• Question: If I was to begin writing my PhD thesis now, would I be eligible for a PhD?

    Asked by Joe to Laura, Matthew, Andrew, Rebecca on 19 Nov 2014.
    • Photo: Matthew Camilleri

      Matthew Camilleri answered on 19 Nov 2014:

      Well, probably you would be eligible for a PhD although in reality most of your research and most of your writing would be useless after your first few experiments. Research tends to be tricky, and it tends to take you in different directions, to make you do experiments you never dreamt of doing before.

      If you want a good write up this should be done by first doing the experiments and then writing the report afterwards. Ofc, something like a literature review can be started before hand, as that required reading a lot of material to understand what your project is all about.

    • Photo: Laura Schofield

      Laura Schofield answered on 19 Nov 2014:

      If you write a thesis on work that is scientifically valid (as in it is of interest and/or importance) and is unique then yes you would absolutely be eligible! The problems you might face are finding an area of science that you could work on by yourself without any university support or funding and then once you have written your thesis, finding examiners to give you a viva. The viva is basically an interview on your work and is usually held by one person from your own University and one external professor/doctor. You might struggle to do it without a Uni but I can’t see a reason why they’d say no!

    • Photo: Rebecca Ingle

      Rebecca Ingle answered on 19 Nov 2014:

      There are a few ways to get a PhD in the UK and one is to get a ‘PhD by publication’ so if you were writing up your amazingly novel work, publishing your own articles in scientific journals, then you could apply for one of those!

      The requirement for PhD work is just that it is completely your own and novel, advances the current scientific understanding and is accurately done. (It sounds so trivial when you write it like that…) You’d definitely be eligible if your work was of that standard.

    • Photo: Andrew McKinley

      Andrew McKinley answered on 19 Nov 2014:

      You would absolutely be eligible for a PhD provided:

      – You did the work
      – You wrote the book (your thesis)
      – The work was publishable and unique on the world stage!

      The trick is learning what it is you have to do in order to ensure you do the right work which is publishable and unique, and for this you typically need a supervisor to guide you – and the supervisor needs to have done work themselves which is unique and publishable. Thus you need to convince someone to supervise you. That usually means showing them you’ve got what it takes and that you aren’t going to waste their time. Usually this is done by showing you have a degree…. (a BSc or a MSc)
      And that then starts the chain-reaction which suggests the earliest most people can obtain their PhD is by the age of 25-26 years.

      It’s not out of the question – we had a student graduate from our department aged 17 years old! He then went to do a PhD and man, was he smart! Not just for a 17 year old, but on an absolute scale! He could run rings around me in some aspects of experiments.

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