Published: Oct 15, 2025 by Dr. Anthony Bernier

Raise your hand if you ever had doubts about your capacities for completing your PhD.

Well, if you were one of the 21 students in my first “So, you’re thinking about pursuing a PhD” class this summer, 19 of those 21 students would quickly put their hands in the sky.

This summer I offered an experimental 1-unit course to our masters students, giving them the opportunity to explore informational resources, processes, academic skills, and other considerations in thinking about pursuing doctoral studies. We addressed the application & selection processes, academic culture, and the resources pursuing a PhD requires as well as, necessarily, a variety of career prospects that, more than ever, must include awareness of volatility and precarity, if not outright attack against scholarship, expertise, and even evidence!

To facilitate focus on pertinent topics, I coined this dorky acronym, “SCORPS,” (skills, challenges, options, resources, process, and supervision) to reflect what the research characterizes as common student concerns. I assigned students to conduct authoritative (controlled vocabulary) searches, readings, and synthesis of current scholarship on their choice of specific topics withing these six broader categories. This gave them sufficient boundary guidance.

Before they were set free on the topics, however, we studied and drilled on a higher level of academic skills they generally need in our masters courses – skills necessary for success in a PhD experience. These are among the skills we work hard to impart in our own Gateway PhD program: starting with assembling an authoritative search syntax, for example, as well as strategic reading and strategic note taking skills.

We also worked within a very tight word limit for the first three of four essays. Students needed to distill and synthesize pertinent scholarship and render their own assessment of it within one page (12-point type, conventional margins). No quotes, no jargon, no citation upholstery.

The final essay, 3-5 pages, required an overall synthesis of the scholarship they read, a critical rendering of it all, and then a culminating assessment informing their own current views about pursuing a PhD (positives and continuing concerns).

Unlike in so many of the other classes I teach (in youth services and history research) I was surprised at how many actually took advantage of the layering on of higher level academic skills. They reported appreciating the systematic assembly and refinement of a controlled search vocabulary and in becoming familiar with actual reference tools – 7 of them admitted to doing this for the first time (throwing much shade, I feel, on our core course curriculum).

Two large patterns emerged from the concerns and insights students documented in their essays. The first is understandable given that of the 21 students enrolled; 17 were first generation masters students. They were concerned about the degrees and nature of “support” they could expect from a PhD program: financial, mentorship/supervision, social, etc.

The second pattern to emerge over the course, closer to the end, revealed more direct acknowledgement about the steps they would need to take and resources they would need to initiate, develop, and maintain on their own. These steps included assuming responsibility for cultivating relationships, for example, with supervising faculty.

Students also appeared to appreciate my proselytizing about the need to form and cultivate their own what I call a “Personal Board of Directors.” A PBD consists of between 4 or 6 hand-picked people from throughout one’s life (not necessarily academics) to approach and request to “keep an eye on me” and “allow me to check-in once or twice a year during my program to hear about my accomplishments, regrets, concerns, or just take me out for dinner.” Research demonstrates this form of community building contributes to successful PhD studies.

In this brief summer class, I also emphasized the notion of “tribality.” Earning a master’s degree qualifies one to join the information profession’s “tribe.” Earning a PhD inducts you into another. We discussed this in some detail but I argued that, no matter how unfortunate, these tribes do not always play well together. Practicing professionals tend (despite our required research methods courses) not to be evidence-based. On the other hand, doctoral studies require evidence, data, and their analysis to inform new scholarship.

While tribal animosity exists in many other fields, it’s still unfortunate that it exists in information disciplines. But it does. And students are well served in knowing that before starting doctoral studies.

If you’re keeping score, I assigned one book and exploited SJSU’s King Library for copies of many of the small chapters from another. The excellent required book was Herb Childress, The PhDictionary: A Glossary of Things You Don’t Know (but Should) about Doctoral and Faculty Life, (Chicago: University of Chicago Press), 2016. Honest, no holds barred, and extremely well-written.

The book we used many chapters from was Karen Kelsky’s The Professor is In. Kelsky’s work concentrates more on the vagaries and precarity of the PhD labor market and how to prepare for it. It’s a shame we couldn’t use the new edition, but it’s not due out until just after class ended!

So, raise your hand if you ever had doubts about your capacities for completing your PhD. I’ll be putting my own hand up now, too…

Acknowledgements:

I’d like thank a few people for helping me think through offering this class. First, I appreciate my colleagues in our innovative Gateway PhD program, several of whom I was able to visit in Manchester, U.K., this June. Our Gateway students also inspired and informed my approach to thinking about doctoral studies. Finally, I’m very appreciative of having Dr. Bill Fisher (emeritus) as a close colleague and neighbor(!), in Eugene, Oregon,  to “kick around” so many of the ideas I put into the class. Bill also helped me secure many of the chapters in Kelsky’s book that the King Library was being stingy about!