good as is, (middling math, very good verbal) and spending most of the next three weeks studying will probably only marginally improve it, but thinking I'll regret the lousy score if I don't study. I don't resent all the reading and writing and research i'm doing for other application stuff, (learning whats out there, reading in my field, etc.) but this pointless exercise of math shortcuts...its not even something real. If I was actually studying anything new, trying to get back my shoddy knowledge of calculus, etc, that would be fine, but all I'm doing is putting a lot of effort into figuring out how to do deliberately badly phrased 10th grade maths problems (which I do know) 10% faster, for an almost certainly meaningless gain in scores. But I keep spending time on it anyway. It makes me really doubt my ability to rationally follow my own priorities. 

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Not usually, but it somewhat depends on discipline. I don't have the time to explain this (work and all of that), but at least in the physical sciences you usually don't write your doctoral proposal until sometime after you start (can be in your first or second year, depending on the program). 

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Yeah, I never submitted a research proposal to any of the US universities I applied to . It was more an application geared to the university, and in the cover letter I mentioned the research areas and people I was interested in working in (might have been in the 'mission statement' part of my application).

In physics at least the first year is mainly for taking courses, being a TA, and exploring the different avenues the department has to offer. Sometimes professors actively try to recruit you as well, they need people to work in their group. Might have changed recently because of the changing nature of funding in the US, but that was the dynamic when I was a grad student.

Note that PhD's in the US in the sciences tend to be a bit longer, definitely giving more of a chance for a leisurely first year research wise. 

Link to comment
Share on other sites

I thought it was more of an exercise is showing you kinda-sorta know what you're doing, and the place to show that 'fit with the department' thing, by making it relevant to what's going on there. I'm kind of thrown not to be required to have to put one together at all. Well, less work, I guess. Or more work in the "statement" thing. 

Link to comment
Share on other sites

My suggestion is that you write the plan after all.

See, I work in STEM, in a theoretical field. For a fresh Ph.D. student I look mainly at one thing: the grades in the really tough theory courses. But I also sit in the university ph.d. admissions board from time to time. And for an applicant into non-STEM fields, the story completely turns around. In the ensuing discussion, the faculty member trying to fight for the applicant from the “soft” field needs all the help he or she can get. A solid research plan is such a form of help. (Also, without it, the faculty member in question mightn’t even notice you.)

For STEM, it’s different. Nobody can come in from the outside (undergraduate studies) and formulate a research plan. Graduate STEM studies start with a year or two of gruelling drilling-down into the minutiae of some insanely specific topic that you hadn’t even heard of one year earlier.  Then you get to do your “own” work on this tiny, narrow topic. (Pray to God that your advisor is at the top of his or her game, so that this tiny, narrow topic is (a ) relevant to anybody else, (b ) feasible, and (c ) sufficiently irrelevant that the other guy who just started at Stanford doesn’t solve it two months earlier. This is why advisors in STEM are so important.)

For non-STEM, anybody with an IQ of 130+ is supposed to be able to cook something up that will become a feasible thesis topic. It’s much less ephemeral and much less universal. That doesn’t make it easier, of course.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

On 9/26/2016 at 11:59 AM, Datepalm said:

US institutions don't require a separate research proposal with applications? Huh. Huh?

There is a reason for this. US institutions often, but not always depending upon the program and discipline, have coursework and exams for doctoral students before even getting to the dissertation proposal. From what I have seen, a lot of programs (and faculty) in the US recognize that the subject matter of your research project can (and likely will) change between the application and the dissertation proposal. 

The interest that I initially listed in my doctoral application's statement of purpose is not my current dissertation project. I stumbled upon my dissertation topic while writing a paper for my adviser during my first semester. My adviser liked my work, and she told me to come back and with several distinct dissertation ideas based upon that initial paper. My adviser and I found one particular topic far more interesting - in the way that only academics can about the otherwise esoterically mundane - since it was surprisingly unexplored, and I have since delved deeply down that rabbit hole. 

Link to comment
Share on other sites

What are you working on?

So there's no way to tell what you'll end up doing going into it, really. I'm ok with that, just wondering what to do with it on applications...I suppose its helpful, in that I can throw a lot of what I would have said in a research proposal about what I'm actually interested in into the statement, and not have to come up with 800 odd words of waffling about life goals and what have you there instead. (I've started trying to work on those right now that I have a bit of time, so it doesn't sneak up on me what I don't, and its pretty much staring into the abyss.) 

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Don’t write about life goals. 

Write a serious research proposal. Everybody understands that you’re going to do something else than what it says in the proposal; this is normal and expected. But your proposal is a good proof-of-concept, shows familiarity with the subject, feasibility, etc.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Maybe try making your research project your life goal. “My life goal is to establish that there can exist no inverse anti-snails in homeotoxic metabrambles of endogenuous degree 4 or more using a combination of multigendered posthermeneutic Wolfstein–Mandelbrot theory and field studies among the !Quing diaspora in Minsk.” 

Link to comment
Share on other sites

One place - in California, naturally, bless 'em - asks for both a personal statement and a statement of purpose, but no research proposal either. Come on, is it not clear by now that I have the personality - and purposefulness - of a stale cupcake? That's why I can't come up with anything better to do with my life than obsessively study how bananas are sold next to bus stops in Mbuji Mayi. Why are you making me spell it out like that, admission-form-writing-people?

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Another place - it turns out, and this is mentioned only on the actual application form, which is only available as of now, and nowhere in the general application guidelines, FAQs, etc - counts their TOEFL 2-year deadline back from September 2017 instead of the application deadline in January. That's 7 months. That's a 30% reduction in the lifetime of the thing. Ok, not retaking it for one application, (may very well not even have time to) but may send convoluted email to admissions department for the sake of personal satisfaction. 

Link to comment
Share on other sites

15 hours ago, Datepalm said:

One place - in California, naturally, bless 'em - asks for both a personal statement and a statement of purpose, but no research proposal either. Come on, is it not clear by now that I have the personality - and purposefulness - of a stale cupcake? That's why I can't come up with anything better to do with my life than obsessively study how bananas are sold next to bus stops in Mbuji Mayi. Why are you making me spell it out like that, admission-form-writing-people?

I've run across a couple that ask for a statement of purpose and a personal history statement. I had never heard about the latter before it popped up in my applications. Based on the vague guidance provided by the schools, it basically seems like a place to say why you are unique demographic snowflake which seems odd to me but :dunno:.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

18 minutes ago, Datepalm said:

There's no race in outer space?

Even I think that's going a little far. Any idea what on earth (or off it) you can really say to that?

For physics, you can focus mainly on how you overcame adversity and explain that while fundamental science is universal and uplifts all of humanity equally, the technology that will eventually be based on it often allows the disadvantaged to leap-frog more developed competition (e.g. many third world countries skipped straight to cell phones without laying untold tons of expensive copper wiring). I wouldn't worry about it too much -- it's an inapplicable question and the people evaluating your application know that as well as you do.

There do exist some fields for which the question is meaningful. I would guess that urban planning is one of them, but you surely know better than I do.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Archived

This topic is now archived and is closed to further replies.

×
×
  • Create New...