Do Grad Students Know the Process for Finishing?

[polly_mer]

We had an odd situation occur at my employer recently. 

We were interviewing for postdocs, so we naturally have many people who interviewing who are within months of defending and graduating.

One particular individual interviewed in fall with an expected defense date at the end of that month.  When the first notice came of "oops, the defense is really a couple weeks later", well, these things happen and the defense will still occur before the expected start date for the postdoc.

After several slippages to the point that we're now in a new academic term, the contact was made this week to find out what the deal is.  Well, the deal is that the student still hasn't completed all the work in the dissertation proposal, which means the dissertation is not in a final state in the hands of the committee.  The student has filed no paperwork at any level for a defense, let alone graduation at the end of the term.  Every estimated date was only in the student's head and bore no resemblance to what we were thinking in terms of "oh, vagueness of 'end of the month' or 'around Thanksgiving' means you are still negotiating the exact date with the committee to be done before the deadlines at the institution for graduation".

In fact, as the contact probed deeper in what remains to be done, the student appears to have the belief that one line on a todo list should be about a month of work with no evident knowledge of how hard that one line is, despite several months having passed now since the student claiming to be within a month of defending.  When we found out what the student was still on the hook to do, estimates ranged from six months to two years of work remaining before the writing phase.  The postdoc offer was rescinded (the student can reapply for whatever's open whenever the student finishes; we hire postdocs all the time) and this particular search was reopened.

My question to the fora is: do your students really understand all the bureaucracy beyond writing the dissertation or is this another case where many folks will be mentored by wolves and good luck to them?

[Aster]

Graduate student behavior can in many ways mirror common undergraduate behaviors.

There can be some pretty terrible graduate students who don't read, don't follow directions, don't do their work, don't stick to deadlines, etc...

And some of those students can even persist all the way to Year 4+ without being kicked out or themselves quitting.

Having observed many of these "atypical" graduate students when I worked at the R1/R2 level, I can state that the atypical graduate students can pop up almost anywhere.

But they do tend to magnify at institutions that are much less selective, and in departments or with mentoring professors who don't really give a crap.

And this is why I rarely look an ABD candidate when I'm on a faculty hiring committee. Because I've seen enough and been burned enough to know that many ABD's either never graduate at all, or graduate so late that it is not viable to hire them. But I do understand that post-doc hiring committees are in a different situation, and often most of the applicants they're looking at are ABD's. I don't have much useful feedback for this situation, other than maybe verifying that the applicant's prelims are done, the applicant has petitioned formally for a graduation date, and that a dissertation defense date has been set.

[Parasaurolophus]

Wow.

For us, it's common to believe we'll be done in four years (because Canadian programs are supposed to be four years long, and typically fund for four), then after a couple years it's five, and finally when we're mostly but not entirely done the dissertation we resign ourselves to six or seven. But that's nothing like this. I don't know anyone who'd claim they were so close to being done when they were in fact so, so far from it.

[Ruralguy]

Don't be disingenuous. This has nothing to do with organization. Its about desperation. They need a job. They want one they like. They applied for yours. Pressure was put on them to graduate. They weren't ready. Maybe at some level that's on them, but the adviser should have been on top of this.

[RatGuy]

In my PhD program, the grad school was on top of everything. I got many email about degree progress from them, while my DGS barely knew my name. I defended in late September of that year, got all the necessary revisions and signatures and formatting for graduation. In mid-November, my DGS sent an email to the listserv chastising me (and a few others) for failing to enroll in dissertation hours. We had to inform her that we'd graduated. So I think it's a far cry from "grad students these days."

[mamselle]

I was just going to say, there's being mentored by wolves, and then there are ghost wolves.

As in, they don't honor appointments, don't look at what they're signing to see that the student is getting half the course credit they should be receiving, don't read the prospectus (or even chapters) of the dissertation for months.

I dealt with all that.

So, it's also possible the student isn't getting any help at all and doesn't even know it.

M.

[dr_codex]

All I can say is, just be glad you don't work in academic publishing. "Almost finished" can mean next week, next month, next year, or next decade.

[Aster]

I don't know anyone who'd claim they were so close to being done when they were in fact so, so far from it.

I have not seen it much (usually just 3-5% of applications), but it is something that requires alert screening for hiring committees.

If our search committee is interested in an ABD applicant enough to bring him/her in for an interview, we make sure to ask what their official graduation date is set to. If they don't know or can't tell us, that applicant gets immediately trash-canned. But if the ABD can say, "oh, I'm graduating next week, my CV was just not updated back in the Fall when I sent it to you," then that's a relief for us.

[polly_mer]

Ruralguy, we hire people at all levels so if the person really just wanted a job, then that person should have applied for one of the many jobs we have that don't require a doctorate.  Postdoc is about the only job that does require a doctorate; we hire research scientists even with just a shiny new bachelor's degree.

