Do I have what it takes to get a PhD?

What would be a good test of my ability to get a PhD?

My first thought is if I can do the sustained work required.
i.e. can i put in several hours of study each day for a month?

 

Persistence, highly self motivated, able to consistently resist procrastination, an interest and willingness to learn and follow research methods, willingness to write a lot and do so in a standard form and style (e.g., APA), legitimately good critical thinking skills, and an outside life than can accommodate your being preoccupied in much of your free time (not all, just much).

 

This is already posted here

 

I had a timeout on my first post and did not wait long enough to check for first post contacting moderator to delete this thread.

copying relevant posts in this thread

 

If you are questioning yourself: you don't yet have what it takes

 

I disagree, the more you that you investigate if you are a fit with the program of choice, the better chance for success. The OP is just asking what is in store for him/her, as they have not been through it.

 

I think you need a motivator. In my case it was simple, I'm in the education business and the Doctorate meant a better paycheck and more job security.

I never did it because I wanted a title or because I wanted people to see me as a "Dr". It was plain simple, employers required one so I just needed one.

If you don't have enough motivation to get one or really a use for it, then I wouldn't bother.

 

Well lets see, you could do it because there are already so few PhD's out there

You could soldier on despite some peoples opinions like this:
Academic departments grow in terms of the number of students enrolled. We know from Parkinson’s Law that growth is an institutional imperative. Administrators advance their careers by expanding the number of subordinates in their department. So, every academic department wants more students � students of a special kind.

Students are not of equal value to a department. The lower-division student (freshman or sophomore) does not rate highly in the currency of academic resource allocation: the full-time enrollment, or FTE. The FTE figure is what justifies the hiring of a full-time faculty member. The lower the ratio, the better. It may take 15 lower-division students to generate one FTE. It may take only eight Ph.D.-level graduate students to generate an FTE.

The more Ph.D. students a department can attract, the faster the growth of that department. This is the iron law of academia. All other economic laws are sacrificed for it, as the economist says, other things being equal.

This fact of academic economic life creates an incentive for departments to enroll lots of graduate students. It also rewards those departments that persuade M.A. students to go into the Ph.D. program.

Also, the brightest graduate students may be asked to do unpaid or grant-paid research for senior professors. The professors then publish the results of this research under their own names, thereby advancing their careers. It’s the division of labor at work.

Graduate students do not learn about supply and demand, and it does not pay senior professors to teach them. Here is evidence. In response to the ever-growing glut of Ph.D.’s, the American university system turned out about 30,000 Ph.D. graduates per year, 1969 to about 1975. Since then, it has increased the output. In 1980, it was 33,615. In 1990, it was 38,371. In 2000, it was 44,808. In 2003, it was 46,024. (Statistical Abstract of the United States, 2006, Table 290.) Despite this, we read on a website devoted to selling “how to get higher learning degrees” materials.

And finally we get down to the real reason. Ego. I have done things to satisfy my ego, for instance I enlisted in the Marine Corps and became a grunt, because I wanted the physical and mental challenge to be pushed.

If your Ego is bigger than your capacity for being a humble learner, then by all means. You have passed the test.

Officially, you get a PhD to demonstrate your competence at research, and this is partly true. But in fact we all know that people get PhDs because they are a required credential for most academic jobs and carry a certain valuable prestige in many contexts. They are a commodified form of cultural capital, and they can be converted in the right circumstances into financial capital. This is also why they usually cost a lot of money.

You do not need a PhD to do good research. You may need one to get people who have theirs, but are not very thoughtful, to take you and your research seriously.

Most people with PhDs are not good researchers. They are competent researchers, not very original, and often not even particularly interested in their fields. They are not even intellectuals. They belong to a professional caste that guards its privileges. On the other hand, there are many widely respected researchers who do not have any doctoral degree, and some even have university faculty positions, though this is becoming rarer because of the attitudes of university administrations.

There are PhDs and PhDs. As with any commodity, there is a market and differential value on that market. PhDs from prestigious research universities are worth more. PhDs earned under the supervision of noted researchers are worth more still. Both these conditions matter far more to the value of your degree than does the intrinsic merit of your dissertation (unless it is truly exceptional). By and large U.S. PhDs are worth less than European ones (and are easier to get). In Europe, PhDs from older universities are worth more than those from newer ones (this is also true to a lesser degree elsewhere), except in technical fields.

Most of the courses you will take to earn a PhD will be of no help whatsoever in your research, now or later. PhD requirements usually represent a political compromise among the senior faculty designed to ensure that the program appears to have "high standards", that all subfields get a crack at potential dissertation students, and that the program reflects someone's ideas of what's important in the field (usually out of date).

On the other hand, a good PhD program will offer you the opportunity to find a thoughtful and caring mentor, to learn from other good students, to sample the ideas of the faculty, to get to know the prevailing wisdom of a field, and to take at least some courses that are genuinely interesting and exciting for you. It will give you the technical skills and some of the intellectual strategies needed to do creative and significant research. Any program can give you a degree; look for a program that can give you more. And if you are in one that doesn't, considering moving elsewhere. A lot of doctoral students today do move. You should not need to lose more than one year in your progress towards the degree from making a move, if you do it right.

But should you seek to earn a PhD at all? Apart from mercenary motives, or ego gratification, or the desire to be taken more seriously by others for not altogether relevant reasons, go for a PhD only if you really want to do research, or teach in a university, or take a leading role in developing policy based on research, or some combination of these goals. The best reason of all to enroll in a doctoral program is because you want to become more intellectually engaged with and more critically sophisticated in the study of some issue or field.

http://www-personal.umich.edu/~jaylemke/guidephd.htm