Russell Yee

An earned doctorate is a major personal accomplishment as well as a necessary professional credential for many teaching and research careers. Note well however that such a degree is absolutely not any guarantee of a tenured teaching job. Only a very small fraction of people with earned doctorates are employed full-time in a stable teaching setting. Even fewer are tenured or tenure-track. And even fewer are doing so at one of their “goal” schools.

If (after earning your degree, managing to find a teaching position, successfully publishing, and probably moving once or more in the process) you actually do land a tenure-track position, congratulations! But if not, at some point you will have to decide if you are open to part-time, adjunct, or otherwise contingent teaching. Long before that becomes a possibility you should read up on the current realities of such employment. These realities (driven mostly by sheer supply and demand) are exceedingly, crushingly stark, especially if you actually need to earn a living wage from your teaching. If you know something about what minor league baseball players have to endure before (hopefully) getting called up, it’s kind of like that, minus the fresh air and peanuts.

With that said, here’s my advice on how to get into a research-oriented doctoral program. Like all advice you should take it with a grain of salt and also seek advice from others.

• The biggest factor by far is whether your stated interests are a match for a given school’s program and faculty. You may be outstanding in every way but if a school has no faculty who can adequately supervise your specific research interests  then there is just no match.
  
  
• Given the above, it’s a fully good idea to get in touch with actual prospective advisors at actual schools and discuss your interests. Just be polite and informed when you inquire. By nature, scholars love to talk about their fields of interest. Try showing familiarity with their work, the literature in their field, and current issues and debates they are likely involved in.

• This all presumes that you actually do have a specific, developed research focus, well-articulated in your purpose statement. Doctoral studies are about specialization. There is a grain of truth to the joke, “Doctoral studies mean learning more and more about less and less til you know everything about nothing!” This focus may well develop and change while you are actually in a program but it helps greatly to have a clear starting focus.

• Of course you already have accredited degrees from college and grad school(s). Of course your writing sample clearly shows full scholarly ability. In part, the admissions committee is wondering, “Will this student reflect well on our institution?”

• Your GPA and GRE scores are more just to see if you’re credible as a candidate. The GPA need not be straight “A”s. In fact, straight “A”s could be taken as a slight negative, as if a student knows how to crank out classwork but not necessarily how to prioritize more-important vs. less-important classwork, and how to be fully active in relevant non-coursework activity. Doctoral studies are about developing independent, creative, skilled scholars, not point-counters and assignment-completers.

• Letters of recommendation matter a lot—who writes them, and what they do and don’t say. A good diverse range of letters definitely helps. Letters by recognized scholars / leaders in your field definitely help. “Fluff” letters by famous names will probably do more harm than good.

The more of these boxes you can tick off well, the better your chances of admission into a doctoral program. Note that there are inevitably also factors completely outside your control (e.g., available slots, other applicants, etc.). Note also that there are many doctoral programs at marginal institutions that would be happy to take your money in exchange for a degree of dubious worth.