Everything you wanted to know about part-time doctorates?

I have recently reflected elsewhere on my tips to doing a part time-doctorate and my tips for what can help if you are supervising a part-time doctorate. I think there are some real distinct benefits of doing a doctorate part-time, especially when the focus of the study relates to policy or practice. The extended thinking time to work through the arguments in your thesis that the part-time mode allows for is one of the greatest benefits in my mind and something which can really benefit the doctoral researcher.

Additionally, I followed this up with my tips for thriving during the part-time doctorate at the inaugural seminar of the professional doctorate society (@ProfDocSoc on twitter). There is hopefully a recording that I will add soon but the seven key areas I discussed were:

• Embracing your identity

• Building your tribe

• Managing your project as opposed to it managing you

• It being your own race….

• And the race being a marathon not a sprint

• You can’t drink from an empty glass

• Always leave threads to pick up…

However, the part-time experience is one where there is a significant gap in the literature. Whilst there are many excellent blogs and books covering the process of studying for a doctorate, many of these focus on the full-time experience. This is something I am working on helping address in the near future and if anyone would like to share there experiences of undertaking a part-time doctorate on this blog, please do get in touch.