Reaching PhD candidacy and what it means

In case you have not heard through phone, email, IM, FriendFeed, or Twitter, I have reached PhD candidacy for my doctorate. But since a bunch of people have asked me exactly what that means I figured I would explain it along with the overall steps needed to get a PhD from UBC in computer science (CS).

When I first arrived at UBC, the first thing I did was take courses. All other departments at UBC have comprehensive exams, which are exhaustive tests to make sure your breadth of knowledge is wide enough for someone who will have a PhD. This is done to make sure you are well-rounded as an individual for your field since your PhD thesis makes you an expert in such a narrow field it would otherwise be very easy to get your degree without knowing some core fundamentals.

Luckily for me the CS department at UBC is special. We don't have comprehensive exams, but instead an eight course breadth requirement. By making sure you take courses in some broad areas the department with an acceptable grade (I believe it is a B or better) the department makes sure you are in general a computer scientist. My first year was spent taking three courses to meet this requirement.

You also need to find a supervisor. The definition of the role varies from supervisor to supervisor, but in general that should help make sure you stay on the right path to graduate. I lucked out that my masters supervisor is friends with my now PhD supervisor. So I managed to get a supervisor within a couple of months of arriving at UBC. But apparently most people arrive knowing who they want to work this. I suspect this is partially because in Canada a masters degree is a separate step from your PhD, unlike in the States where typically you skip your masters if you go for the PhD.

Then you start hunting for a thesis topic. For me this was a long, arduous process. The ideas I came up with either were either not scientific enough (not enough research and so more like a big masters thesis) or too big (requiring multiple PhDs and years of work). But I did finally find one.

Once you have a topic you need a committee. You can add people because they would make a good recommendation later on when you apply for a professorship. You can ask someone who fills in a knowledge gap you might have involving related work. Or you can ask someone who you think won't cause you much grief. Either way you need a committee. At UBC you need three, although one of the members is almost always your supervisor, so you really only need to hunt down two more people.

With a topic chosen and your committee selected, you need to defend your thesis topic proposal. A defense (at least at UBC) consists of a half hour presentation, a round of questions from your committee, questions from the audience, and then more questions from the committee. The purpose in doing this is to make sure you are not going to waste time on a topic that will not lead to you getting a PhD. In other words, if you successfully defend your thesis topic the department has said it will grant you a PhD if you do what you said you would do. This is what I just did.

The last step is actually writing your thesis and defending that. The defense is just like the one you do for your proposal. The reason I am now labeled a PhD candidate is I am now a candidate to defend a thesis. Up to this point the university would not let me consider defending a thesis as I had other requirements to complete. But with all but one checkbox out of the way I am allowed to defend a thesis. Some universities also call the state I am in All But Dissertation (ABD).

Now obviously there is more to a PhD then what I have said here (primarily the actual research and getting publications). But the primary steps of courses/exams, supervisor, topic, committee, proposal defense, and finally thesis defense are what you need to go through to get a PhD. For me I now have a flag at the finish line that is visible from where I stand; I just can't tell how far away the flag is.