Is a PhD program a professional program for aspiring faculty members?

[marshwiggle]

Since med school is a professional program for doctors, and law school is a professional program for lawyers, is a PhD program the equivalent for aspiring professors?

If so, are there any ways PhD programs should adapt some of the practices of other professional schools?

If not, what makes them different? And what makes  "faculty" a professional career?

Does the original question have a different answer depending on discipline; i.e. does it matter how many jobs there are outside academia requiring a PhD?

[polly_mer]

Discipline definitely matters.  Two of the biggest assumptions are

(1) humanities PhDs as representative as all PhDs

and

(2) academia as the primary employer of PhDs.

On a recent thread, someone asked why we don't have more successful quit lit articles.  One reason is only a few fields really need quit lit as a thing.  The rest of us just get jobs and move on to successful lives because academia is just one common enough career path.

[Sun_Worshiper]

I did go to grad school with the intention of becoming a professor, and it ultimately worked out that way for me, but I've had to figure a lot of things out on my own. Most glaringly, ~50% of my job is teaching, and yet I got no formal training on how to teach. I also didn't get any formal guidance on putting together job market materials, interviewing, networking, etc., or on logistical things like negotiating a salary. Advisors can give some informal guidance on these kinds of things, if you have good ones and/or know what questions to ask, but not everybody gets this kind of attention.

Now I teach in a professional school (or at least a department that brands itself that way) and students are offered a lot more in the way of formal professional development support and career advising. Not all of it is transferable, but I do think that PhD programs should formalize some of the professional development stuff - and I'm sure some do.

[eigen]

Building off of Polly's responses, I'd argue that at least in my field they are very much not professional programs. They do not prepare someone for a particular profession (faculty or otherwise) but broadly prepare students for a range of career opportunities depending on skill set and interests.

[Ruralguy]

It would have been more useful to have more discussions regarding teaching, and maybe people giving us practical tips after observing us as TA's.

I also think a wider discussion of what people could do with a PhD in X would have been helpful. Not just "Well, try to be a professor, and if that doesn't work, just wing it."

Of course, more detailed discussion on what it means to be a faculty member somewhere would have been helpful as well.

[eigen]

It would have been more useful to have more discussions regarding teaching, and maybe people giving us practical tips after observing us as TA's.

I also think a wider discussion of what people could do with a PhD in X would have been helpful. Not just "Well, try to be a professor, and if that doesn't work, just wing it."

Of course, more detailed discussion on what it means to be a faculty member somewhere would have been helpful as well.

I think most graduate programs would benefit from opt-in experiences that are "co-curricular". For instance, teaching experience isn't really that useful for someone who plans to do no teaching after graduate school. Patent law isn't very useful for someone who plans to go to a teaching university.

But having students be able to take supplemental courses in business, patent law, management, teaching/pedagogy, etc. would be useful as ways for students to develop skills for a chosen career alongside their chosen track. In the sciences, I think greater inclusion of / allowances for internships would also be immensely useful, as they can be hard to fit in with many traditional programs that really are based on 12 month research focus.

Overall, I think we need to do a better job of giving incoming graduate students some opportunities to explore careers and options during their schooling to expand skills in needed areas, but I think any "one-size-fits-all" solutions we add perpetuate the existing problem (presuming a profession) rather than solve it.

I've mentioned this before, but the vast majority of folks in my PhD program had zero interest in faculty jobs of any stripe and were quite up front about that.

[Kron3007]

I would say it is definitely not.

In the case of a lawyer, they go to law school and then have to pass the bar (I dont think you actually need to go to law school technically).
In the case of a MD, you train to become a resident.  After which you are certified to practice medicine.

In both cases, there is a regulator that permits you to practice and the training really only leads in that direction.

For a PhD, there is no certification board and the training can lead in many different directions.  When I started my PhD and even after I completed it, my intention was not to become a professor even though that is where I ended up.  A PhD is there to make you a subject matter expert, no more, no less.  One thing you can do with this expertise is to train others, but that is not the intention of the degree.  If that were the intention, it is structured all wrong... 

[Parasaurolophus]

I would say it is definitely not.

In the case of a lawyer, they go to law school and then have to pass the bar (I dont think you actually need to go to law school technically).
In the case of a MD, you train to become a resident.  After which you are certified to practice medicine.

In both cases, there is a regulator that permits you to practice and the training really only leads in that direction.

I dunno, I mean... for a lot of disciplines, the training really only leads in the direction of a faculty job, and the regulator--deregulated as it is--is the job market, which keeps some people out of the profession, and a chosen few 'in'. To be a university instructor, you need the PhD, and you need to "pass" the market. Then comes your on-the-job training experience for six or seven years.

The disconnect is that the training is all focused on research, whereas most of most jobs is teaching. And even for research jobs, there's no training in mentorship, which is surely part of the reason why so many people have supervisors who take 6 months to a year to read any of their work.

(And, frankly, even the research training isn't all that good. It's too focused on some aspects of research, and not enough on others--like, e.g., how to cite like a fucking adult.)

