Question: What is PhD?

Alice Jones Bartoli answered on 10 Jun 2011:

Hi youngee,

PhD stands for Doctor of Philosophy (which doesn’t make much sense – given that my PhD is in Psychology). It means that I’ve carried out a large-scale piece of research that other scientists (other psychologists for me) agree is of an interesting, useful and good enough standard so that I can call myself a Doctor of Psychology (I get to call myself Dr Jones, my friends think this is funny) and so that I can start doing research independently and take on my own students to teach them how to do research.

The best way it was described to me was like a ‘driving test’, you have to pass this in order to be able to move on in your career as a scientist and do more of the work that you are interested in.

For your PhD you carry out this research, usually taking about 3-4 years, and you write a large report on what you’ve done, why you did it, and what you found. This is the ‘thesis’ – it usually looks like a big book, I think mine was about 80,000 words long (and mine was quite short!).

It sounds like a lot of work, and it is… but you are trained to do it. Before I started it, I’d gone to university and done a degree in Psychology, and worked with other psychologists to learn about the things I was interested in. It is a lot of work, but I’m so glad that I did it.