Living in Liminal Space

Interviews requested today

Alison Bashford    Acting DDOGS
Jillian Krill    Chair of PhD awards subcommittee of Academic Board
Peter McCallum    Chair of Graduate Studies subcommittee of Academic Board

The mythical PhD handbook

This morning I conducted an interesting exercise. Pretending that I was looking to enrol in a PhD at the University of Sydney I searched the site for general information about PhD degrees, to almost no avail.

The easy page to find is the one with lots of puffery about how faaabulous Sydney is for PhD students. It's links are weird - e.g. if you click the one labelled postgraduate applicants you get taken to a site for coursework in the faculty of nursing. There are links to a couple of professional master's degrees but very little else. But this is the page that you will be taken to whenever you click the link for 'student handbook' on any postgrad research site.

Slightly more difficult to find (requiring a search) are the academic board and other regulations for the awarding of the PhD.

Searching for just 'PhD' will take you to lots of obscure places - the Electron Microscopy Unit, for instance - before you find the Academic Board site. "Doctoral" sends you first to the Institute of Transport and Logistical Studies - I'm sure a popular place to do a PhD - before Academic board for some more useful stuff.

If you go the faculty sites you can find their postgrad student handbooks - but a cross-disciplinary student might not know which faculty they want to enrol in. I certainly didn't - I could have been in Education or Arts (cultural studies). And the one in Education isn't easy to find either.

Nowhere can I find a handbook that brings all this information together for prospective candidates. There's some publications from the Learning Centre, but they are nearly ten years old. The SUPRA (student union) handbooks are the best resource, but there's nothing on what the university wants students to know about its process and policies.

I did quite easily find a link to the ITL's supervisor training program. However, their link to the now-mythical 'handbook' downloads the Fac of Health Sciences student handbook and. like all the other links, takes you back to the page of puffery with no handbook linked from it.