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Written by a PhD student with insights from fellow students, this clear and concise book covers every aspect of the realities of the PhD experience for prospective and current PhD students. It gives an honest inside view on the day to day experience, whilst providing practical strategies, useful tips and solid advice to support and motivate fellow students. Covers topics from the initial decision to undertake a PhD, through the different stages and finally to the decisions about what comes next.
This essential new self-coaching guide will help students to discover their full potential and bring vitality to their PhD experience and beyond by developing self-sufficiency, resourcefulness and resilience.
"This book provides insights on the state of higher education in Africa, focusing on South Africa, the hub for doctoral training. It depicts the competing realities shaping the doctoral process and the resulting learning outcomes for African students pursuing studies in the fields of humanities and social sciences"--
This book provides an authoritative overview of the criteria and standards of the doctorate across a wide range of international settings, with a particular focus on the practices of examining. Presenting case studies and research from 13 universities in 13 countries across Africa, Asia, North and South America, Australia, and Europe, the book is based on in-depth interviews and comparative analyses of the PhD examining experience. It reveals the variations and similarities in different academic traditions and investigates the extent to which there are comparable expectations and standards across countries. It suggests that criteria and standards – both written and unwritten – are broadly similar, but shows that there is a need for much more explicitly formulated criteria and standards for an internationalised approach to doctoral assessment. Following on from the 2019 book The Doctorate as Experience in Europe and Beyond, this book will be of great interest to current and potential doctoral examiners, researchers of higher education, and university administrators.
The Doctorate as Experience in Europe and Beyond presents a detailed and fascintating account of completing a doctorate from the perspectives of researchers, supervisors and students. It provides an in-depth insight through qualitative data, interpretative methods and insider experiences for a truly unique perspective. Given the popularity of doctoral studies and their increasing importance outside of academia, the PhD has needed to evolve and develop, particularly given its role in the internationalization of universities. Drawing on in-depth interviews with international participants, this book explores case studies and comparative analysis of the dimensions of researcher identity, the processes of supervision and the use of languages for teaching and learning and conducting research. Providing a keen insight into how the internationalization of higher education is affecting the doctoral experience, The Doctorate as Experience in Europe and Beyond is ideal reading for all academics, doctoral supervisors and examiners as well as postgraduate students involved in doctoral education.
The aim of this book is to provide prospective and current doctoral students, and their supervisors, with a range of narratives of doctoral experiences. The book is an outcome of a conference where both academic and professional doctorate students at different stages of their research shared their experiences of the process of completing a doctorate. The ten candid accounts included in the volume provide a valuable insight into the kinds of challenges that arise and the ways in which these might (or might not) be overcome. In so doing, this book ‘lifts the lid’ on some of the hitherto concealed aspects of the doctoral process. The book also includes a chapter from an established academic with a record of writing about the doctoral student experience, as well as inserts from a doctoral programme leader and an experienced academic supervisor. In the Introduction, the editors review some of the current literature on experiences of the doctoral research journey and the research process. The book concludes with the editors’ reflections on both the unique nature of doctoral research for each individual and the common stages that students experience on the journey.
Focused on understanding the journey of international doctoral and early career scholars, this key book provides insight and guidance for those whose country of origin differs from where they have chosen to pursue a doctorate. Drawing on the experiences of PhD students, it harnesses invaluable insights to support a deepening appreciation of a chosen subject of study, manage research and make the most of what intercultural interactions can offer within a doctoral experience. Each carefully considered part uses research-informed evidence drawn from a wide range of experiences and observations, providing various, and at times contrasting, perspectives. This book has been written to: Offer new insights into the PhD abroad experience Equip international scholars for their doctoral journey Help the reader optimise institutional support with help from supervisors and other staff members Filled with evidence-informed suggestions and advice, this book offers support to doctoral scholars and early career researchers as they navigate their international doctoral journey. The 'Insider Guides to Success in Academia' offers support and practical advice to doctoral students and early-career researchers. Covering the topics that really matter, but which often get overlooked, this indispensable series provides practical and realistic guidance to address many of the needs and challenges of trying to operate, and remain, in academia. These neat pocket guides fill specific and significant gaps in current literature. Each book offers insider perspectives on the often implicit rules of the game - the things you need to know but usually aren't told by institutional postgraduate support, researcher development units, or supervisors - and will address a practical topic that is key to career progression. They are essential reading for doctoral students, early-career researchers, supervisors, mentors, or anyone looking to launch or maintain their career in academia.
This book presents a significant advancement in the theory and practice of knowledge engineering, the discipline concerned with the development of intelligent agents that use knowledge and reasoning to perform problem solving and decision-making tasks. It covers the main stages in the development of a knowledge-based agent: understanding the application domain, modeling problem solving in that domain, developing the ontology, learning the reasoning rules, and testing the agent. The book focuses on a special class of agents: cognitive assistants for evidence-based reasoning that learn complex problem-solving expertise directly from human experts, support experts, and nonexperts in problem solving and decision making, and teach their problem-solving expertise to students. A powerful learning agent shell, Disciple-EBR, is included with the book, enabling students, practitioners, and researchers to develop cognitive assistants rapidly in a wide variety of domains that require evidence-based reasoning, including intelligence analysis, cybersecurity, law, forensics, medicine, and education.
This multidisciplinary, multi-voiced book looks at the practice and pedagogy of generic, across-campus support for doctoral students. With a global imperative for increased doctoral completions, universities around the world are providing more generic support. This book represents collegial cross-fertilisation focussed on generic pedagogy, provided by contributors who are practitioners working and researching at the pan-disciplinary level which complements supervision. In the UK, funding for two weeks annual training in transferable skills for each doctoral scholarship recipient has caused an explosion of such teaching, which is now flourishing elsewhere too; for example, endorsed by the Carnegie Initiative on the Doctorate in the USA and developed extensively in Australia. Generic doctoral support is expanding, yet is a relatively new kind of teaching, practised extensively only in the last decade and with its own ethical, practical and pedagogical complexities. These raise a number of questions: How is generic support funded and situated within institutions? Should some sessions be compulsory for doctoral students? Where do the boundaries lie between what can be taught generically or left to supervisors as discipline-specific? To what extent is generic work pastoral? What are its main benefits? Its challenges? Its objectives? Over the last two decades supervision has been investigated and theorised as a teaching practice, a discussion this book extends to generic doctoral support. This edited book has contributions from a wide range of authors and includes short inset narratives from academic authorities, accumulatively enabling discussion of practice and the establishment of a benchmark for this growing topic.
