Fulfilling the Potential of Your Doctoral Experience. Pam Denicolo

we have all contributed to each chapter, in combining our expertise and experience of different disciplines and contexts to provide a range of perspectives and ideas, we have necessarily contributed different proportions to specific chapters. Thus, you may ‘hear different voices’ and encounter different vocabulary/jargon as you address different topics in the book. We hope this adds to, rather than distracts from, the content and your enjoyment. We will refer to the process of sharing your writing with others in the chapter focused on thesis writing, drawing on our experience of providing each other with constructive feedback while writing this book and many other books and articles. This has helped us to tone down our own discipline-specific jargon in our writing. All organisations, including institutions of higher education, and discipline groups within and between them, use jargon and specific language, so we have listed key terms in the Glossary, each one in bold at first mention in the main text, to help you if you are not familiar with it.

      At the beginning of each chapter, we provide a list of its main content, while within chapters we use Activities, Information Boxes, Reflection Points and Top Tips to help engage you, enhance your reading, bring ideas to life and help you to make effective choices. Of special note, we have collected advice and examples from current and recent doctoral researchers to ensure that we represent doctoral education from their perspectives as well as ours. These perspectives, some of which are also from supervisors and others involved in the doctoral process, such as librarians, are presented as the Voice of Experience. Each chapter ends with References and additional suggestions for Further Reading.

Part One Engaging with the Process

      1 What is the Point of a Doctorate in the 21st Century?

      In this chapter, we will consider how to:

       Understand the legacy of the doctorate

       Recognise what a doctorate means in the 21st century

       Grasp the implications of the contemporary doctorate for newer researchers

       Tailor your doctorate to meet specific needs, making the best of available opportunities

      In this chapter, we hope that we can clarify both what a doctorate is, what its value can be in the near future and what attributes a doctoral researcher tends to develop rather quickly.

      We will begin by outlining the recent history of the doctorate because that history will have some influence on your experience as a doctoral researcher whether you are new to the higher education system in which you are registered or are very familiar with it in general terms. This is because doctoral education worldwide has undergone radical changes in structure and function in recent times, at least at the policy level that impacts on the requirements placed on doctoral candidates. This caveat is included specifically because we want to make you aware of the variety of expectations of doctoral researchers held by both staff within your institution and external people such as examiners and prospective employers, each of whom may be, more or less conversant with the changes involved in doctoral programmes. With every development in education, there are ‘early adopters’ and ‘reluctant engagers’ and all possibilities in between. By reading this book, we hope you will become familiar with, and even expert in, the requirements of and possibilities within doctoral education now and in the future. Then you will be able to respond appropriately to those requirements, sometimes even guiding others about what is currently deemed appropriate.

      Vestiges of the past

      Historically, the purpose of the doctorate was to train people to become academics – future stewards of the discipline – through the process of a form of apprenticeship to an established academic. The evolution of the doctorate from an academic research credential to a process of researcher development to prepare researchers for a wider range of employment only began in earnest towards the end of the last century, some twenty years ago. Therefore, there are still many people employed in higher education posts who experienced that former function of the doctorate and, indeed, still perceive the doctoral process and purpose in that way for a variety of reasons. (For instance: they may believe it is best; they know of no other version; they are too busy with teaching and research to notice changes; they deliberately ignore new policy and procedures that may seem to threaten their professional identity.) We can have some empathy with those positions and have acknowledged elsewhere (Denicolo, 2016) that widening participation (sometimes seen as massification in higher education), the rise of credentialism, increased financial pressures and the requirement of research to make a significant contribution to the national economy and social wellbeing, present challenges to the apprenticeship model. However, our purpose here is to help you thrive in the doctoral world as it is now and is likely to be for some time in the future. The purpose of the doctorate nowadays has been elaborated to include preparing people for a wide world of work to which they will contribute a range of skills and attributes acquired or honed through the doctoral research process. We will elaborate on this next.

      The doctorate in the 21st century

      In this section, we draw on the UK Quality Assurance Agency’s (QAA) ‘Characteristics Statement – Doctoral Degree’ published in 2015 and to which one of us has contributed. You will find in this document considerable information about the development of the doctorate with comparisons of purpose and structure between doctoral types and between disciplinary or national forms. In summary, though, the main message is that, despite variance in detail, all doctorates are based on original research conducted independently by an individual. We will go into more detail in later chapters about what is meant by the terms ‘original’ (particularly Chapters 4, 7 and 8) and ‘independently’ (particularly Chapters 5 and 6) but, for now, the key criterion is the process of conducting research, with all its skill and knowledge requirements. There is now also a requirement that researchers develop professional skills and attributes, building on those they bring to the task and developing new ones (Chapters 3 and 5 and then 9, 10 and 11 will elaborate on this). This is intended to recognise that all the professions researchers may subsequently engage in, within and outside of the academy, demand high-level skills of various kinds beyond being able to design and conduct a specific research project (see Denicolo and Reeves, 2014). In fact, only a small proportion of successful doctoral candidates will go on to a postdoctoral research post and/or have permanent or tenured academic positions. For more detailed information about (UK) doctoral career destinations, see the ‘What Do Researchers Do’ report on the Vitae website (www.vitae.ac.uk/). Further, any individual may engage in several different ‘careers’ over a lifetime, making skills that are generic and transferable very important. In Information Box 1.1, we present a section from the QAA document about what skills a successful doctoral graduate is expected to be able to contribute to their future work. These are characteristics that we hope to help you achieve by following the advice in this book and those documents and books we recommend.

      Information Box 1.1 Characteristics of doctoral graduates (QAA, 2015)

      [Doctoral graduates] should all be able to:

       search for, discover, access, retrieve, sift, interpret, analyse, evaluate, manage, conserve and communicate an ever-increasing volume of knowledge from a range of sources;

       think critically about problems to produce innovative solutions and create new knowledge;