A few days ago, I participated in the second day of the training course “Taking charge of your PhD-project”. This is a one-time mandatory course for all PhD-students employed by FOM, which I estimate to be more than 100 persons per year.

To make a long story very short, I must say I was deadly bored.

My impression from the whole course was the following: “A successful PhD is one who can manage his/her supervisor in such a way that he/she can write a thesis within the exact four years of his/her contract (so no prolongation). Within two days we teach you, all 10 students at the same time, techniques and skills you will need to control your disobeying supervisor.”

After the first training day, I expressed my feelings about the course to two personnel officers and I asked for being allowed to skip the second day. I did not get any sympathy. Instead, I was requested to come up with some suggestions for improving the course, after I participated in the second day.

Here is my suggestion: To avoid any further loss, terminate the course immediately.

Now, I am relaxed. I am going to justify my suggestion in two steps. First, I will describe why I find such a course inappropriate. Then I will suggest another possible way of helping students and reaching the FOM objectives. As this would be a very long text, I am going to split it into two parts.

Part 1: Why is the two-day training course “Taking charge of your PhD-project” inappropriate?

I have studied in a business school for one year. Before that I was working in a management consulting company. One of the company’s products was indeed one-day luxurious management courses for the busy middle-managers (mostly engineers by education) of rich companies. I have participated in many of those crash-courses. Later I have followed the same topics as a complete 4-month course in the business school. Based on the experience from both types of trainings, I tell you why I think a crash-course in behavioral sciences is absolutely nonsense.

a) Necessity of the course

The firm that has ordered the course, FOM, has a problem that needs a solution. The problem is that some PhD-students request extension on their normal 4-year contract and that means extra cost for the firm. Whether or not a successful PhD-education is the one that is obtained exactly in 4 years, I leave the discussion to the experts.

Beside the discussion on principles, there is still something missing in the formulation of the problem. It is only stating the cost, what about the benefit? Most of the publications (which is directly counted in the productivity of FOM) of each student come out in the last year. Is there any statistics on how much income (equivalent of publications) is earned by FOM during the extension period of the student?

From now on I assume FOM can completely justify this problem and it must be solved. The following lines express why such a course does not help with solving this problem.

b) Incomplete target

The major part of the course is about miscommunication and conflict between the student and the supervisor. However, in the audience only the students are present, the lowest in the hierarchy of power. So what about the supervisors? They still have the final word. Who is going to give them some advice? I must say, most of the negotiation techniques taught in the course are only suitable for negotiators in the same level of authority. When I asked about the absence of supervisors, I was responded: We cannot force them. Most of them are not our employees.

Supervisors are not the student’s employees, either. When FOM cannot force them, how do you expect the students to “take charge of” their supervisors’ decisions?

The current way of running the course is like asking the kid to read “The one minute father” and train his father based on the book. I do not want to discuss here what some professional managers think about Blanchard-Johnson’s one minute this and that.

C) Misconceptions about the scientific methods

I encountered several inquiries during the course, which were not applicable to many scientific projects. Here I just list my own impression of scientific activities, related to some points that I think were misunderstood by the trainers.

– Various types of scientific projects are run differently. Theoretical, computational, and experimental projects differ a lot in their preparation time. Setting table-top experiments is different from using large facilities (Synchrotron, Tokamak, etc.)

– Output of a PhD-research must be Novel. It is not trivial to formulate the outcome in advance.

– It is not possible to plan a Gantt chart for research. We are not building bridges.

– Milestones (the moments that papers should be written) will cause unnecessary stress for the student and the supervisor. Putting pressure on writing a paper in an inappropriate moment will sacrifice the quality of the report and is a waste of the idea.

– In the Netherlands PhD-student do not get marks.

– The rule of “three published articles before graduation” does not apply to many PhD-students.

d) Generality

Not only the circumstances of every project are not alike, but the students also have diverse capabilities and various shortcomings. They are from different backgrounds and unlike cultures. They have different attitudes, habits, norms, and interests.

The solution to everything is a solution to nothing. It is hard to imagine the proper reaction to a co-authorship dispute between student and supervisor, when the example in the course is about “buy or keep the car” quarrel between a couple.

e) Lack of assessment

What level of which qualification is needed for a student to be successful? Does such a standard exist?

My qualifications were not rated before the course. I received no clear answer when I explicitly asked: “What qualification do you expect me to gain after watching your role playing?” My qualifications were not measured after the course, either. What I have gained from the training, nobody can tell. The trick, as always, is to ask the trainees to assess themselves: “Have you find the course useful for yourself?”

Anybody who is given flavors of magic and universal C.O.S., S.M.A.R.T., B.O.W.N., HARD-SOFT, C.P.C.A., and blah-blah techniques that are applicable to everything will have the immediate feeling of enlightenment and satisfaction (unless he is unlucky enough to have heard about these sorts of techniques ten times before). Why nobody has asked: “Based on what you have been told, do you now guarantee to finish your PhD within 4 years?”

f) Period of the course

A killing question to any crash-course would be: Why just two days?

Didn’t the subject worth spending two weeks on? Couldn’t it be taught in a two hour lecture? These are the questions I asked and I did not get a convincing answer. Two days is perhaps the maximum that FOM can force the students to come and not to start complaining.

I think I have criticized enough. In my next post, I will write about my suggestion for helping new PhDs to find their way in dealing with their challenges.

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