My Thesis/PhD FAQs
For what it's worth, I am REALLY sick of answering variants of this:
So, you've got a draft of your proposal... does that mean you're almost done? What's left in your PhD? How long will it take?
So here's the (long) answer:
PhDs are different depending on your country and university. But here's what I have left in my particular situation.
I'm currently revising my proposal. This will take another couple of weeks, I'd guess, since I've got other stuff on my plate this week.
Once my supervisor and I have agreed on a final draft, we send it out to my committee. They get a few weeks to read it, and we schedule a proposal defense.
I defend my proposal to my committee. My committee acts as a sanity check to make sure my research is PhD worthy, that I'm not biting off more than I can chew, that I know the background material, etc. Included in my proposal is a rough plan of what I think I need to do. (Okay, not as bad as that link implies.) They will help me refine this so I know exactly what I need to do to earn my PhD.
Then, I do whatever it is we've said I'll do. ;) The next step is the rest of research I need to support my ideas. In my case, this is going to involve me looking at, parsing and testing probably thousands of web pages, as well as coming up with a more complex algorithm than the one I used to support my thesis proposal, and implementing and testing it. I expect this will take months and months and months. Don't ask me how long; if I knew that, this probably wouldn't be research. I'd be thrilled if I'm done before fall.
At some point, I decide I have enough data (or I want to graduate sooner rather than later...), and I go back to writing it up. Knowing me, this will take at least another month. My master's thesis took nearly 3 and it was a lot shorter, but I also lost the entire thing and had to re-write it, and then I had to rerun a bunch of data because I found a bug in my implementation...
Once my supervisor and I have agreed on my PhD thesis, again, it gets sent out to my committee. I think they get 6 weeks to read it before we can schedule the defense.
I defend the thesis. This is kinda scary! But usually they don't let you defend a PhD thesis unless you're actually ready, so I will probably pass with some conditions before I can submit my final copies. Usually there's a bunch of editing and sometimes some extra experiments involved here.
Another week or so of revisions (often there's a tight deadline here) and then I'll submit my final copies for binding and archival. And then that'll be it!
So... I don't really expect to graduate before the end of 2009, although it's possible if experimentation goes well and I manage to write up the results reasonably quickly. It helps that my supervisor rocks *and* seems to be able to get stuff back to me obscenely quickly right now: he had comments on my proposal draft the afternoon after I sent it!
But yes, I can see the light at the end of the thesis now. It's just really far away, and I really wish you'd quit asking me about it!
Frequently asked question #2:
What are you going to do after graduation?
Answer:
Not sure. I'm sort of planning on playing it by ear depending on what's available then. I've been in the one university too long, and if I ever want to get taken seriously as a researcher I pretty much have to leave, so ideally I will NOT be staying in Ottawa long after I graduate. I'd prefer to stay in Canada in a lot of ways, but I don't know yet if that will make the most sense.
I love teaching, so a postdoc or junior faculty position would be awesome. There's also a lot of neat web stuff going on and I wouldn't mind going into industry as long as it's the right job. I'm just not entirely sure what the right job is yet. Just hoping I'll know when I find it!
And, of course, my boyfriend and I are hoping to go from a long distance relationship to a short distance one. Currently, his job is portable, so it may be my job options that decide where we'll settle, but we still have to find a city we both like. :)
So, you've got a draft of your proposal... does that mean you're almost done? What's left in your PhD? How long will it take?
So here's the (long) answer:
PhDs are different depending on your country and university. But here's what I have left in my particular situation.
I'm currently revising my proposal. This will take another couple of weeks, I'd guess, since I've got other stuff on my plate this week.
Once my supervisor and I have agreed on a final draft, we send it out to my committee. They get a few weeks to read it, and we schedule a proposal defense.
I defend my proposal to my committee. My committee acts as a sanity check to make sure my research is PhD worthy, that I'm not biting off more than I can chew, that I know the background material, etc. Included in my proposal is a rough plan of what I think I need to do. (Okay, not as bad as that link implies.) They will help me refine this so I know exactly what I need to do to earn my PhD.
Then, I do whatever it is we've said I'll do. ;) The next step is the rest of research I need to support my ideas. In my case, this is going to involve me looking at, parsing and testing probably thousands of web pages, as well as coming up with a more complex algorithm than the one I used to support my thesis proposal, and implementing and testing it. I expect this will take months and months and months. Don't ask me how long; if I knew that, this probably wouldn't be research. I'd be thrilled if I'm done before fall.
At some point, I decide I have enough data (or I want to graduate sooner rather than later...), and I go back to writing it up. Knowing me, this will take at least another month. My master's thesis took nearly 3 and it was a lot shorter, but I also lost the entire thing and had to re-write it, and then I had to rerun a bunch of data because I found a bug in my implementation...
Once my supervisor and I have agreed on my PhD thesis, again, it gets sent out to my committee. I think they get 6 weeks to read it before we can schedule the defense.
I defend the thesis. This is kinda scary! But usually they don't let you defend a PhD thesis unless you're actually ready, so I will probably pass with some conditions before I can submit my final copies. Usually there's a bunch of editing and sometimes some extra experiments involved here.
Another week or so of revisions (often there's a tight deadline here) and then I'll submit my final copies for binding and archival. And then that'll be it!
So... I don't really expect to graduate before the end of 2009, although it's possible if experimentation goes well and I manage to write up the results reasonably quickly. It helps that my supervisor rocks *and* seems to be able to get stuff back to me obscenely quickly right now: he had comments on my proposal draft the afternoon after I sent it!
But yes, I can see the light at the end of the thesis now. It's just really far away, and I really wish you'd quit asking me about it!
Frequently asked question #2:
What are you going to do after graduation?
Answer:
Not sure. I'm sort of planning on playing it by ear depending on what's available then. I've been in the one university too long, and if I ever want to get taken seriously as a researcher I pretty much have to leave, so ideally I will NOT be staying in Ottawa long after I graduate. I'd prefer to stay in Canada in a lot of ways, but I don't know yet if that will make the most sense.
I love teaching, so a postdoc or junior faculty position would be awesome. There's also a lot of neat web stuff going on and I wouldn't mind going into industry as long as it's the right job. I'm just not entirely sure what the right job is yet. Just hoping I'll know when I find it!
And, of course, my boyfriend and I are hoping to go from a long distance relationship to a short distance one. Currently, his job is portable, so it may be my job options that decide where we'll settle, but we still have to find a city we both like. :)