The Sweet Completion of a PhD

After the many commencement events of the last two weeks, one of them, the ceremony for newly minted PhDs deserves some reflection. It is labeled the “hooding” ceremony. It is uniquely heartwarming event.

The PhD gown is adorned with a hood of colors specific to the doctoral degree awarded. The ceremony involves the calling up of the PhD candidate and their chair/mentor to the podium. The hood is placed over the head of the candidate. A hug between the two is common; some sort of congratulations is standard.

A funny side note – younger generations tend to be taller than earlier ones. It is common that the PhD candidate is much taller than the chair of their committee. The PhD candidates, by and large, have never experienced the hooding, so they are a bit unschooled in how it is done. When height difference is large, hilarious bending-down of the candidates and jumping-up by the chairs ensues.

My favorite memory of this was a PhD candidate who was approximately 6’10” and a chair/mentor who was about 5’. As they approached to podium, the impending challenge was obvious, and murmured laughter in the audience was heard. First, the candidate leaned over. Too tall. Then, he knelt down. Still too tall. Then he leaned over while kneeling. Success! (All the while, the audience was enjoying the show and loudly laughing and cheering.)

The hooding is, of course, a symbol of a rite of passage. The chair is publicly acknowledging the entrance of the student into the community of scholars in the field, a full member of research enterprise. All the demonstration of critical and creative skills has occurred — deep knowledge of the field, advanced methods of inquiry, abilities to synthesize different sets of developments of the field.

The importance of the ceremony matches the magnitude of the challenge that the PhD candidate has met. PhD programs are grueling, many-year efforts. The PhD is a research degree. This means that originality is a key attribute. For some students, it involves the invention of a problem to tackle in a dissertation, one that has never before been solved. For others, working in large multifaceted research programs, the problem is one connected to a set of related problems. Regardless, the work must be on the edge of human understanding, an effort to explore what has not been explored in the past in the way that is being pursued.

While there can be group support for the student’s efforts, there is an inevitable solitary nature of PhD work. It must be unambiguously the work of the candidate. At times, this is a lonely business.

In addition, it is common that initial ideas for PhD research fail. Sometimes, completely new ideas must be generated. Most often some adjustments to designs and plans must be made. In any case, few dissertations are finished without a series of setbacks. At these moments of setbacks, the chair/mentor can play an important role. When the chair becomes a sounding board of ideas to pursue in face of the setback, the chair can give lifelong lessons in how to maximize the benefits of scholarly work faced with such complexities. The most effective chairs teach the dissertation student how to use apparent setbacks as a source of insight, which can be exploited in later steps.

It is thus completely understandable that many PhD candidates develop an intense intellectual bond with their chair/mentors. They are guides through an intense, original, set of experiences of the PhD candidate. The best chairs do so with the candidate concluding that they have survived the setback and invented a new way forward to their success. Given the failure rate at the edge of human understanding inherent in a research career, such resilience is a very desirable trait.

While there are professional degrees (e.g., physicians) that may require more years of work, they often occur in group settings with teams supporting apprenticeship characters of the work. The solitary achievement of the PhD dissertation work is thus uniquely rigorous.

The hooding ceremony is all the sweeter because of the hard work that is required of those attending it. The ceremony is filled with joy, gratitude, and good humor.