How to Fail Your PhD
For many people, an advanced degree is a requirement for their preferred job. Becoming a university professor, for example, generally demands one. Other people just like being in school and would be horrified if they actually graduated. Here are some tips for staying in graduate school for as long as possible; by following them, you should be able to avoid getting kicked out and yet never graduate.
- Don’t transfer credits over from your master’s degree, if you have one. By failing to count classwork you’ve already completed, you can add as much as thirty credits to your degree requirements!
- Take classes that don’t count towards your degree. You probably need to file a report each year showing progress towards your degree; by taking classes in related subject areas that don’t count towards the requirements, you can claim that you’re learning relevant information without actually getting closer to graduating. Alternatively, if your school has a breadth requirement, keep taking classes from the same area; you’ll rack up the credits, but most of them won’t count towards the PhD requirements.
- Take the minimum number of credits possible. Full-time for a graduate student is generally nine credit hours, but you can get away with taking as few as three. A PhD generally requires at least 72 credit hours; by taking only three or four per semester, you can stretch it out for quite a long time, especially if you followed tip #1 and didn’t transfer over credit from your master’s degree.
Bonus: since credits often expire after ten years, if you take relevant classes your first few years and then follow tip #2, you can stay in school long enough to make the original classes fall off, after which you’ll have to retake them!
Warning: taking only a few credits each semester means you pay the highest per-credit tuition rate; this strategy is not for the poor!
Advanced: PhD students also have the option of enrolling for “continuous registration’, which means you’re still a student but are not taking any classes. Not only do you fail to make any progress whatsoever that semester, but it’s a lot cheaper!
- Do your best to avoid choosing a good PhD thesis topic. By choosing a topic that’s too broad or too difficult, you can be assured of spending many years trying to solve it; indeed, it might not even be solvable! Someone working on a PhD in computer science, for example, might try to sneak through a topic that’s actually NP-complete (for the non-CS people, this means it can’t be solved in any reasonable time). If your advisor and committee are any good, they won’t let you choose such a topic…but then, you generally get to choose your advisor and committee!
- Related to #4: choose a topic in an area that your advisor and committee are not familiar with or interested in. This will make it much harder for them to keep you from doing something stupid. If you can annoy one of your committee members, all the better; he can easily slow down your progress in many ways. Just don’t overdo it; you don’t want to get kicked out prematurely!
By following these tips, you can be sure of not ever graduating in any reasonable amount of time. Isn’t being a student wonderful?
No related posts.