I think the fact is that most advisors get no training regarding the practical components of being an advisor. So it really shouldn't be a surprise that there's a huge amount of variation here.
One my big takeaways from my own PhD was that different professors have wildly different levels of ability in terms of people management. All of the professors I met were very smart, but some of them were clearly very poor at the people management aspect of things.
Having said that, I'm not sure what I would actually suggest to a student going into a PhD program today. My observations were formed after watching a few projects crash and burn, and that's not necessarily the path I'd recommend for finding out if your advisor is a good one.
I had an advisor who just didn’t have a skill in or desire to advise. I didn’t discover this until in my junior year he went on sabbatical and the professor in transitioned to was really amazing. I still communicate with him 20 years later and hear about intern candidates, etc.
It’s one of those areas you need to know about — it never occurred to me to ask about or really look into what an advisor relationship can or should be!
This is a problem with education in general. Those things should be taught in middle/high school as essential tools for modern life. Same as personal finances, effective strategies for team/group work, overcoming social anxiety, managing stress and building/maintaining relationships (personal and professional).
One thing that (many) academics lack is project management skills. This is why many (that I know) sit on a desk, with a mountain of papers, having a thousand things unfinished. Try doing that in an actual business and see how it plays out..
Being a good teacher doesn't make you a good project manager.
I personally identify with being a thinker instead of a doer and for most of my professional life struggled trying to find a position from where to contribute without feeling inadequate for not doing/executing.
The PM skills is to get them to produce efficiently and effectively. Not perpetuate the "sitting and thinking".
But instead, they made sure I knew the name of the boats Columbus sailed in, in 1492. The Niña the Pinta, and the Santa Maria. I was forced to submit to whatever story they told me about the relationship between Columbus and the natives, no matter how untrue it was. But maybe that was the real lesson....
It also makes that, “what have you been doing for the last five months?” question a lot less uncomfortable to answer.
I'm skeptical of the calls to overhaul. Undergrads and even masters degrees went through this and now we have group projects and less individual learning. Too much focus on team work and collaboration. If anything we need to be teaching more wandering through the woods, more being on the out over the in of the group.
I would say there should be sort of a short PhD, maybe akin to MPhils, and ideally a step above the masters but below the PhD. The MPhils fulfil this ideal of more professionalized programs while PhD programs can remain more to their traditional styles.
One big problem acadaemia has is the individual nature of research, even within research groups. A vast amount of time and effort is wasted on trivia due to working alone, which would be quickly resolved in a group. And while there is value in individual intellectual effort and reward, it can be vastly greater returns in a group context.
None of this is to say that lone investigation of out there ideas is bad. I think that's essential. But not for 100% of your time.
In many research settings, the scale of projects requires being a small part of a larger group. And while groups can squash good ideas, they can also kill bad ideas, and there needs to be a balance.
Not all PhD students are Einsteins, and it's as important to prevent people diving down a rabbit hole which leads nowhere as it is to give them the freedom to explore or else they might find they wasted several years rediscovering something already known or discovering nothing. I saw this happen to one of my fellows as well as myself. A good supervisor should be guiding appropriately. I found to my horror a PubMed search revealed a paper dating back to 1992 which had done several months of my research nearly two decades prior. When there are so many millions of papers, it's all to easy to miss stuff in the noise.
I would say that there's no one-size fits all for a PhD, but that I think something PhD students need taught how to do early on is identify their own development needs, and either address them, or seek the support to do that.
It's important that we don't turn PhDs into a taught course though, since ultimately the goal is to learn to direct your own research project from fruition to results, as an independent researcher. There's also a growing number of "structured taught first-year" PhDs (that then last 4 years rather than 3, with the first year akin to a "professional masters" with qualification at the end of it)
EngD degrees are probably a bit more like the JD or MD (if you're doing engineering, that is), but I don't have much experience of that approach. It does seem to be more along the lines of what you highlight a need for though (the project planning, management, etc.)
[0] https://www.vitae.ac.uk/researchers-professional-development...
Gah I think this is a terrible idea.
In practice it means courses that aren't really relevant to anyone that you have to take when you really want to be getting on with your research.
Everyone's putting in minimum effort and getting nothing out of it. What a waste of time.
They're also taught by people slightly outside your field since they're taught across the department, so they teach you things that are seriously wrong for your field (I was told to publish in journals not conferences, for example, which is incorrect for my field).
They were always a frustrating waste of time. I just wanted to get on with my work.
It's only popular because it's aping the American PhD, and in my opinion the British PhD is better in practice (shorter, more focused, more grown-up, more independent, more professional) and should not be watered down.
I definitely don't like the trend towards the 4 year PhD with taught courses in year 1 though - I had enough time in 3 years to mess around on side projects and other things I didn't need, but which were fun and interesting, even if irrelevant. When you add the inevitable consulting and startup advice on the side, it seems to me 3 years should really be the upper bound, rather than extending the process any further.
Or, perhaps there is an initial period of a year or so where the student is not yet doing a PhD, but is trying to produce results nevertheless. Saw that in Surrey, but can't remember how long students had after defending their PhD proposal and being promoted to PhD student.
Ultimately the goal of a PhD is to learn to be a researcher and to produce a good new research result. If you can do that in three years why wait around another two or more for the sake of it?
I had a colleague who did a PhD in two years in Austria. In that time he got two top-tier papers published. If you’re getting multiple papers into top-tier venues then surely you’ve past the test? You obviously can do research and you obviously are producing good results as judged by a wide group of peers.
Why does the US drag it out so much?
I’ll tell you why - US PhD students also only spend about three years on their PhD. They spend the rest of their time doing masters-level taught classes, teaching (!) and working on their advisors’ projects instead of their own!
I find that a lot of important nitty-gritty knowledge is dismissed as besides the point, something akin to why MIT designed the "Missing Semester" course [1]. I would have a very hard time progressing with research if I didn't find Zotero [2], for example.
[1] https://missing.csail.mit.edu/ [2] https://www.zotero.org/
I honestly think the PhD system needs to be overhauled. even at a "top-tier" program like mine, it is amazing to me that at no point do we receive any training regarding practical components of research. 100 years ago, the way you became a physician was to follow around a physician and one day you were ready to be a physician yourself. In the year 2020, this is how PhDs are trained. I do realize that a PhD is not a "professional" degree like MD or JD, however, given that most PhD grads will 1) go to industry 2) go into academia, we need to teach students about project management, planning etc.