Welcome to the Ivory Tower! Coat check is to your right
Last night, I was having dinner with a friend/colleague, and he said something really interesting. He told me that it was really nice to think that while there was this looming exam coming in two years, and the dissertation and all that coming afterwards, and while people didn't think we could go over these hurdles now, they DO think we can in the future. They expect us to be able to, and are going to try to train us to be able to do it.
It made me realize that I'm in the ivory tower now. I'm past almost all the gate keeping. They aren't trying to weed people out anymore. Now it's all about helping people succeed. Doesn't mean it'll be easy, but it's set up for success, not for avoiding failure.
I started looking at this program as a series of training wheels. First you have course work, which has a steadily increasing amount of reading, writing, and thinking. This trains you to do research, and to integrate that research, and to produce papers. Eventually, you finish coursework, and those wheels come off.
Next you prepare for an exam. Here you are being trained to become an expert at something. You should know how to read and process by now; that's what the coursework was for. But you still need to know how to pull a lot of information from a lot of sources very quickly. And you should know how to produce writing fast. So you take these exams, some of them written, some oral, and those wheels come off.
That's the big one, I think. The last gate being kept. This is why after the exams, you are ABD, which is practically a PhD. You just have one thing left to learn:
The dissertation. No more artificial deadlines, no more telling you what to read (as both the earlier steps do). This is about doing your own research, handling your own time, and putting it together in the longest thing you've ever written. Once you're done, you know how to write a book (you just did), you know how to prove that you're an expert in a field, and you're ready to stand guard at the ivory tower. No more training wheels.
It's strange to think just how far I've come, even if there is a whole lot more left to do.
It made me realize that I'm in the ivory tower now. I'm past almost all the gate keeping. They aren't trying to weed people out anymore. Now it's all about helping people succeed. Doesn't mean it'll be easy, but it's set up for success, not for avoiding failure.
I started looking at this program as a series of training wheels. First you have course work, which has a steadily increasing amount of reading, writing, and thinking. This trains you to do research, and to integrate that research, and to produce papers. Eventually, you finish coursework, and those wheels come off.
Next you prepare for an exam. Here you are being trained to become an expert at something. You should know how to read and process by now; that's what the coursework was for. But you still need to know how to pull a lot of information from a lot of sources very quickly. And you should know how to produce writing fast. So you take these exams, some of them written, some oral, and those wheels come off.
That's the big one, I think. The last gate being kept. This is why after the exams, you are ABD, which is practically a PhD. You just have one thing left to learn:
The dissertation. No more artificial deadlines, no more telling you what to read (as both the earlier steps do). This is about doing your own research, handling your own time, and putting it together in the longest thing you've ever written. Once you're done, you know how to write a book (you just did), you know how to prove that you're an expert in a field, and you're ready to stand guard at the ivory tower. No more training wheels.
It's strange to think just how far I've come, even if there is a whole lot more left to do.