[Kron3007]

I would say it is definitely not.

In the case of a lawyer, they go to law school and then have to pass the bar (I dont think you actually need to go to law school technically).
In the case of a MD, you train to become a resident.  After which you are certified to practice medicine.

In both cases, there is a regulator that permits you to practice and the training really only leads in that direction.

I dunno, I mean... for a lot of disciplines, the training really only leads in the direction of a faculty job, and the regulator--deregulated as it is--is the job market, which keeps some people out of the profession, and a chosen few 'in'. To be a university instructor, you need the PhD, and you need to "pass" the market. Then comes your on-the-job training experience for six or seven years.

The disconnect is that the training is all focused on research, whereas most of most jobs is teaching. And even for research jobs, there's no training in mentorship, which is surely part of the reason why so many people have supervisors who take 6 months to a year to read any of their work.

(And, frankly, even the research training isn't all that good. It's too focused on some aspects of research, and not enough on others--like, e.g., how to cite like a fucking adult.)

Technically you do not need a PhD to be a professor.  I recognize that this is a de facto requirement for most fields but there there are no laws or regulations that make this the case.  I have met professors that do not have a PhD... 

Just because there isnt market demand for your skill set dosn't mean that the intention is to train you to be a professor.  This is also only the case for a moderately small subset of disciplines, most areas have other career options (to varying degrees).  When you come out of a PhD program, the institution is not claiming that you will be a good teacher, administrator, committee member, or grant writer, only that you are an expert in your field.

The focus on research instead of teaching is precisely because it is not teacher's college and is not a professional degree.  If it were a professional degree designed to train professors, I would agree completely that there should be more focus on this, but that is not the point of a PhD.  If you added these aspects you would likely compromise the quality of the program or make it take longer.


 

 

[polly_mer]

But having students be able to take supplemental courses in business, patent law, management, teaching/pedagogy, etc. would be useful as ways for students to develop skills for a chosen career alongside their chosen track. In the sciences, I think greater inclusion of / allowances for internships would also be immensely useful, as they can be hard to fit in with many traditional programs that really are based on 12 month research focus.

My non-academic employer has internship and similar programs from high school through postdoc.  We are being encouraged to have students throughout the year, not just the summer.

We absolutely want people with graduate education, but it can't be focused on becoming a professor because almost none of them will.  We have many people who left academia for a different mix of research, service, and mentoring with teaching as an option.

We also hire many people with a research master's degree as scientists and engineers because the research skills don't take six years of grad school to learn.  Getting permission to take non-credit classes in all those areas is straightforward, encouraged, and paid for as professional development.

Personally, I took tons of workshops on teaching, mentoring, and similar endeavors through my grad school and postdoc time.  It was incredibly useful both in the classroom and in my other careers.  However, trying to teach people who actively resist learning and being low paid is unpleasant as a profession so now that's a hobby.

[eigen]

But having students be able to take supplemental courses in business, patent law, management, teaching/pedagogy, etc. would be useful as ways for students to develop skills for a chosen career alongside their chosen track. In the sciences, I think greater inclusion of / allowances for internships would also be immensely useful, as they can be hard to fit in with many traditional programs that really are based on 12 month research focus.

My non-academic employer has internship and similar programs from high school through postdoc.  We are being encouraged to have students throughout the year, not just the summer.

We absolutely want people with graduate education, but it can't be focused on becoming a professor because almost none of them will.  We have many people who left academia for a different mix of research, service, and mentoring with teaching as an option.

We also hire many people with a research master's degree as scientists and engineers because the research skills don't take six years of grad school to learn.  Getting permission to take non-credit classes in all those areas is straightforward, encouraged, and paid for as professional development.

Personally, I took tons of workshops on teaching, mentoring, and similar endeavors through my grad school and postdoc time.  It was incredibly useful both in the classroom and in my other careers.  However, trying to teach people who actively resist learning and being low paid is unpleasant as a profession so now that's a hobby.

There's a return of increasingly industry focused programs in chemistry, and I'm happy to see it. Not just industry focused in terms of "most people go into industry" but actively encouraging industry collaborations, internships, etc. and thinking about the skills that a chemist needs to be successful in industry.

[kaysixteen]

'PhD program' is way too broad.   All disciplines' PhD programs are not the same, and all disciplines are far from the same.   Classicists and chemical engineers might as well be on different planets, and the programs to train them reflect this difference (one person mentioned the aspect of PhD training as primarily/ almost exclusively research-focused, but this ain't true for something like classics, where there is just too much to learn, including various languages, historical and cultural content, etc., as well as techniques to study the past-- the dissertation is really just the last 'thing' done in grad school).  And, of course, most grad students, like it or not, more or less in any discipline, willl see the PhD program as a professional program akin to law or med school, although, of course, what their professional goals would be would be very different.   Many if not most PhD studentsd in STEM may have no interest in an academic career, but this is never ever going to be the case for classics.