Have you ever wondered about the process of getting a Ph.D.? Well, if you want all the dirty details, keep reading.
I earned my Ph.D. from a top-10 program in politics and my wife is currently working on a Ph.D. in a top-5 program in sociology. As a result, I am painfully aware of what it takes. It involves a series of hoops to jump through:
1) Get accepted into a Ph.D. program. I'm going to be honest. Too many people are admitted into Ph.D. programs right now. There is currently a glut of Ph.D.s on the job market. Too many universities have added Ph.D. programs to make themselves look better. With too many programs come too many people graduating from said programs. This comes at a time when colleges and universities are actually hiring fewer professors.
All this to say that it is much easier to get into a Ph.D. program than it has been at any time in history. But, at the same time, having a Ph.D. is becoming more and more meaningless. I know too many people with Ph.D.s who are working at restaurants and similar low-skill jobs. In order to come anywhere close to being guaranteed a job after getting a Ph.D., you must get your degree from a top-10 program. It is much harder to get into a highly-ranked program. If your college grades and admission exam scores are less than stellar, you might consider getting a Master's degree first and then apply for the Ph.D. program. Top programs are much more comfortable admitting someone who has proven they can do graduate school level work.
2) Coursework. The first two to three years of your Ph.D. program will involve taking classes. Typically you will take three courses each semester. If you are thinking, "Oh, that's not too bad. I took more than that in college," you would be wrong. Think about your toughest college class, triple the work load, and you now have an idea of a typical graduate school course. First-year graduate students are also frequently surprised at the types of things you are expected to learn. I'd have to say that in the first year of my graduate experience, I didn't learn a single thing about politics. That's right, nothing. In fact, I'm fairly sure that I knew more about politics than some of my professors. Graduate school course work is highly specialized. The higher-ranking the program, the more specialized the courses are. My wife took one required statistics course that literally had no numbers. (She was really confused.)
3) Intensive work for very little money. In order to pay for grad school, most people are either a TA or an RA. A TA is a teaching assistant which, much of the time, means glorified grader. You are essentially the slave of the professor teaching the class and you play whatever role that person tells you. I TAed for one class where I was one of two TAs for a class of 300 students. The professor was a particularly bad teacher, but liked giving lots of writing assignments. The result is that I essentially had to teach 300 students the material in office hours while also grading 150 student papers once per week.
An RA is an indentured servant to a professor performing research. You basically do whatever the the professor says while getting no credit for the work. They also seem to forget how long it takes to do things. Part of the deal is that you are supposed to work 20 hours in exchange for tuition and minimum wage. However, if it takes you more than 20 hours to get the work done, that's just the way it is. But if you put in too many hours, it takes away from your ability to do your own schoolwork.
4) Preliminary/comprehensive exams. This is a particularly annoying hoop through which to jump. You must decide two areas in which you claim to be an expert. Then, after your courses are complete (or near complete), you must prove that you are an expert in your areas. You are given a massive, all-day exam in each area which is then evaluated by a committee of professors in that area. Often there is one committee member who derives some sort of perverse pleasure from damaging graduate students. In my case, there was one professor who scored everyone's test as a "fail" because we did not, "adequately cite from the work of our department's highly esteemed faculty" (even though the questions asked had nothing to do with the research of any of our faculty). Different departments will do this differently. The natural sciences tend to be easier than social sciences or humanities for some reason. But, it is a painful hurdle through which we must jump.
5) Doing your own research. After completing coursework and proving you are an expert in your areas, you are now at the stage where you can start doing your own research (in addition to your TA or RA gig). This is a major shift. All of a sudden, you have spare time. You are suddenly your own boss for 1/2 the time (in theory--depending on TA/RA status). You set your own deadlines. You schedule your own days. You set your own priorities. Your academic advisor may give you suggestions, but they are suggestions and there aren't any penalties, or even grades to encourage your behavior. I've known a lot of people who did well in all the "hard parts" of graduate school but fell apart when they found their new freedom.
If you can handle the freedom, then your job is to come up with something that has never been said before. You are to convince a panel of scholars that your work is "interesting", "new", and "academically rigorous". The problem is that different scholars define those three things differently. In my own experience, I had a conservative Roman Catholic, a Black church scholar, and the chair of Women's Studies on the same committee. Looking back, I can say that it was stupid on my part. It was extremely difficult to make all three of these individuals happy, and I consider my own dissertation to be garbage as a result. I had to water down everything to make everyone happy. It ended up wildly different than my own views just so I could finish jumping through this hoop.
But, if you are willing to jump through all these hoops, you too can get a Ph.D. Just know what you are getting yourself into before you start. It is a lot of work, and there is no guaranteed job after all the hoops are complete. If you decide to pursue a Ph.D., make sure you truly love what you are studying, because I doubt that it is otherwise worth the effort.
