Thesis Whisperer | 17 July 2013
The Thesis Whisperer is a newspaper style blog dedicated to helping research students everywhere. It is edited by Dr Inger Mewburn , director of research training at the ANU. It’s a great resource, even for those of us not undertaking research degrees, with useful tips on things like making effective presentations and dealing with writer’s block. In this recent post, Inger suggests that in order for passion (what you would like to do) to follow skill (what you can do) you need to create the opportunity and space for it to happen. One way you can do this is to concentrate on your ‘unique selling proposition’.
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Debate flies thick and fast in the literature about the purpose of the PhD, whether it achieves this end and if we are going about it in the right way within our various universities. However, very little of this debate is based in anything like hard data.
Regardless of scant facts we have about the working lives of doctoral graduates, the great doctoral debate has spilled over into the mainstream press. Take as just one example this one from The Economist called Doctoral degrees: the disposable academic. These articles about the parlous state of the academic job market are naturally depressing for anyone doing a PhD. Yet, Kendall points out that this crisis narrative around the doctorate tends to obscure one important point: the unemployment rate of doctoral graduates is actually very low.
Kendell quotes it at 2%, but this is based on data from 1999. The newest, clean set of data I have is from the 2004 Australian Graduate destination survey (you have to pay for this data, so I don’t have the more recent version). Although this data is old, I’m given to understand that there has not been dramatic shifts in the overall picture since then.
Read the full post – What’s your edge