“Adebola Adedimeji, a former Trinity lecturer, failed to defend his work in court after being accused of plagiarism by his former thesis supervisee, Annette Rochford. Rochford, a clinical nurse specialist, has accused Adedimeji of presenting her research as his own on two separate occasions …” (more)
[Jessica Hobbs Pifer, Trinity News, 8 September]
“A Trinity College Dublin (TCD) student has penned a letter to the minister of third level education claiming that PhD students are forgotten in Ireland. The letter asks for an accommodation subsidy to be provided to students as the maximum stipend of €18,000 per year makes living in Dublin difficult to afford …” (more)
[Gabija Gataveckaite, Independent, 3 September]
“There was a bit of a spat over Twitter last week regarding how many hours students (and postdocs) should be expected to do at the bench. This originated in a tweet from a professor of chemistry but I don’t think it is necessary to go through the exchanges in any detail. Suffice it to say that the originator believed that it was impossible to ‘do world class science in 38 hrs per week’. Others challenged him that work-life balance was important, amongst other complaints …” (more)
[Athene Donald’s Blog, 22 July]
“A PhD student will have her monthly grant cut by €400 after a shorter route to her university was calculated via an unnamed road on Google Maps. Niamh Dillon, who is in the second year of her PhD at the University of Limerick, will see her Student Universal Support Ireland (SUSI) grant cut after the awarding body calculated a shorter distance for her to travel to university …” (more)
[Jess Casey, Irish Examiner, 11 July]
“Lately, more and more students want a non-academic job when they finish their PhD. Anecdotally, some graduates seem to be experiencing the PhD as a barrier to employment, not an enabler. In fact, I’ve heard so much negative talk about how employers react to PhD holders over the years that it seemed important to start looking at this phenomenon more closely …” (more)
[The Thesis Whisperer, 13 May]
“Training of PhD students. It’s a big topic and large sums of money are involved. As I wrote in the autumn, there are concerns about the decisions that are being made. With the recent announcement of 75 new Centres for Doctoral Training (CDTs) by the EPSRC, the topic is bound to be in the air again. The blog-that-calls-itself UKRI Observatory did its third analysis of what was going on …” (more)
[Athene Donald’s Blog, 17 February]
“A Co Limerick woman who has become the first Traveller in Ireland to graduate with a PhD, said she has ‘mixed emotions’ about the accolade, as it reminded her of the Traveller community’s long struggle in accessing education …” (more)
[David Raleigh, Irish Times, 15 January]
“Occupation: PhD student. Age: 31. Location: Dublin. Salary: €6,000. Monthly pay (net): €500. Monthly expenses: Rent: €700. Household bills: Included in rent. Transport: €24. Phone bill: £10 (so €11.27) …” (more)
[TheJournal.ie, 30 December]
“The impact of research and research degrees at Waterford Institute of Technology on the south east region and Waterford city was highlighted on Thursday last. In 1993, Waterford Regional Technical College (WRTC) conferred its first ever PhD graduate. At the time WRTC was the first Regional Technical Colleges to award PhDs …” (more)
[Munster Express, 28 December]
Abstract: Contemporary science has been characterized by an exponential growth in publications and a rise of team science. At the same time, there has been an increase in the number of awarded PhD degrees, which has not been accompanied by a similar expansion in the number of academic positions. In such a competitive environment, an important measure of academic success is the ability to maintain a long active career in science. In this paper, we study workforce trends in three scientific disciplines over half a century. We find dramatic shortening of careers of scientists across all three disciplines. The time over which half of the cohort has left the field has shortened from 35y in the 1960s to only 5y in the 2010s. In addition, we find a rapid rise (from 25 to 60% since the 1960s) of a group of scientists who spend their entire career only as supporting authors without having led a publication. Altogether, the fraction of entering researchers who achieve full careers has diminished, while the class of temporary scientists has escalated. We provide an interpretation of our empirical results in terms of a survival model from which we infer potential factors of success in scientific career survivability. Cohort attrition can be successfully modeled by a relatively simple hazard probability function. Although we find statistically significant trends between survivability and an author’s early productivity, neither productivity nor the citation impact of early work or the level of initial collaboration can serve as a reliable predictor of ultimate survivability.
Changing demographics of scientific careers: The rise of the temporary workforce, Staša Milojević, Filippo Radicchi, and John P Walsh. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the USA published ahead of print December 10, 2018, https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1800478115.
