Doctoring the doctorate

In 2020, while quarantined in a South Korean hotel room, I found myself sitting an unusual PhD viva. As with thousands of other students during the Covid-19 pandemic, the defence was done remotely via video link. The twist was that I wasn’t being assessed on a project I had completed under my supervisors; instead, I was being asked about work I had done before I’d even applied to the university. This was a PhD by published work, considering whether I had completed a rigorous body of scientifically valid, original research that was substantial enough to be considered worthy of academia’s highest qualification. And it’s just one of a growing number of alternative ways to complete a PhD.

While a ‘traditional’ PhD in the UK is often thought of as three to four years of study followed by a thesis, alternatives have been around for a long time, says Robert Bowles from the Royal Society of Chemistry’s careers team. ‘With the academic job market, there’s always a demand for publications to be competitive. If you can get a PhD and publications at the same time, that may be considered a benefit,’ he says. ‘Historically, numbers have always been very low for alternative routes, but an employer looking for a research scientist isn’t going to worry too much about how a PhD was achieved. They are looking for you to demonstrate the skills and knowledge that you’ve gained, irrespective of the route you’ve taken. It’s more important to be able to show you’ve got the skills relevant to your role than how you’ve got your PhD.’