Part-time PhDs and Parkinson’s Law or when more time is actually not a good thing
JUNE 2 — PhD programmes in the country remain quite the rage. Government initiatives like MyBrain 2.0 (or MyPhD) and visa options like Graduate Pass have ensured a steady stream of local and foreign post-graduate students into our academic institutions.
While, as a whole, the increase in the number of PhD graduates should bring a net gain to our country, some issues have already arisen chiefly of which is the high number of unemployed doctoral scholars.
But I want to focus on another pressing issue usually associated with post-graduate programmes, especially PhDs.
I’ve spent about six years working with post-graduate students and one non-negotiable statistic stands out: The part-timers as a whole do worse than the full-timers.
Yes, yes there are exceptions of course. But these always prove the rule which is that if you’re going to do an MBA, DBA, PhD, etc. your chances of successful completion (within, oh, 20 years or less) rise by a whole lot if you skip the part-time groove and jump in full-time.
One huge problem with part-time is the nasty existence of Parkinson’s Law i.e. that work expands (or, in our context, delays?) to fill up the time available for its completion.
Put simply, the more time is given the more work people will feel they need to do simply because of the extended duration.
A cute analogy is the average buffet breakfast at any hotel. On a normal day we eat our breakfasts based on our budget and our daily habits which, I guess, would usually be one portion or so.
But if we were to stay a few nights at some fancy hotel, suddenly our breakfasts are potentially unlimited since it’s a buffet.
Ditto, the makan version of Parkinson’s Law! (see note 1)
However, I think the problem with a part-time PhD isn’t even that more work actually gets done; it’s the perception slash delusion that one needs to do more (because of the extended time), all of which eventually produces hopelessness and despair. Result? The candidate drops out.
Because a PhD already involves a lot of work as it is. There are the (usually) extensive amounts of reading involved because how do you jump-start an investigation without first knowing what’s relevant, what’s pertinent, what’s already been found, what’s being studied, who the key players and writers are, what’s considered “acceptable” research in the field, what methods are endorsed, future trends and so on.
If holding a PhD in some topic renders you an expert, how can a wannabe expert not spend the requisite time absorbing what every other expert more or less takes for granted on the topic?
Hence, unless we’re going to give up academic integrity and just ask Gemini or DeepSeek to write our 70,000+ words for us, we absolutely need to put the time in to draft out what we have to say.
Like building the Great Wall of China, it’s one brick — or, in this case, one word — at a time. And that’s a whole lot of “bricks” a PhD student has to lay down.
And all this is without the psychological curveball of Parkinson’s Law!
A part-time PhD would, by all accounts, insert this law into a student’s psyche and make that Great Wall feel like an even greater one.
Now for the bad news.
Part-time PhD candidates are usually part-timers because they have a full-time job on their hands.
This means not only less time to work on their academic research (duh), it also means less “mindshare” or emotional leverage to focus on their theoretical background or literature reviews or what-not.
Hence, again, why in a globe where the average drop-out rate of PhD programmes is 40-50 per cent, part-timers have a categorically higher risk of non-completion than full-timers.
So am I suggesting that you either do a full-time PhD or not at all?
Well, obviously not.
I hope this piece helps as a reminder that when you have more time on your hands (for something as complex as a PhD) it means that time management becomes even more important.
Make no mistake: A PhD done part-time is more challenging than one done full-time.
Ensure the structure and scope. Don’t allow anyone, not even your supervisor, to tell you to take all the time you need.
Make sure your thesis is worked out relatively well from the start. Give yourself no mercy on the chapter deadlines. Heck, ask your boss for a sabbatical if possible.
Think and study like a full-timer whatever the official university acceptance letter states.
Don’t let Parkinson’s Law derail your research. All the best.
Note 1: Parkinson’s Law is also displayed every day by every major IT system-integration project that budgets years and years to implement a new system for their organisation.
Somehow the lesson is never learnt that the longer you “let” a project continue, the more it will be hit with complications and problems.
* This is the personal opinion of the columnist.
المصدر: Malay Mail
