Doing a PhD in IT
Why do a PhD in IT? Peter Blanchfield, Head of the Division of Computer Science & Information Technology, University of Nottingham (Malaysia Campus) shares his views.
One of the biggest problems in running a university computer science department anywhere in the world is trying to get correctly qualified staff.
Obviously the best staff are needed but good computer scientists are in short supply and those with a PhD can still name their price anywhere they go. But this is still not a good reason to do a PhD. The hard work and long hours that are involved in obtaining a PhD wouldn't necessarily be justified by the outcome of a possibly high salary. After all, big companies like IBM and AT&T don't ask for PhDs for the majority of their better-paid jobs. They don't even need you to have an MSc, just the right mindset and an ability to work without much supervision.
A PhD cannot be written by attending courses and lectures alone. A PhD is about looking for the answers to questions people have not yet found the answers for. You can get training in how to do the work. You can even find people who will tell you they were told what to do all the way through their PhD. But that is not the sort of person I am looking for when I go in search of staff. We expect our undergraduates to be stretched by what they are studying and to be challenged by their teachers to think beyond the confines of conventional ways of thought.
This afternoon I was listening to one of my colleagues describe to one of our students what he thought a PhD was all about. He described it in terms of Columbus setting out to find a westward route to the Indies. Conventional wisdom said that you should get together a caravan of camels and set out on foot to the east. Columbus convinced the King of Portugal that there was a way to reach the East Indies by setting out to the west. When he arrived in America he had found a place that was going to be of great value to those who sent him but was not his original destination. When you start a PhD you know what your aim is. What you don't know is where you are going to end up.
A PhD gives you the chance to explore new horizons. There are many areas in computer science in which we don't know how to find the answers we are looking for. We have some good ideas but we need people with the right mindset to try new things and be prepared to go ways that others would not think of – going west to get to the east perhaps.
So how do you find the right place to do a PhD? If you are thinking of studying at a British university the best place to look is the Research Assessment Exercise (RAE). All universities in the UK have been assessed, department by department and rated on a scale of 1 to 5, with 5 being the best. The best research departments will have a score of 4 or 5. But look out for how many staff have been entered into the exercise. Some universities are selective about how many staff they put in which allows them to get an artificially high score. The RAE website lists the proportion of staff that have been entered.
The next thing to do is to have a look at the website of the university you are interested in. Check out the research that they are doing and make sure you are sufficiently interested in the outcome. It may go quickly but the time you spend on a PhD will include many times when, perhaps like Columbus' crew, you will wonder if you will ever reach the end. But if you are really motivated to study in the area you've chosen you will be far more likely to get there.
