Demystifying the Engineering PhD

Monica Cox

• Publisher: Academic Press
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN: 9780128015933
• eBook ISBN: 9780128016039
• Topic: Medicine
• Subtopic: Medical Theory, Practice & Reference

Demystifying the Engineering Ph.D. explores what it means to be an engineering Ph.D. holder, including insights from engineering professionals working in academia and industry across multiple institute types and companies. Topics covered include motivations for obtaining a Ph.D., the added value of a Ph.D., and career options for Ph.D. holders. The book concludes with recommendations for transforming engineering doctoral education to preparing doctoral students for diverse careers in industry and academia.

• Helps readers gain insights into diverse engineering work environments and explores ways to transition across engineering sectors and careers
• Presents real-world experiences of engineering Ph.D.'s working in academia, industry, government and other non-traditional areas
• Discusses how to communicate your work to a variety of audiences

Part I

Why Obtain an Engineering PhD?

Outline

• Chapter one Motivations
• Chapter two The Added Value

Chapter one

Motivations

Abstract

How does an engineering PhD holder earn a doctorate? Stories varied across respondents. This chapter provides motivations for pursuing an engineering PhD as told in the voices of people interviewed for this study. Throughout this chapter, motivation is referred to as the reasons that respondents pursued a PhD, including: personal interests, influences from others, and academic-related factors. Findings also explored what motivated respondents to persistin their pursuit of their degrees, even during hard times. I also present advice for those considering the pursuit of the PhD and for engineering professionals who may guide them on engineering PhD journeys.

Keywords

Career motivation; PhD pathways; Persistence

My decisions (to earn an engineering PhD) were not based upon necessarily positive influences as much as negative influences. Undergraduate, I was going to college and most of my experiences there were positive, but even after I finished there I still didn’t necessarily want to get my PhD. What really influenced me was my time at [Graduate University]. I was there for about two years, in electrical engineering. And the entire time I was there I never had a female professor and I never had a professor of color. So at [Undergraduate College], most of my professors were African-American females and at [Graduate University] I had none of them. And not only did I not have any mentors that looked like me, or instructors that looked like me, I also felt that their teaching style was not conducive for me to be successful in my learning. So actually as an undergraduate sitting in a classroom, I said, 'I think I can do this better. I think I have a better way. I think that there is a way to give an impression to students of engineering who if they don’t look like them, they at least make it look enjoyable and like something they would want to do.' I just feel like the traditional engineering professor is not something that inspires me to want to be an engineer. That’s why I decided to get my PhD.

Catrina Benson, PhD, Assistant Professor

How does an engineering PhD holder earn a doctorate? Stories varied across respondents. This chapter provides motivations for pursuing an engineering PhD as told in the voices of people interviewed for this study. Throughout this chapter, motivation is referred to as the reasons that respondents pursued a PhD, including: personal interests, influences from others, and academic-related factors. Findings also explored what motivated respondents to persevere in their pursuit of their degrees, even during hard times. I also present advice for others considering the pursuit of the PhD.

Open-coded responses from interviewees resulted in fourteen occurrences (London et al., 2014). Asset-oriented reasons for pursuing an engineering PhD included:

• • Exposure to graduate education opportunities (e.g., attending a conference or professional development workshop)
• • Interest in a career that requires a PhD (e.g., working as a tenure-track faculty member)
• • Influence of a family member
• • Encouragement from mentors such as peers, teachers, and professors
• • Trends that called for advanced degrees
• • Desire to do scientific work
• • Opportunity to enter the academic profession
• • Commitment to research in general
• • Fascination with something associated with one’s technical area but not research (e.g., teaching)
• • Passion for one’s particular technical subject/ topic of interest (e.g., operations research within industrial engineering)
• • Personal interest (e.g., going abroad, being challenged intellectually)
• • Prior success in graduate school (e.g., engaging in research as a Master’s student or passing a qualifying exam), and
• • Funding to attend graduate school

Although the majority of the codes were asset-based, one negative motivation (i.e., discontent with one’s current job), emerged. Such discontent might relate to having a desire to explore a new dimension within one’s job.

Academia respondents

Members of the research team rank ordered respondents’ motivations for earning engineering PhDs. Within academia, the seventeen respondents identified their motivations to be the opportunity to go into the academic profession; personal interests; being passionate about something associated with their technical subject, but not research; being influenced by mentors, teachers, and/or professors; having a goal that necessitates a PhD; and being passionate about research. Elaboration of each of these motivations from the perspectives of academic audiences is presented in this section.

Opportunity to go into the academic profession

Some engineering PhD respondents currently working in academia recognized early in their careers that earning a PhD in engineering offered a way to obtain university jobs and to achieve their goals of becoming college professors. Although many of the engineering PhD holders loved to teach, they realized they had to conduct doctoral-level research to obtain a PhD to teach at the college level, thereby becoming the required credential for them to become faculty members.

Catrina Benson, an Assistant Professor with graduate degrees in electrical engineering, expounded upon her passion for teaching and its connection to her pursuit of a PhD. She noted that as a woman of color in engineering courses, she also wanted to be a role model for future students of color:

I loved what I did because the whole purpose for me getting my PhD is I wanted to teach, and I wanted to be an engineering professor; not necessarily do research. I wanted to be an engineering educator. I wanted to educate potentially more students who looked like me and repeat after my own kind. I wanted them to see role models that looked like them. I wanted them to see it could be done.

