October 2007 – by Alan Kelly, Dean of Graduate Studies, UCC
Changing PhD training in a changing world of research
Life is changing fast, in PhD study, in research, in life in general.
For example, not too long ago, when a person wanted to buy music, they went to a building called a music shop, selected a CD (or record, or tape) from a rack, paid for it, and left with a physical item in their hand. Today, they most likely search on the internet using specialised search engines (like iTunes) for what they want, download it onto their PC, and most likely never obtain the physical entity unless they copy it onto a CD for portability.
Also not too long ago, when a person wanted to find a scientific paper, they went to a building called a library, selected the paper from journals on the shelves, photocopied it, and left with a physical item in their hand. Today, they most likely search on the internet using specialised search engines (like Science Direct) for what they want, download it onto their PC, and most likely never obtain the physical entity unless they print it for portability. The PDF is to the scientist what the MP3 is to the music fan, and the literature review has become a personalised playlist of knowledge.
Things are changing in scientific research, and the way in which young researchers access the scientific literature is just one example of a basic tool of the researcher that has changed radically in around 10 years. Literature searching is not the only thing that has changed, of course. The great biologist Francis Crick once said that the pace of scientific research had quickened so much that the difficulty of a piece of research went from Nobel Prize level to Masters student level in 10 years. Techniques that took researchers days, weeks or months are now automated, miniaturised, controlled and taken almost for granted. Max Perutz spent most of his working life painstakingly uncovering the molecular structure of haemoglobin; the advent of powerful number-crunching software and specialised equipment means that today it could be done in a tiny fraction of the time. Most postgraduate students today have on their desks a computer that exceeds in power what was needed to send men to the Moon in the 1960s, and took up whole rooms in the process. E-mail and Skype make communicating instantly with colleagues or other researchers around the world ridiculously easy when, only 20 years ago, mail to Australia or America could take weeks to arrive, and transatlantic phone calls were an exotic luxury.
Scientific research is changing rapidly, and today in Ireland the nature of scientific training itself is also under review. The PhD is a relatively young degree, evolving in Germany in the mid-19th Century, and with the first PhD (in Chemistry) being awarded at UCC in 1943. In Ireland, the PhD has traditionally been achieved through an ‘apprenticeship’-style training, where a student registers to study on an independent piece of original research under the supervision and guidance of an experienced academic researcher, who advises them on the conduct and publication of their research; such students rarely take formal coursework during their PhD studies. In the U.S., in contrast, it is quite normal for PhD students to take an intensive initial stage of advanced coursework, which may take up the first year of the degree, or even more, before research begins. Many countries, most notably the U.K. and Australia, are moving towards an intermediate arrangement, where students take some coursework and training in key generic skills alongside their studies, and this is the direction in which it is currently proposed that Irish PhD studies will move in the near future.
Various studies of the Irish Higher Education sector, by the OECD and others, have concluded that the standard of Irish PhD training is excellent, with PhD graduates being genuinely expert in their fields of study, and many university staff being committed to PhD supervision as a key part of their academic activities. However, criticism has been levelled at the numbers of PhD students being trained in Ireland, their integration into the workforce, and the narrow project-specific focus of their training.
Hence, new objectives for PhD training in Ireland have emerged very recently and rapidly. The universities are being challenged to double their PhD numbers by 2013, to provide structured training to these students in skills that will both enhance their research and their ultimate career opportunities, and to do all this in an inter-institutional framework, to enhance collaboration and avoid replication of specialised training for small numbers of students in particular disciplines. Such principles have been fully adopted by the HEA and are elaborated within the Strategy for Science, Technology and Innovation, and the universities are today considering how best to implement these changes without damaging the quality of research that must remain at the heart of PhD study. Alliances across the entire sector, or between smaller groups of Universities, are being nurtured, and national graduate training programmes being considered carefully, prompted by funding from sources such as the Irish Research Councils for Science, Engineering and Technology and Humanities and Social Sciences.
The emerging vision of the PhD student of 2013 is one who undertakes high-level research in his or her discipline as their primary goal, under the supervision of committed and experienced researchers, while spending a small amount of their time attending modules or training workshops, some of which may be in other Irish or international universities, which broaden their education and provide advanced skills, for example in data analysis, writing, or ethics. They contribute to the teaching of the university, and are trained to do so, and benefit from belonging to a community of scholars both within their home University and across partner institutions. Finally, after submitting their thesis, they have a wide range of clear career options open to them, and many will go on to make a substantive contribution to the development of Ireland’s knowledge economy.
The goal is becoming clear, but there is a lot of thought and work to do to achieve these quite significant changes to the way we educate PhD students. Of course, these changes are an experiment, one involving changing elements of the most advanced degree the universities routinely award and, like any good scientific experiment, it must be watched, monitored, its success evaluated in terms of tangible outcomes, and, if necessary, adjusted or improved. Targets such as doubling numbers of PhD students must not be achieved by sacrificing quality for quantity, for example, or without clear evidence of meaningful absorption of the graduates by the industry in the manner anticipated by Government. Nonetheless, it is inarguably a time of excitement and opportunity for students and researchers alike, and an experiment to be undertaken with caution, care and, above all, optimism that great things may develop.
Alan Kelly
Dean of Graduate Studies, UCC