What is the level of difficulty in an online Ph.D. program? How does your online Ph.D. program differ from others?

This question seems to be one of the big ones for people either considering or launching into a doctoral program. I’ll suggest a few points that people don’t seem to expect (and for which I’ve compared notes with others).

But first, let me also offer that I worked full time for a Fortune 100 company that paid for my tuition, plus some other expenses. They also paid to send me to some seminars to support my research. So, that was a big help. Having said that:

The doctoral journey takes a lot of time. It’s almost a full-time job in itself. Even when your company is paying for the classes and materials, you’re going to be spending most of your waking hours doing it.

Once you master the research skills (which are the main content of most of the classes), the degree of difficulty isn’t really that tough. Considering that most of your research skills can be taken back to your full-time job, mastering those skills make some things a lot easier.

After getting past your time management issues (family, work, social obligations), the next toughest thing is networking. I was able to use some of my cohort in helping understand key concepts; but once I started my research (concept, proposal, study, dissertation, defense), the big issue was figuring out how to work with all the stakeholders. These included my advisor, my committee, the government (where I got a lot of my data), other authors (for permission in publishing some materials), editors, subject matter experts, and the institutional review board (IRB). Interestingly, project management software, such as Microsoft Project, will help this part out a lot. I learned that documenting conversations and the process of planning, estimating, organizing, and so on, were important skills in research. Again, this helped me back at work.

Schedule. Getting to classes on time, coordinating travel (for remote sessions), and so on, were just details to be handled.

Conversely, the subject matter for my research and dissertation weren’t really that tough once I got on top of the basic concepts, taxonomy, the research framework, and the main research question, then it was just a matter of plodding through.

All of this was worth it, though.