Many of the respondents who eventually earned a PhD developed interest in the degree early in their undergraduate experiences. Mechanical engineer Miranda Chilton, who works at a doctoral/research university, decided to become a professor as a sophomore engineering student taking thermodynamics. Meanwhile, chemical engineering Full Professor Christopher Roe, whose interest in teaching was piqued during his first year of college and who works at a doctoral/research university, “felt at home” when he taught others. To pursue his passion, he knew he needed to get a PhD. The journey was not easy for him, however, resulting in his almost leaving graduate school with only a Master’s of Science degree. At one point, he wanted to return to his childhood home. At that point, he “was reminded that I wanted to be a faculty member, so I decided to stick with it.” Similarly, Sherrie Roberts, an Assistant Professor of Electrical Engineering working at a Master’s College and University, echoed, “I decided to stay on (in graduate school) for a PhD because I wanted to become a professor. I really loved my professors when I was an undergrad, and I knew that was the job that I wanted to do.”

Not all academic respondents decided to earn a PhD as undergraduate students. Kevin Magee, a mechanical engineering professor who worked in the automotive industry after getting his undergraduate degree, pursued a PhD after earning his Master’s degree. He realized that his career path was limited at the automotive company where he worked. He explained, “You can only go so far as an engineer before you either go into management or needed (an) advanced degree … I did not want to go to management, so I went the academic direction.” Similarly, Mitchell Bentley, an Assistant Professor, decided to earn a PhD several years after working in the automotive industry: “When I was around 26/27 years old, that’s when I made the decision that long-term I wanted to go back and get my PhD and into the ranks of academia and leave the electronics industry completely.”

Personal interests

Several academics noted that their PhD pursuits connected to their personal interests, particularly their desires to help others in the future. Catrina Benson spoke of her transition from a minority-serving, liberal arts institution as an undergraduate to a larger predominately white institution to pursue her engineering degrees. Her desire to have mentors and instructors who looked like her motivated her to enter the professoriate. Miranda Chilton noted an affinity for helping other undergraduate engineering students comprehend course content:

When I was a sophomore and taking classes I found it very rewarding because I could help my classmates understand material that they were not able to understand from the lecture that had just been given by the professor. And so, I had a way of explaining it that made sense to them. And they liked that. I found it very rewarding to be able to provide knowledge in an understandable manner.

For both Benson and Chilton, their educational experiences in engineering classrooms motivated their pursuits of engineering PhDs. Sitting in a classroom and seeing how they could make a difference for future students informed their career paths as professors.

Similarly, undergraduate experiences drove Distinguished Professor, Adam Greene, and Christopher Roe, to pursue PhDs. As an undergraduate, Greene enjoyed school and realized he needed more than a Bachelor’s degree. For this reason, he aimed to attend graduate school.

Although Roe’s undergraduate experience was positive, he wavered somewhat once he entered graduate school:

Very early on I decided I wanted to do the PhD and wanted to be faculty. And I don’t think I doubted that for a minute when I was an undergrad. So, perhaps I doubted it a little bit when I was a grad student.

Adjunct Assistant Professor Craig Daniels perceived that his engineering discipline (biomedical engineering) warranted his earning a PhD given the nature of the work he might pursue:

I think I always wanted a terminal degree. You know engineering, especially biomedical engineering is particularly sensitive with respect to the kind of work you can do as a Bachelor’s or Master’s level engineer. Especially when it comes to medical devices, you know, they want that PhD for liability purposes. So, unlike a civil engineer or a mechanical engineer who could design a bridge or do whatever, the medical industry is particularly sensitive to having a PhD So, if you really - if you want to do PhD level work, if you want to do really great stuff in bioengineering you have to have a PhD.

For these respondents, obtaining an engineering PhD connected to both their enjoyment and their disgruntlement of their undergraduate experiences within specific engineering disciplines.

Being passionate about something other than research

Many of the academic interviewees identified their affinity for something other than their technical area or research as a motivation for earning a PhD. Miranda Chilton, Adam Greene, Sheryl Chambers, and Mitchell Bentley highlighted their love for and interest in teaching. Chilton recalled a graduate education experience that transformed her perspective about the impact of teaching:

When I went to (Graduate University), they were working with teachers to help them understand engineering to bring it into their classrooms, and I had never even considered an audience besides college students. And as soon as I thought about other audiences, I thought, ‘Wow, this is great. I really want to make a difference in the education in this country. And, here’s a place I can do it.

Greene also discovered a love for teaching after receiving a fellowship that offered him an option to be a teaching assistant (TA) versus a research assistant (RA). The breadth of experiences as a TA allowed him to see himself as a future faculty member:

I had a fellowship but then it was to be supplemented with either a TA or an RA. And I guess I decided I wanted to do a TA because I wanted experience making presentations. I wasn’t very comfortable with that. And, their TAs actually taught classes. … So as a TA I actually taught a strength and statics course, did all the lectures. You know, graded all the homework. And then I also taught a strength and materials course. And, that was fun. That was more interesting than I thought it would be … I enjoyed that. And I thought, well maybe I’d like to do that sometime.

Chambers’ interest in becoming a professor began in high school. Similar to Greene, a teaching assistant experience fortified her interest in teaching. Chambers, a lecturer with a PhD in chemical engineering, reflected:

When I was doing my undergraduate work at (Undergraduate University) in chemical engineering, I had the opportunity to be a teaching assistant, I think it might have been in my junior year. But I had the opportunity to be a ...

Table of contents

• Cover image
• Title page
• Table of Contents
• Copyright
• Dedication
• About the author
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Part I: Why Obtain an Engineering PhD?
• Part II: What Does It Mean to Be an Engineering Steward?
• Part III: What Do Engineering PhD Holders Do?
• Part IV: How Do You Maximize an Engineering PhD?
• Appendix 1. Engineering PhD trends
• Appendix 2. Characteristics needed of engineering PhD holders (identified by all respondents)
• Appendix 3. Expectations needed of engineering PhD holders (identified by all respondents)
• Index