What’s the workload like? I think this was my biggest fear, and probably is the most popular question many of you have. The answer is it’s a constant grind. Although some (a minority) of my classes may be taken remotely, I will have to be on campus for about 60% of my classes – all of my engineering classes are in person on Arizona State University’s Tempe campus. But while away from my advisor in these two first years, it becomes video meetings with him, writing conference papers, doing research, and doing classwork. I go to campus at least every semester and I attended a conference with him in Tampa, Florida. I’ll be presenting at conferences in San Antonio and Detroit next year.
The studying is every weekend in the library plus phone calls to people across the country during the day and then research anywhere from one to three nights a week. If I’m not doing homework I’m reading papers and logging them in what’s called a reference manager.
What are the requirements for your PhD? Each program you look at will have different requirements. Some are heavier on classwork than others and each of them has a dissertation. And the dissertation approaches seem to fall into one of two categories: a three-paper dissertation or a more traditional dissertation. The program I am in requires 30 credits of classwork at a 500 level or greater (this is graduate level) plus a three-paper dissertation. Purdue University was 24 credits and a traditional dissertation.
What’s the classwork like? Pursuing a doctoral degree in your mid 50s I think is a bit different than doing it in your mid 20s. The reason being that 35 years of experience in the same field represents a significant body of knowledge accumulated over the course of a lifetime. Also, my advisor is my peer, at least by age, so constant counseling on life, career, and beneficial class selection isn’t really as necessary as it would be for a fresh out of graduate school candidate. I cannot select Basketweaving 101 as a class to take, but as long as I can make a case that any class I choose is contributing to my study, it likely will be approved both by my advisor and by the graduate department.
In the three classes I have taken thus far, two of them have been on research methods and statistics, and the other class was on scientific teaching at a collegiate level. All three of these classes will help me during my doctoral pursuit, and after graduation when I hope to be doing some teaching at a collegiate level. My 4th class in spring of 2026 will be regarding the use of GIS (geographic information systems) in industry and also potentially for my dissertation.
What do you mean by presentation “circuit”? In addition to the mandatory publication (i.e., the dissertation) to establish research competency, it seems to be an unwritten rule that PhD students learn how write papers and present them orally. So currently I have written one conference paper and will have written two, and presented two, by summer of 2026. This is a great experience for me as a developing doctoral student as it serves to prepare me to conduct and present original research. What I think I’m to learn is that a Doctor of Philosophy is a degree that teaches you how to research. The vast majority of students will not have developed E = mc2, but they will have the skillset of knowing how to rigorously mine out and gather data, analyze it, and then document it through methods learned from their advisor, other PhDs, and even other student peers. Conference papers or technical papers at this stage in an academic career are cowritten by my advisor, or others I presume, if I wanted to pursue that.
How did your dissertation get “derailed?” Oh yes, my favorite subject of fall, 2025. I had developed a great topic which was the study on cost and performance optimization of temporary shoring methods resulting in a data driven framework for use by practitioners. And during the first paper, called the literature review, I found an Egyptian group of researchers who had covered my exact topic. Bye bye dissertation topic.
I immediately went back to looking for a variance in this area and had success thanks to my advisor. Now I’m still in the same area, just with a tweak which should maintain originality. Time will tell after I, again, conduct the literature review. So, with a tweak to my subject, I’m hoping that the hundreds of papers I’ve already pulled and logged for research purposes will not have been for naught.
Are you still motivated to obtain this additional degree? Heck yeah! Being derailed on my dissertation topic I think is part of the journey. I enjoy reading about other projects around the world. I enjoy the discipline of notating other people’s research. It was a punch in the gut to have found just about my exact topic in that other paper, but better to find it very early in my research than at the end.
My story. Well, you’re reading it. You’re living it with me. I’ll see you in another six to twelve months with an update. I’m keeping my fingers crossed that I’ll be well on my way to having successful and novel research.
Work safe!