Abstract: International students have not traditionally been the focus of labour law scholarship, in part because their central purpose in a foreign country is to study rather than work. It is also generally accepted that there is no special reason to focus on international students as a distinct category of workers. This article attests to the particular vulnerability of international students in domestic labour markets, drawing on a comparative study of government policy and practice in relation to international students in Australia and the UK. Immigration rules in both jurisdictions frame the manner in which international students engage in the labour market during their studies. These rules restrict the hours in which international students can engage in paid work during semester, and if breached can result in the international students being deported from the host country. This has the effect of limiting the job market for international students, increasing the power of employers and reducing the likelihood international students will report exploitative work. Instead of strict work hour limits and deportation for breach, governments should rely on other regulatory mechanisms for ensuring international students are present in the host country for the purpose of education rather than work.
Joanna Howe, A Legally Constructed Underclass of Workers? The Deportability and Limited Work Rights of International Students in Australia and the United Kingdom, Industrial Law Journal, https://doi.org/10.1093/indlaw/dwy021. Published: 24 October 2018.
“Earlier this Open Access Week, university library staff throughout the UK celebrated #ThesisThursday, a day of focused attention on the less talked-about articles in open access repositories, PhD theses. Camilla Griffiths and Nancy Graham describe the work the LSE Library has led to digitise the theses of the School’s doctoral alumni, outlining the benefits of greater visibility, widespread indexing, and robust URLs …” (more)
[LSE Impact Blog, 27 October]
“I started my full-time PhD in 2014, and finally graduated this summer after having to extend it for health and financial reasons. I never thought I would succeed, but somehow I managed (even the dreaded viva examination wasn’t as scary as it sounds). For the first month or so after graduating, I basked in the relief and elation, absolved from all that pressure and expectation. But those feelings dissipated quickly …” (more)
[Guardian, 28 September]
“Four years ago in this newspaper, I wrote an article about falling in love with a man; a man who died in 1677. In March of this year, I wrote another piece about that man, the philosopher Baruch Spinoza. At that point, I was a month away from submitting my doctoral thesis in philosophy, which was heavily influenced by and including Spinoza, and I had fallen out of love with him …” (more)
[Laura Kennedy, Irish Times, 12 September]
“Abstract: Expertise is under sustained interrogation. We see it in so‐called edu‐scepticism and pessimism about graduates’ apparently diminishing employment prospects, challenges to the role of Higher Education institutions as arbiters of knowledge and post‐truth rhetoric more broadly. This paper examines how the PhD is being discursively positioned in this context. We ask what these changing conceptions of expertise, education and work mean for how PhD‐level expertise is understood. Drawing on a range of sources, from the scholarly to the wider media, we draw together five exemplar models of expertise to expose the transforming ratio between generalist, transferable skills and specialist knowledge. The evident diminution of specialisation raises numerous issues for the PhD as it is increasingly called upon to serve multiple and potentially contradictory needs: an innovation society on the one hand and the discipline on the other. Reconciling the tension between depth and breadth is an important issue for a degree whose hallmark is – or at least has been – depth.
Robyn Barnacle, Christine Schmidt and Denise Cuthbert, Expertise and the PhD: Between depth and a flat place, Higher Education Quarterly. First published: 29 August 2018. https://doi.org/10.1111/hequ.12181.
“As a PhD student in my final year, I find it demoralizing and frustrating to be constantly reminded of the bleak job prospects in academia. This dim outlook may well increase the pressure on students and contribute to high rates of anxiety and depression among them …” (more)
[Philipp Kruger, Nature, 1 August]
“Willie Penrose (Longford-Westmeath, Labour): A significant number of people have contacted me about the failure of Student Universal Support Ireland, SUSI, to fund to completion those pursuing doctoral studies in various disciplines. These postgraduate students are eligible to grant aid under SUSI’s criteria. However, it is cut off due to time limits …” (more)
[Dáil debates, 27 June]
“Catherine Martin (Dublin Rathdown, Green Party): To ask the Minister for Education and Skills the number of students in State-funded third level education facilities that undertook doctoral research in 2017 and to date in 2018; and the number of these that were State funded …” (more)
[Dáil written answers, 19 June]
“In the circles in which I once moved when I was still an active law lecturer, one of the regular questions colleagues from the United States of America would ask is whether, with a JD degree (‘Juris Doctor’), they were entitled to style themselves ‘Dr’. This often led to long discussions about how academic qualifications should be used by their holders to declare their status. I was awarded my own PhD in 1982 …” (more)
[Ferdinand von Prondzynski, University Blog, 18 June]
“A hashtag debuting this week has caused quite a stir on Twitter: #immodestwomen. In the wake of a US newspaper deciding not to accord anyone the title of Dr in its articles, unless they were medical doctors …” (more)
[Athene Donald’s Blog, 17 June]
