Getting a PhD -- Capturing Six Decades of Motivation, Supervision, and Topic Choice

As the structure and purpose of doctoral education evolve rapidly, up-to-date records of ‘how a PhD actually starts’ risk being lost. This paper provides a scholarly snapshot of those practices before they shift once again. We conducted semi-structured interviews with 22 active researchers in the Computing Education Research (CER) community who had completed their PhDs in varying disciplines, mostly computer science or computing education, in six decades (from the 1970s to the 2020s). Their PhDs were earned in twelve different countries; they now work in ten of those countries.We report on a qualitative analysis of participants’ motivations for pursuing a PhD, how they found their supervisors, and how they identified research topics. The breadth of this sample puts experiences at single institutions or countries into perspective. We found a wide range of motivations for PhD studies, including – among others – the desire to do research, a strong interest in teaching, the desire for an academic credential, and a fascination with learning. We also found a wide spectrum of practices in how supervisor-student connections are formed and thesis topics identified, ranging from the supervisor having almost total control to the student being expected to take the initiative. Collectively, our participants paint a rich picture of the beginning phase of PhD studies among people working in CER. Taken together, these findings create a baseline that future scholars can compare against as doctoral training continues to change.