Surviving the PhD by Dmitry Pavlov
Added December 08, 2005
Dmitry Pavlov
Page 2
What Do You Need To Get a PhD?
Several important things: patience and concentration, good advisor who is going to understand, appreciate and bear with you if necessary (I had a one like this Prof. Padhraic Smyth of UC Irvine who I can confidently call one of the world's best advisors ever), ability to find with your advisor's help the topic that would lead to productive work, publications and ultimately defense and dissertation. What's also quintessential is that your advisor is an expert in the field if you have chosen to write a dissertation in and you like to do what he is doing and what you will likely be doing once you get a PhD.
The journey typically starts with your getting accepted into a program and it would be very nice if the University also sent a letter of financial support to you (fellowships, RAships and TAships in the decreasing order of the likelihood of getting are fairly common in technical disciplines and less so in humanities). For me it was a visa requirement to get both acceptance and financial support and I was lucky to get both. TAship means you will have to teach and this could be fun or impediment depending on your attitude. RAship means you will have to work for a sponsoring professor which is typically better than TAship since this in principle should advance you closer to getting the desired PhD. Finally, the fellowship requires nothing of you, just do what you please and don't forget to pay the taxes on the non-tuition part of it. A lot of government (e.g. the NSF and the NIH), and non-government (e.g. "The lesbians of California") organizations issue fellowships to qualified individuals satisfying the need or merit requirements.
Ok, now you have the money and the offer from several Universities, where should you go? Several considerations: the higher the University ranks in the program of your choice the better, the more what you have to do is aligned with what you want to do the better. Typically there are tradeoffs involved but as a rule of thumb . if you get your PhD from Stanford, you would be apriori thought of as a "great candidate" for any job purposes, if you come from Oklahoma State, you may still be great but you will stand in line after everyone from Stanford, Berkeley, MIT etc to get an ear of the employer. You can safely assume that the distribution of quality of the PhDs from each University is roughly a Gaussian with a mean of top-level schools being way higher than 2-3 tier schools, and this should determine the choice. After all, if you do something, it should be worth the effort.
Shop for PhD Surviving books on Amazon!
Page 1 Page 2 Page 3 Page 4
