A Ph.D. is a strange thing to pursue. It is regarded with an almost mystical aura by the typical person precisely because of how incomprehensible its process of attainment can be. A medical doctor has obvious social capital simply because of the economic realities associated with medicine: you'll never run out of customers, and you can charge what you want. An undergraduate degree holder has somewhat reduced social capital due to the increasingly raw deal that college has become: some of your dumbest, most impulsive high school friends could attain a liberal arts degree from the modern American university so long as they will go in debt to obtain it. Master's degrees gain you something tangible in the sense of a demonstrated 'mastery' of a technology or skill and a badge of initiation into the world of white collar labor. But a doctor of philosophy in a liberal arts subject matter? What the hell is that? What does it show the average person? Understanding the answer almost requires a college degree in itself.
Here's some illustrations of why a Ph.D. in a nonmedical subject matter baffles the average person.
In order to successfully defend your dissertation, you must first demonstrate comprehensive knowledge of your field, usually in the form of published works that pass peer review, or more traditionally, a set of challenge questions posed by experts in the field. In most programs, you need to complete this process twice, to prevent lucky breaks from granting you the right to defend a dissertation. This process is never guaranteed in the same way that undergraduate 'exams' often are. These are never multiple choice or rote memorization tasks. In fact, the professors often have no incentive whatsoever to pass you. They aren't paid extra for time devoted to you, and you've already paid the university in full. Sometimes these professors will fuck with you just because they can. In the case of publications, editorial peer review boards sometimes have actual disincentives to publish your work. Therefore, you need to impress multiple career experts in your subject area with your degree of knowledge, creativity, independence, and cleverness on at least two occasions with a product output equal to two published articles in peer reviewed journals or a viable grant proposal and a published work. And none of those experts are under any obligation to like your work or pass you.
The coursework is also less forgiving. The kind of classes chosen are often selected without consideration of your readiness. It is simply assumed that you are well enough educated to manage the work. If you aren't, then literally no one will care as you fail your classes. I personally spent 20 hours a week on studying to earn a barely passing grade in Professional Statistics. This class was taught by a stranger in another field who could care less if I kept up or made the grade. Through sheer grit, I eked out a passing grade for this course, despite a history of difficulty with mathematics and only one undergraduate course in the subject.
If you want the Ph.D., you find a way.
Another course had us execute a feat of memorization for the final exam for no other reason than the professor wanted to toy with us. We had to recreate a flow chart from memory including the shapes and positions of dialogue boxes for over 100 items, none of which I can remember today. However, I damn well knew every single item the day of the exam, or passing the required class was impossible. These sort of games are commonplace. In the martial arts, a good metaphor is the hazing practice of thousands of pushups, squats, situps, and basic drills just to demonstrate toughness and willingness to endure hardship.
Both of these classes I took 8 years prior to being able to begin my dissertation. Before then, I finished a Master's degree and attained professional certification and licensure.
I've gone in debt nearly $100,000. This kind of debt burden requires you to land a job of at least $100,000 a year in order to have any hope of paying your debt back in 10 years while supporting a family and owning a home. I consider it a humility brace. After 10 years, I'll have enough money for a sports car, kid's college, retirement, or underground supply bunker, but until then, I pay back my debt to society that they neither understand nor approve of. It's like an abstract type of prison sentence paid back over a very long time for the crime of staying in college too long. Just remember as you pay your exorbitant debt, other countries give their citizens this shit for free...
After your coursework and examinations are successfully passed, you have now earned the right to begin the worst undertaking of your adult life: a dissertation. First, some background.
An undergraduate degree of the modern day signifies one's ability to show up to class on time regularly for 4 years, read and write, speak to professors in a socially appropriate way, and not commit crimes in the dormitories. Most individuals can attain this, and going in debt to do it is foolish. A Master's degree signifies mastery of a subject area, such that one could be employed to do that thing for a job with minimally guaranteed competence. This justifies a certain degree of debt. A Ph.D. signifies a NOVEL CONTRIBUTION to a subject area. Something exploratory that no one has ever done before. An abstract attainment sometimes completely divorced from economic value. Furthermore, a Ph.D. requires one to determine their own research methods, technologies, assistance staff, budget, and timeline, as well as the technical work of compiling data, writing up the results, and soliciting feedback from the dissertation committee. And the worst part? No one cares about any of it. Not your committee, not your spouse, not your kids. No one. Most likely, not even people in your field of study. The only people who care are you, your committee who is made to care, and any future dupes who want to extend your frontier research line. For however long it takes you to finish your dissertation, your only friends will be dead people or living dead people who write about your topic. You will work long hours only to receive apathy and disdain from typical people who will wonder why you don't do something more useful. You'll even begin to hate yourself as you grow older, sicker, sadder. You'll pay to work and grow to hate your work. At the same time, it will be the only thing you think about. You'll grapple with your subject matter. Argue with it. Just to feel some facsimile of a human connection as you sequester yourself in a prolonged monastic routine of self abasement. You'll regard current events, politics, economics, even your own livelihood as curiosities occurring in the background of your all consuming obsession to finish the degree and escape your self imposed cloister. Your marriage will suffer, your friendships will suffer, your sex drive, health, and finances will suffer. And YOU will suffer. All so you can contribute new knowledge to an uncaring society. You will carefully polish thousands of pearls for direct delivery to the pig pen. And you'll go in debt to do it.
