Help PhD students meet their deadline

In the past months, we sprinted to the finish line three times. With success, thanks to the entire team. Three PhD candidates in my team submitted their dissertations before the last day of their contract. We made the deadline three times!

That should not be special, but unfortunately it is. Far too many PhD candidates do not make that deadline. And usually both the PhD candidates and the supervisors are to blame for that. Missing the submission deadline is painful for everyone, but it happens too often.

The number of PhD candidates who are not ready before the end of their contract is not easy to measure, also because it is not entirely clear what the definition of “being ready on time” is. I, and probably most colleagues, see uploading the manuscript to myphd as the last step within the contract; but there are also groups where even the defence and graduation ceremony usually take place within the four years of a PhD contract.

On the other hand, there are many more groups where the culture is that PhD candidates only complete their dissertation months or even years after they have left employment. This leads to PhD candidates who write their introductory chapter or even entire research chapters in the evenings and weekends.

We need to eliminate this culture. It is not normal for PhD candidates to complete their dissertation in their own time. First of all, the UWV (where you can get an unemployment benefit, red.) has become much stricter about continuing to work after the end of the contract. But apart from that, continuing to work “for free” is an anachronism. We should be proud that most PhD candidates in the Netherlands are employees, instead of students. So we should also treat them as employees. And because most PhD candidates continue in a job outside of academia, we cannot expect them to complete their dissertation pro bono.

In 2013, Rens van der Schoot and colleagues investigated the reasons why PhD candidates in the Netherlands submitted their dissertations too late. They found that PhD candidates take an average of almost five years to complete their PhD trajectory, and that this delay was due both to setbacks during the project and problems with the planning. But there were also many complaints about poor supervision and supervisors who were excruciatingly slow with feedback. 

Everyone has a role to play in preventing delays: the PhD candidate, the supervisor and the promoter. And the university itself, as employer. Within the Doctoral Advisory Board of the UU (formerly known as the Graduate Committee), we are developing a policy to reduce the number of PhD candidates who submit their dissertation after the end of their contract.

But what can be done now to ensure that PhD candidates succeed in submitting within four years? First of all, expectation management is important, and this is a task for the Graduate Schools. It has helped me enormously that our Graduate School of Natural Sciences has drawn up a PhD Guide, just like many other Graduate Schools. For example, this PhD guide states that, as a guideline, a dissertation must have three “publication-worthy” - but not necessarily published - scientific chapters. Before this was explicitly put in writing last year, it was always unclear to PhD candidates whether they had to write three, four or even five chapters. That caused unrest and stress.

In addition, a tight schedule helps, and that is a responsibility for the promoter, supervisors and the PhD candidate. I myself always have PhD candidates keep a Gantt chart in their final year, which shows the planning per month. That planning runs until the last day of the contract, and the goal is that the dissertation must be uploaded to myphd on that day. The last three months before the end of the contract, it becomes a planning in weeks, and in the last few weeks even days. We adjust the time planning at each meeting, and it helps if PhD candidates are honest and open about their own progress. I am also very explicit when I have time for feedback on documents - and I also block that time in my agenda - so that PhD candidates can plan exactly what needs to be done and when. In this way, the PhD candidates also practice project planning and management at the same time. 

A PhD trajectory is a long marathon. But when the finish line is finally in sight after three years, everyone wants to make a final sprint. How it should be: supervisors and promoters coach the PhD candidate through the final stages, and then celebrate reaching the finish line with the entire team.