9 Things I Wish I Knew About Doctoral Programs

Recently, I earned my doctorate in engineering education, so I figured I’d write a little piece reflecting on the things I’ve learned. Specifically, there are 9 things I wish I knew.

It Is the Wild West
Feedback Is Critical to Success
Your Advisor Means Everything
There Are Many Ways to Secure Funding
Reading Is a Fundamental Skill
Teaching Is Undervalued
Grades Don’t Mean Anything
Research Isn’t Explicitly Taught
Resilience Is More Important Than Intelligence
Looking Back

It Is the Wild West

Coming from industry, I was somewhat used to the day-to-day structure of a full-time job, so I was very surprised to find that doctoral programs are incredibly unstructured. This will likely be jarring for folks coming straight out of undergrad as well.

For whatever reason, grad school has very little in the way of rules. There are credit requirements, sure, but that’s roughly where the requirements end. For example, when I was in computer science, the requirements was that I complete a major and two minors. Often, however, the courses listed as a part of a major or minor did not exist or what not offered often enough to be considered requirements.

To make matters worse, advisors often have their own requirements of their students for graduation. For example, in addition to the usual examination requirements (i.e., qualifying, candidacy, dissertation), my early advisor had a policy that students had to publish a certain number of times at a certain conference to graduate.

Fortunately, engineering education was much more structured, but I still had a ton of flexibility in my scheduling to pick and choose the courses I wanted to take. To support this flexibility, the engineering education department made students submit plans of study to the department for review. That way, faculty would not be able to later deny a course after it had already been taken.

In either case, however, the degree is tailored significantly more to the individual, which can make it feel like the wild west at times. In other words, two people earning the same degree might have very different paths through the program. Ultimately, I really ended up liking this approach, but it can lead to a lot of anxiety.

Feedback Is Critical to Success

If you’re like me and came from a STEM discipline, you may have a general aversion to feedback. I think part of that is the result of a general sense of elitism in the field. As a result, you often have to pretend you know what you’re doing, even when you don’t. Therefore, you’re never going to ask for feedback.

In a doctoral program, you have to get rid of that mentality, or you will not succeed. Doing everything yourself is frankly not an option. After all, getting feedback is an integral part of scientific research as it’s the foundation of the peer review process.

Your Advisor Means Everything

Your advisor can make or break your entire doctoral program experience. I am convinced that the incredibly low retention numbers of PhD students is likely for this reason. Of course, the only evidence I have for that is my own experience and the experiences of a handful of other folks I met in group therapy.

With that said, it cannot be understated how important your advisor is to your success as a PhD student. From a milestone standpoint, they sign off on all the major exams from qualifying to your dissertation defense. Likewise, they will likely be your main source of funding. Therefore, if they don’t want you to work for them, you will not be funded.

While you’re working through your proposal and dissertation, your advisor is also your primary critic. As a result, you have to be comfortable with their style of critique. If sending documents to your advisor fills you with anxiety, then it’s going to be a long painful writing process.

Overall, I was very fortunate with the handful of advisors I had, so I never had any issues. That said, I encourage you to search up “bad PhD advisor” on your favorite search engine and see what others have said.

There Are Many Ways to Secure Funding

When I entered my doctoral program, I was promised funding through teaching. This is often known as a graduate teaching assistantship/associateship or GTA. As a GTA, your degree is fully funded as long as you teach a course or two each semester. In addition, you are given a small stipend, so you can pay bills.

In contrast, you can secure funding through research, which is unsurprisingly called a GRA. Typically, this involves working on a study for a faculty member.

While GTAs and GRAs are the two most common ways of securing funding, universities sometimes have administrative roles you can serve in called GAAs. In my experience, all three are considered “full-time” positions at 20 hours per week. In some cases, these positions can be overloaded up to 30 hours per week or 75% FTE. For instance, I’ve worked as a GTA for 75% FTE, and I’ve also worked split positions like a GTA for 50% FTE and a GRA for 25% FTE.

Generally, all of the graduate positions involve working for some amount of time while taking classes and working on your research. If your goal is focus primarily on your coursework and research, then you need to secure a fellowship. I personally never tried to get a fellowship, but I would imagine they would make your life a lot easier. However, be aware that having a fellowship gives you less work experience, so you might have your name on fewer papers or have less to list on a CV. That said, a fellowship is a form of credential, so the work experience may not be needed.

Reading Is a Fundamental Skill

Again, coming from STEM, I was a bit surprised by the amount of reading I was expected to do in graduate school. Granted, I had to do a lot more reading in engineering education than in computer science. That said, reading became a daily habit pretty quickly.

