Not Only the Sorcerer's Apprentice: Re-Conjuring the PhD
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Without a magic mirror on the wall, Ph.D. students have to look elsewhere for answers. In this paper, we pose the question, “What does it mean to be a Ph.D. in the 21st century?” We explore this issue through our respective social locations, as two first year Ph.D. students from differing backgrounds and as a tenured professor in a Faculty of Education. Our interest lies beyond a critique of the current model and a dualistic consideration of what should or should not be. Instead, we engage auto-ethnography with an analytic-induction approach to consider what postmodern doctoral studies might entail. The discussion is informed by a range of theorists, allowing us to consider multiple voices in the process of inculcation within the canon. Central to our discussion is the motivation of doctoral students and the means by which we can find our place within existing research communities. We examine the responsibility of students in animating knowledge and disseminating it outside the walls of the established academy. With a Ph.D. comes considerable power. The time has come for us to re-think the way we pass the wand from sorcerer to apprentice, and perhaps, even what is the wand.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.012 | 0.025 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.018 | 0.012 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.011 | 0.011 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.015 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.007 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.007 | 0.003 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".