Charles Pigden (Otago) writes:
Re your post from Meghan Sullivan. Graduate students contemplating a thesis only PhD in either Britain, Continental Europe or Australasia should presumably be asking a slightly different set of questions.
1) You are likely to be heavily dependent on your supervisors. Presumably you are interested in them because of their eminence the field. But are they ALSO conscientious and helpful people who can be relied on to be good mentors? A brilliant research philosopher can be a bad mentor and a less-than-stellar philosopher may shine as a supervisor.
2) Does the department have the depth of talent to support you if you decide to switch topics or if your star supervisor dies, retires or decides to leave?
3) Are there enough graduate students to constitute a viable community of enquiry and the right kind of atmosphere so that you can educate each other by mutual brain-picking?
4) Is the department a sociable place so that you can educate yourself by picking the brains of the faculty? (LaTrobe in the eighties, where I did my PhD, was really excellent in this respect. I did not realize at the time how lucky I was.)
5) Does the department have a strong seminar program with a reasonable number of visiting philosophers either from other cities or from foreign parts?
6) Is the social set up such that it it easy to meet and talk to visiting philosophers? (Again La Trobe in the eighties was outstanding in this respect as was the ANU where I worked for a while as a research assistant. People I got to know quite well included David Lewis, Bill Lycan, Frank Jackson, Michael Devitt and David Armstrong. By the time I got my first proper job I was on terms of easy familiarity with most of the big names in Australasian philosophy as well a number of prominent Americans. It is in my native land, the UK, that I am relatively unknown. )
7) Are there good opportunities and preferably funding for conference travel? And are the conferences they can fund good ones to go to? (This last is, I suspect, quite important. Many department are not made of money and they can't afford to fund you to go just anywhere. I was lucky in that I regularly got to go to the AAP conferences which are, by most accounts, a lot more friendly and indeed useful that some of the APA conferences. I could BOTH strut my stuff and learn a lot from interesting papers often in areas other than my own. Are the conferences you can go to likely to be like that? )
8) Many of Meghan's questions about placement apply just as much to research-only programs as they do to course-based doctorates. (Though this was not such a big deal when I was young.)
9) Ditto her questions about the kind of town or city that you can expect to be living in.
That's all, but I thought a slightly different perspective might be helpful.
Recent Comments