In the course of my own dissertation, I worked a full time unpaid job seeking out old psychometric tests that are no longer in use, soliciting and running participants through a novel teaching methodology, and processing all data as well as writing my dissertation document. I was self appointed CEO and director of my own little laboratory. This required me to independently learn how to administer psychometric tests, run audio software, engineer sound, teach advanced musical skills to complete novices, compile spreadsheet data, run operations in Excel, decide which statistical tests to run, run those statistical tests using open source software, calculate certain statistical tests by hand, write the results in APA format, rerun the same tests every week to inductively learn whether my research was a waste of time or a breakthrough, and learn how to tolerate it all for over 2 years straight. All my friends left town. I became a stranger to my family. Somehow, I stayed sober, which I count as a personal accomplishment. Did I mention that I taught 6 college classes per week at the same time? My title at the university: teaching assistant. I didn't even get to be called professor for teaching over 600 students. Only my students called me professor, and I never bothered to correct them. My take home pay was slightly higher than $15 per hour. My own students could have outearned me easily with high school diplomas.
The offhand way I list these requirements isn't meant to imply that the demands of the dissertation came without significant setbacks. I had to determine which tests to run and track them down through interlibrary loan, which required 6 months of research in psychometric assessment. I had to run all experimental sessions myself. Prior to this, I needed IRB approval to run my experiment, which took 6 months of revised proposals. I had to teach myself statistics, and if I couldn't understand something, no one I knew could help me. Do you know why it's important to calculate the normality of residuals when running an independent samples t-test to support a significant difference between demographic groups in your sample? I got to figure that out using textbooks and 10 year old forum threads. You tell me if it's a marketable skill. When my equipment malfunctioned, I got to learn how to fix it, so I guess I also dabbled in fucking variable capacitor physics. Again, no help, no human connection. Also, my coursework was close to expiring, since I had taken some of these courses 8 years (!) ago. Meaning I would essentially need to quit college or retake those courses I barely found a way to pass the first time if I outstayed my welcome. Keep in mind, I had my 2nd comp publication repeatedly rejected by multiple journals, meaning I was not eligible to defend my dissertation, and would shortly run out of time to try. I somehow satisfied the 2nd comp requirement by completing both a publication and a grant submission in 6 months alongside teaching classes, running participants, processing data, and writing.
I also found my libido flagging as a consequence of a zinc deficiency acquired from my strict plant based diet, which resulted in a sudden loss of my libido and sperm counts. It took me months to figure out that high phytic acid intake through dried beans were sapping nutrients out of my body (canned beans are much healthier). In the meantime, I assumed I was getting depressed and losing my libido for psychological reasons, and as my attraction to my wife began to decline, I eventually found only one 20 year old undergraduate I supervised was able to elicit any feeling of attraction from me. No one tells you that a lost libido also makes a man far pickier about females. A lesser man would have acted on this situation. Rather, I was smart enough to know there must be a physiological cause for my declining physical functions and I had to reject this young woman's growing closeness to me and watch her take an interest in a boy so I could go home to a nearly sexless marriage. As this happened, I eventually became unable to sexually perform at all for days at a time while I worked to complete all degree requirements (some of which were outside my control) in hopes of starting and supporting a family with a woman with whom I could no longer sexually function. Fixing this situation required me to conquer grinding depression as I watched this beautiful young woman slipping away from me, serious revisions to my diet to reverse nutrient deficiencies, and nearly 2 months of struggling to regain sexual function using diet.
If you want the Ph.D., you find a way.
After finding the tests, obtaining IRB approval, administering the tests, teaching the participants, running the stats, writing the document, you now need to propose and defend the document. That means, you will approach 5 Ph.D. level professors who don't care about you and convince them to be unpaid members of your committee. They receive no incentive to join your committee or pass your work. They are also experts in the field, so they will regard your 'novel contribution' with suspicion and criticism. Your job is to answer their every criticism and craft a dissertation that forces and persuades them to sign off on your work. You will do this by making your proposal and defense in person. In my case, my proposal meeting took a whole year to schedule. My defense meeting took 6 months. This is due to the sheer busyness of these 5 professors who literally could not feasibly agree to 2 hours on a given day. Somehow, the day was set. Even then, one of them missed the meeting and needed to be hunted down for a one-on-one review of my work.
With a successful defense complete, you can now call yourself Dr., but you still need the official approval of the graduate school, so you hunt down signatures to be filed by very strict non-negotiable deadlines for graduation (don't forget that your credits are expiring as you gather these documents!!). Those 5 professors who were so hard to pin down the first time, now need to be pinned down again within weeks. To add further complexity, your 100+ page document must conform to special graduate school formatting conventions in order to be accepted. If it is not accepted, you might just miss your graduation deadline and need to try again in 6 months. As your credits expire.
This process in total is incomprehensible to most. A good metaphor would be the hunt. Particularly, a hunt for a rare or legendary animal, like a ghost white buffalo. If you spear the rare, fierce animal, you receive the accolades of fellow hunters. If you fail to catch the animal, others will ridicule you as foolish or over-ambitious and you'll receive no credit. Some will even question whether your goal is even possible. Therefore, the experience of a doctoral candidate is one of unending existential anxiety in part because some of your degree attainments require sheer good luck. It is one of the very few human endeavors wherein you either become a complete success or an abject failure and there is NO in between. It is possible to do everything properly and still fail to satisfy all requirements in the requisite time. If you succeed, you are granted social status and a very good chance of higher lifetime income. If you fail, you are worse off than someone who merely earned a Master's degree and started a career. For that reason, it's a ballsy move and not something to be recommended to the impulsive, weak willed, or easily discouraged.
No comments:
Post a Comment