If you are a professional, deciding whether or not to enroll for a PhD can be difficult. It's hard to know what to expect or what will be expected of you. The time and effort required are not clear. Success is uncertain and it's not clear what the benefits are. Worst of all, you won't really know what a PhD entails until you are in the program. Many professionals start a PhD and only then discover that it is not what they wanted.
This book helps you to decide. You will learn what a PhD is, and what it's not. You will get to understand the academic nature of the degree and how that affects the kind of knowledge you will produce in your research. You'll get an idea of what it's like to do a PhD, what the benefits are, and what it takes to succeed. You'll also learn how to make a PhD work for you, as part of a professional career.
This book is for any kind of professional, with a practice outside of the university who already has a master's degree. It will help you if you are undecided about the value doing a PhD. The book is practical and gives you guiding questions that help you apply the information to your own circumstances.
Autorentext
Judy Backhouse writes optimistic future fiction to explore better futures for humankind and planet Earth.
Before we can bring about better futures, we must imagine them so that they enter the domain of possibility. Stories are a way to expand our minds and adjust the possibility horizon.
Judy retired in 2023 from a long career which included work as a mathematician, an information systems architect, a senior manager in the corporate world, advisor to the South African Minister of Higher Education, Head of the School of Economics and Business Sciences at the University of the Witwatersrand, South Africa and a researcher at the United Nations University investigating how technologies can improve governance.
Having earnestly pursued truth and explored the limits of evidence, she now (in the words of the immortal Le Guin) makes stuff up.