Now, there is a bit of a difference between reading for pleasure and academic reading. Personally, I don’t do a lot of reading for pleasure. For instance, prior to graduate school, my day-to-day reading involved Twitter, Reddit, and subtitles. Regardless, I would imagine that folks who read for pleasure read everything line by line.

In contrast, academic reading often involves more of a skim than a rigorous pass through. The reason being that there is simply too much literature to read. Typically, you’re going to start with the title and decide if that study is something you need to read. Then, you’ll move to the abstract to confirm your original assessment. After that, you’re probably going to skim the article for the key points as they relate to your needs, but very rarely are you going to read the study from top to bottom.

However, early in your academic journey, you are going to want to read studies from top to bottom. That way, you can get comfortable with the typical structure of a document. Also, it allows you to get comfortable with academic jargon, and it shows you what not to do in your own writing.

Then, the only works you will typically read from top to bottom are the ones you lean on most heavily in your work. For example, I leaned on a couple of books, which I have actually read through several times. There are also a few papers that influence the work I do, so I have also read those a few times. Beyond that, I usually only skim papers to find evidence for any arguments I plan to make.

Teaching Is Undervalued

It perhaps comes as no surprise to folks who have spent any time in academia that teaching is undervalued. However, I was the most surprised by this in engineering education, as education is in the name. While engineering education taught me how to teach (unlike computer science), the research conducted in engineering education doesn’t exactly make its way into practice.

What you will find in academia is that there is a massive divide between theory and practice. Again, perhaps this is unsurprising in fields where there is an academic and industry divide, but education is directly embedded in academia. So, I find it strange that education-related research doesn’t immediately yield dividends in practice.

In my experience, this is because academics do not believe they have a duty to apply their findings in practice. Instead, they expect educators to find their work and apply it themselves. This is called research-to-practice, and I do not believe it is happening. After all, there is no incentive for educators to read research nor is there really time to do so. Not to mention that the vast majority of professors are not trained to teach in the first place, so how would they go about making sense of education research?

Grades Don’t Mean Anything

One of the weirder things I learned is that graduate school grades don’t mean anything. I first realized this when I took an algorithms class straight out of industry. Unlike my peers, none of the course content was making any sense to me, so I was regularly scoring in the bottom fourth of the class on exams. At some point, I reached out to the professor about my grades, and he asked me what grade I needed. When I told him a ‘C’, he said not to worry. I ended that class with a B.

That story should probably be enough to sell you, but I’ll also share the trajectory of my GPA. I finished undergrad with a 3.55 GPA, my master’s with a 3.78, and my PhD with a 3.86. In other words, my grades just kept going up. I don’t think anything really changed about me as a student, just that grading gets a little easier the further down the academic rabbit hole you go.

Research Isn’t Explicitly Taught

Often, doctoral programs expect you to already know how to do research before you arrive. To me, this is a bit strange because I assumed the point of a doctoral program was to teach you how to do research. Yet, when I entered my computer science PhD program, there were no courses on how to do research (or how to teach for that matter).

Luckily, when I shifted over to my engineering education PhD program, there were required courses on how to conduct research (and teaching). In fact, I was required to take a general research design course as well as a quantitative research course and a qualitative research course. On top of that, I took a mixed methods course.

However, I tend to believe that engineering education is a bit outside of the norm in terms of academic training. Mostly, you’re going to learn to do research through your peers, which may be more akin to a trial by fire.

Resilience Is More Important Than Intelligence

Perhaps the biggest takeaway for anyone looking to complete a graduate program is that you don’t actually need to be absurdly smart. Interestingly, this was a lesson I learned before I went to graduate school, but I think it still deserves to be a part of the list.

As the story goes, I was helping a friend of mine move. His dad worked at a university and was notoriously blunt. For example, he once told a buddy of mine that aerospace engineering is “kinda technical.” Anyway, he asked me if I was applying to high end schools, and I told him I wasn’t because I couldn’t get in. His response: “even top schools need monkeys.”

While I think his framing is ridiculous, he’s sort of right. You don’t actually have to be “smart” to complete a PhD. Sure, intelligence (whatever that means) goes a long way, but hard work is what actually gets you to the other side. That means using your downtime to read and write, working weekends when needed, and leaning on your peers for help. Ultimately, the folks that make it to the other side have fought their way through a significant degree of adversity.

That’s not to say that people who quit are failures. I know plenty of people who didn’t finish their degrees, and it was often due to things I mentioned above like bad advisors but also things like cultural fit. There are a lot of reasons why folks drop out, and I don’t see that as a reflection of their lack of resilience. However, people who succeed often have resilience in abundance.

Looking Back

To be honest, there is likely a lot more than 9 things I was surprised by in my doctoral program, but I’d be here all day. Instead, let’ wrap this one up!

As always, there is plenty more where this came from:

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