Interesting thoughts / opinion piece on the rather archaic process involved in PhD training / assessment. Are the (unnamed) authors’ conclusions relevant to digital health PhDs in Aotearoa NZ?
Link: https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-023-00084-3
d41586-023-00084-3.pdf (64.2 KB)
The paragraph below copied from the article best describes what I see in supervision in NZ.
“Some candidates are instructed in cohorts with more than one supervisor, so that students are less isolated and better protected if a relationship with a single supervisor goes bad. Some take additional courses of study, or have their research progress assessed periodically — the kind of guided approach that happens in education more broadly.”
I would say that students receive experience within the environment they are hosted, and that as academia moves towards greater transdisciplinarity so will PhD experiences. Like most teaching the Covid pandemic may have affected the cohort experience.
Obviously, the experience of doing a PhD is going to vary depending on the particulars of your University, Department and Supervisor. My high-level comments would be that PhD education is primarily focused on training the next generation of foot soldiers for the internal war within and between the departments of Academia for funding, prestige and visibility. Most PhD do not end up in academia. So candidates are being trained for a war they will not fight and a fight that is not valued by non-participants or future employers. The training is expensive, demanding and unhealthy. So a call for reform seems reasonable. Equally, the same criticisms can be said of vocational training for the doctors. To be fair to RACS in Australia, what they are doing to transform Surgical training sounds impressive at least from afar.
This editorial is vacuous fluff but that may be the view from particular foxhole that I am sheltering in whilst doing my PhD.
First, I think the authors should have been named in this article, and their affiliations. Possibly they were not named because of the bias readers would have (and possibly the hate that might be showered on them by the people they are criticising).
Second, the table is misleading. If you use raw numbers to indicate an increase you’re bound to show an increase, but if you compare the growth against population growth you’ll probably see that not a lot of growth in numbers has actually happened. Also, claiming that South Africa has not produced PhDs in the last 20 years is wrong - it would have been more honest to say that data were not available, which is more believable.
Third, I agree that the model of ‘enroll in a PhD to help me do my research’ is a flawed model unless advanced research skills are mastered as a form of transferrable skills. Also, it’s wrong to assume that most academics use this model.
Health informatics research by definition is transdisciplinary and applied. To appropriately supervise a health informatics PhD student one needs to construct a supervisory team that enables the student to learn research skills from multiple perspectives, handle contradictions, and learn scholarly thinking. Becoming a philosopher is a big deal. One doesn’t have to work in a university after becoming a philosopher.
I would say that the wonderful thing about being a philosopher in health informatics is that boundaries can be pushed in the workplace, research can be done anywhere (the halls of academia don’t own research or philosophers), and society can benefit in multiple ways.
If you are feeling trapped by your PhD journey in academia, form a community of researchers at work (fly in the face of those who say your work is worthless…), have regular meetings, present your work regularly to your colleagues, build an expectation that your work as a philosopher is integral to the success of your employer. It’s one thing to claim, as the authors of this article, that PhD students are trapped in a dead-end unfunded academic career. It’s another thing to normalise the presence of philosophers in the workplace. Not easy but doable - ask those who are already doing it.