I know that this question has a huge amount of factors, but how long did it take you to finish your dissertation? Please provide specifics, if you can, like how long it was and what the process was to get it officially complete. Thanks,
Kristie, I think it depends on how you look at it. Is it from the proposal phase or including the post-proposal phase. Personally, it took me 14 months to complete the proposal including the needed revisions. Also, it took me additional 12 months to complete the post proposal including all needed revisions and re-revisions (post defense). All in all, I completed the Ph.D. degree program in about 6 years. Good luck to you on your academic doctorate journey. Thank you.
Kristie - In the NSU DBA program, from beginning of course work to degree completion took me 4.33 years. I was done with classes at about the 3.33 year point. The NSU average is 62 months: Elapsed Time Mean Start to CSA 6081 14 6081 to PLR 29 PLR to CP 1 CP to Proposal 23 Proposal to Draft approval 8 Start of classes to Draft approval 62 First quartile for start of classes to draft - 50 months Third quartile for start of classes to draft - 73 months 6081 is one of the research methods courses PLR is "Preliminary Literature Review" CP is "Concept Paper" Regards - Andy
Forever. And ever. I think that most quantitative disserations are easier to write up and can take a shorter time. But if you do empirical research, that could also have an impact--how long your experiment, survey, data gathering, etc. takes. Qualitiative dissertations test hypotheses using words--lots of them. I think they tend to take longer. If persistent (I wrote every, every day), you can do it in a few months or more. But expect a year or more. It took me about 6 months to write the first draft submitted to my advisor. But I'd been familiar with the issues and the literature in my field for two decades. It took another couple of months to do revisions from the entire committee, and a couple more to get it through the university after the "defense." I had much of the literature compiled when I began actual writing in July 2002. I submitted my draft in December, "defended" in March 2003, and submitted my final version to the university in May. Hope this helps.
Kristie, Please disregard my earlier post on this subject. The correct post follows: I think it depends on how you look at it. Is it from the proposal phase or including the post-proposal phase. Personally, it took me 14 months to complete the proposal including the needed revisions. The revisions here were strictly based on rejection related to the need for the problem clarity, expanded literature citations, justification for the methodology being used, etc. Also, it took me additional 12 months to complete the post proposal including all needed revisions and re-revisions (post defense). My committe chair had some suggestions for me prior to the defense. I did all those. One other committee member suggested I included a statement that recognized his concept. I know about his theory in his published book. Initially, I chose not to include it in my lit section. Later, I recognized his concept. I won his and 3 other committee members votes. Hitherto, I passed. I was happy and drained. I went home quietly, cooked and ate some baked salmon steak and zuchinni and squash vegetables with a glass of wine, and spent the evening sleeping. I woke up the next day, and I said...what next......... All in all, I completed the Ph.D. degree program in about 6 years. It was a worthy journey for me. Good luck to you on your academic doctorate journey. Thank you.
A rule of thumb that I use is if it takes less than 2 years of full time work from start of proposal to defense and completion then it's a degree mill degree. I only speak from the outside looking in.
My PhD took me 6.3 years, full time. The actual dissertation took me 3 months to write. I can clearly remember finishing the dissertation a few days before Thanksgiving in 1988 -- so it's almost exactly 15 years ago. I was a little slower than typical. We started with 20 PhD students in 1982, and 10 ultimately crossed the finish line -- with the first graduating after about 4.5 years and the 10th after about 7.5 years (all full time). This was after the university had taken steps to accelerate PhD graduation (following a murder of a professor by a PhD student). One my lab mates started in 1976 and graduated in 1990, working on the PhD full time throughout that period. He was not unusual for that earlier cohort, when students were still being treated as little more than slave labour.
It took me 5 years and 10 months to do my Ed.D. post-masters. My dissertation took around 20 months. However, 8 months of that was waiting for approval from the human research committee of the national group I used for my survey and an additional 2 months for the university approval process. Although I wrote most days, I did not write everyday and some days I wrote for 15-20 hours. I also did my dissertation while running a state agency with a 40 million dollar budget and 280 employees. I think what I gave up most during that time was sleep
Well, obviously I am not there yet. I was told that at ACCS the ARP (advanced Research Project) for the DMin would involve approval of the proposal and then take at least a full year to complete. I can testify that the proposal approval is not a rubber stamp process. I got my proposal through UNIZUL quicker than through ACCS. The PhD who is supervising it is going over it and asking questions (not that UNIZUL did not....they did), etc (real helpful). North
I took me almost 4 years to complete my Ph.D. (actually 3 years 11 months). 18 months of that time was spent directly working on the dissertation. The work prior to this time was coursework but research done in my doctoral courses was also done to support the work on the dissertation. John
A non-scientific informal poll of several colleagues (community college and university faculty) led me to believe that dissertations tend to take between one and two years to complete. This is apart from doctoral course work and comprehensive examinations. Tony Piña Faculty, CSU-San Bernardino
