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by barry-cotter 1531 days ago
> A solution to this that you may like if you want more oversight may be to treat a research lab more like a corporation with a board of directors (I can hear the researchers recoiling) or some other governing body over the lab and the students itself. What do you think of that idea?

Rule by committee. So many examples of that working out great.

How about keeping the apprenticeship aspect just having more masters? One year of just comprehend exams, one year where you’re supposed to devote half your time to research with an advisor and half to comps, and three years where you work on six different projects with different advisors in six month chunks? Some of those will be written up as failures, but basically you end up with 3+ Master’s theses. That’s a great deal more love research academia than legal academia and they don’t seem to lack for scholarly work or impact.
2 comments
Fomite 1531 days ago
This would require revisiting a lot of things - it basically assumes that all projects can be broken down into one-year, coherent and publishable chunks. I love Masters students, but they are often not the most productive, as they rarely get to wade really deeply into a project, and almost never get to develop a project of their own.
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ModernMech 1531 days ago
I like your idea a lot, but I don't think it could replace the Ph.D. proper. You really do need all that time on one project to make a dent in the state of the art sometimes. One year I spent an entire summer generating data for a single figure in my dissertation. That's part of the reason why it took me 8 years to graduate.
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barry-cotter 1531 days ago
It wasn’t always like that in the US. Three year doctorates are still a thing in the UK and in Germany. Lower the standards for a doctorate and make a postdoc a formal necessity for a job as a professor, rather than not formally being one but practically so. You can even call it a habilitation, like the Germans do. If you want a doctorate go for it. If you want to teach at university after you get your doctorate you need to basically do another one, but it’s called a habilitation.
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