All I can say is, just be glad you don't work in academic publishing. "Almost finished" can mean next week, next month, next year, or next decade.

I've been "almost done" on a paper for almost a year now.  Maybe this weekend is the completion (but likely not since I've been given more urgent things with a looming deadline and severe consequences for not finishing, unlike that paper).

[Kron3007]

Wow.

For us, it's common to believe we'll be done in four years (because Canadian programs are supposed to be four years long, and typically fund for four), then after a couple years it's five, and finally when we're mostly but not entirely done the dissertation we resign ourselves to six or seven. But that's nothing like this. I don't know anyone who'd claim they were so close to being done when they were in fact so, so far from it.

Our official timeline (Canadian university) for a PhD is three years, not that this is common.  Even NSERC scholarships are for three years.

Regarding the OP, who knows what is going on here.  Perhaps they met with their advisor who said they could defend without the unfinished experiment and then a committee member insisted.  My point is that there could be a lot going on behind the scene that led to this other than the student just dropping the ball.

Personally, I always make students present a timeline working back from their defense date, taking all of these things into account and we go over all of this.  I remember when I was an Mc student the timeline was a lot slower than I would have imagined.

I recently met with a grad student that was not aware that the program runs through the summer.  I don't know how this one slipped through the cracks, but I guess I assumed this was obvious and did not explicitly stated it.  He is a first eneration student (as was I), so it is perfectly reasonable that he didn't know even though it seems evident.

[Ruralguy]

I meant to say that this grad student was desperate for a relevant academic job and not just any job.
That can lead to unclear thinking and just plain lying. If it's gone on too long and doesn't violate laws or ethics just cut him loose after a brief polite but clear warning about getting 100 percent done by March 1 or whatever.

[Ruralguy]

I apologize...it's clear you already dumped him....that was the right thing to do. And yes, his mentoring might have sucked, but maybe he was just clueless or mentally ill or physically ill, or...

[Caracal]

I apologize...it's clear you already dumped him....that was the right thing to do. And yes, his mentoring might have sucked, but maybe he was just clueless or mentally ill or physically ill, or...

In my grad program, there was really nothing formal that had to happen between finishing your comps and defending your dissertation. I assume various paperwork had to be filled out on the back end, but other than applying for graduation and sending in my official approved thesis, I didn't engage with it. If your advisor said your dissertation was ready to defend, you could go ahead and defend it. Now, in practice, for any of this to work well, there needed to be lots of informal steps. Ideally, you were in close touch with your advisor as you worked through chapters, and as you got towards the end of the process you started to give stuff to your committee members and get feedback. As all that happened you got clearer and less conditional dates for finishing from your advisor. At first it was more like, "ok well, if you think that timeline for revision is reasonable, we can shoot for fall next year." And then eventually if things remained on track and you kept giving your advisor revisions they were happy with, you got an actual date. Once that happened, there was a basic expectation that your advisor was confident that you would have the completed product ready and that it would pass muster with the rest of the committee. Nobody ever failed a defense when I was there, and if they had, it would have been seen as an indictment of the advisor as much as of the student.

This all worked well as long as you had responsible advisors and reasonable students who were on the same page, and it worked well for me. I did see some cases where this went off the rails, however. I can think of a few cases where students just apparently kept submitting work that didn't address their advisors critiques and the messages about what needed to happen to set a defense date were not getting heard, either because the advisor wasn't clear enough, the student was choosing to hear what they wanted to hear, or often a combination of the two. I wouldn't be surprised if something similar was going on here.

[spork]

A situation of a grad student advertising himself as almost done but in reality being far from it sounds like a major fail on the part of both the grad student and the grad program.

I'm glad you and your colleagues can, even at the interview stage, toss someone's application into the trash. Here a department hired someone who billed herself as "ABD" for a tenure-track position and she was supposed to have the PhD completed within one year. She left for another job four years after being hired, still without a PhD. I don't fault her one bit for landing such a sweet gig, I blame faculty in that department and higher-level administrators for creating the situation.

[polly_mer]

I meant to say that this grad student was desperate for a relevant academic job and not just any job.

We are a non-academic institution.  Postdoc positions, as it states in the job ad, are for one year with an option on a second year.  A third year is possible, with a ton of paper work.  Thou shalt not have a fourth year.

Thus, it's weird to be thinking in terms of this postdoc being a relevant academic job like a TT position.  In contrast, a research scientist position is permanent until fired and does not necessarily require a completed PhD.  We have hired people in the past three years into those positions (paid better than postdocs because postdocs are categorized as students getting training) with only bachelor's degrees.

I can believe that someone really didn't know what was required to finish their degree much more than I can believe that someone thought this term position that absolutely requires a PhD in hand before the official offer paperwork was somehow the gold ring of job victory.