Inventing a different kind of PhD program: The UWaterloo experience

Guest post by Dr Emmett Macfarlane

Today’s post is written by our colleague Emmett Macfarlane, writing about the University of Waterloo’s new PhD program in Political Science. Offering opportunities for experiential learning and a focus on public-facing scholarship, the program is a great example of program design ‘for the public good.’

The Department of Political Science at Waterloo launched a new PhD Program in 2022, after several years of careful thinking about not only its design and features, but also its objectives at a time when many people argue that Canada produces “too many” PhDs, at least in the social sciences and humanities. Our faculty is a highly research-oriented group featuring many nationally and internationally renowned scholars, and we stood out as perhaps the largest political science department in Canada without a disciplinary PhD (about half of our faculty contribute to an interdisciplinary PhD in Global Governance).

When we began talking about a disciplinary PhD Program, we were very conscious of not simply replicating the standard approach of other departments across the country. We recognized the commonly cited statistic that approximately 75 percent of social science PhDs end up in careers outside of academia. Would we just be exacerbating a broader problem? Political science doctoral programs – like those of many other disciplines – tend to focus almost exclusively on academic research and preparation for scholarly careers. There were scant entrenched, formalized program elements geared explicitly towards non-academic career paths.

As a collective, our faculty tend to have research programs that are sharply focused on matters of policy and social concern. Many of our faculty have “real world impact”, from colleagues doing community-based research to those heavily involved in providing policy advice to governmental, social, non-profit, and private organizations at the local, national, and international levels. How could we leverage this to create something innovative, unique, and most importantly, student-oriented? And how could we do this as a mid-sized department of 20 faculty members at a time of severe resource scarcity?

We soon settled on a program design that maximizes student options and flexibility, allowing them to opt into different streams geared towards their ultimate career aspirations. All students enter into the ‘regular’ program, which includes typical core requirements: a year of coursework, leading to comprehensive field exams, followed by a thesis proposal, and finally the thesis itself. Even within these core requirements, we opted for customization and flexibility: students can opt to take a second major field (i.e. International Relations or Canadian Politics) or create a ‘custom concentration’ for their second area of study, which can be a focused theme within their major field (for example, security, rights, environmental policy, etc.), based on their coursework. The thesis format itself is also up to the student, and can range from the traditional dissertation of 200-350 pages, to the increasingly popular ‘publication model’, or an alternative format altogether (for example, a documentary), providing it meets the benchmark requirements of scholarly rigour, originality, and sufficient depth.

Beyond the regular stream of the program, students can opt into the Experiential Stream or the Teaching Stream. The Experiential Stream is centred around the University of Waterloo’s co-op program, the largest of its kind in the world, and allows students to seek 12 months of co-op experience, but students can also opt for shorter internship/placements without the co-op designation. The Teaching Stream incorporates enhanced, faculty-guided teaching training and Professional Development.

We also developed formal Professional Development requirements, beginning in Year 2 of the program, including six core department-delivered modules (usually consisting of half-day seminars/workshops) covering topics like ‘communicating research to non-academic audiences’ or career-building/networking, etc. Our MA students also benefit from the availability of these seminars/workshops.

Additional PD requirements beyond those offered by the department also allow PhD students to pursue enhanced methods or skills training tailored to their own research interests, pushing them to extend their skills beyond what is taught in our required methods course. Students in the Experiential Stream have additional PD requirements geared towards non-academic career development. Students in the Teaching Stream have discrete requirements geared towards enhanced teaching training, including programming from Waterloo’s Centre for Teaching Excellence as well as faculty-mentored teaching training (usually including the opportunity to teach a course).

The Program’s design appears to be attractive to prospective PhD applicants. We’ve immediately emerged near the top of the Faculty of Arts in terms of doctoral application numbers, and have thus far met or exceeded our relatively modest targets of four students per year (we tend to have 10-15 Master’s students per year, making for very active but manageable graduate supervisory loads, overall). Now in its third year, our PhD Program boasts 17 students total (three part-time).

Our key challenges are organizational. I suspect the first couple of cohorts have felt a bit like guinea pigs as we onboarded the different components of the program. With a lot of moving parts, including the organization of field committees for exam reading lists and defences, student thesis committees, and tasking faculty members with leading different PD modules or to do teaching training, there are additional demands on faculty resources/time associated with the added complexity of the program. We will also have to continually review the effectiveness of the program’s various elements, particularly as students begin to graduate from the program over the next few years. But we are committed to ensuring the program remains student-focused, flexible, and rewarding.

If you’re interested in sharing your program design or redesign experience with subscribers to Reimagining Graduate Education, please send us a message:

Help advance broader discussion of graduate education! Ask your university and local libraries to order a copy of For the Public Good: Reimagining Arts Graduate Programs in Canadian Universities.

Praise for For the Public Good: Reimagining Arts Graduate Programs in Canadian Universities:

• “It is the kind of quietly good book we need to see more of. … This book provides a very solid description of the process of defining and developing excellent, sustainable arts programs that serve students rather than academics. And not only is it dead-on in terms of its recommendations about how to design and evaluate programs, it has a lot of helpful matrices and worksheets to help those who are put in positions requiring them to do exactly that … More like this, please." – Alex Usher

• “Nearly half the book is dedicated to charting a transformative course for liberal arts departments.... If For the Public Good can provide the impetus for social sciences and humanities departments to refine their graduate studies programs, the career outcomes for tens of thousands of grad students will be the better for it. That alone would move the needle on Canada’s public good problem." – Literary Review of Canada

Related articles:

• Arts graduate education in Canada should be redesigned around students’ and society’s needs (May 2024)

• Arts graduate programs have an opportunity and a need to focus on talent development (June 2024)

• Canada actually needs more arts graduate students. We’ve just been doing it wrong (paywall, The Globe and Mail) (August 2024)