On twitter, a toxic environment to be sure, I saw a thread about people wanting to boat about how bad their dissertations were. Several referred to theirs as "dumpster fires." Perhaps they see it as a kind of cathartic confession, that they can admit they just produced a piss-poor piece of work but are proud of getting the degree anyway? Clearly, graduate education is a toxic system if it fosters this kind of mentality.
I didn't check to see what fields these people are working in. If the point is the credential, then it wouldn't matter how good the dissertation was. If the idea is that there are no jobs for PhDs anyway, that would be a justification for just doing the best you can but being resigned to not do a very good job.
If you want to be an old-school scholar, then the idea that you should be 30 and have a PhD but not yet done any good work in the field is rather self-defeating. When are you planning to start? But maybe that old school model doesn't work.
1 comment:
Oh, I think they are saying it to indicate that they're already advanced in knowledge beyond the original concept they committed to.
My dissertation was *definitely* bad but superficially it reads like a book, because I have nice ideas and a good prose style. It didn't matter what you wrote, but it had to be internally consistent and look good and be done. You had six years of required coursework and a really grueling exam, and people were exhausted, and they had a year or so of funding left, and the university needed to produce degrees and did not think we would get jobs, so those were the instructions. Result was a massively under-researched tome. But they didn't care about research, because they didn't care about you or about the field; they only cared about writing, because they wanted products.
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