by Dave Jensen » Sat Jul 16, 2005 1:46 pm
My only experience with these professional doctorates is by watching those who have them in Scandinavia (I'm a columnist with Scandinavian Life Sciences). They seem to work great for these people, who work with the best of mentors in both academia and industry, and then go almost universally into PhD positions in industry.
I think they make a great deal of sense here, because the two different career tracks for PhDs are indeed SO different. The academic career track demands certain things that the industry career track doesn't, and a professional doctorate like this may be the answer we need for many young scientists who want to work for industry.
Professional Masters programs have been a mixed bag. Sadly, many of them go out into the world and take BS level jobs. Most employers lump jobs into the PhD category and OTHER, meaning BS/MS level. But a professional doctorate, if it were accepted by industry, would take people directly into those PhD positions. The big thing, as others have mentioned, is whether or not the hiring managers would accept these degrees, since the current crop of hiring managers comes up through the usual academic route. My guess is that if their companies were involved in the program development, they would. So it would take a few big companies like Amgen, Genentech, Biogen-IDEC, etc, to get behind this.
Dave
“There is no such thing as work-life balance. Everything worth fighting for unbalances your life.”- Alain de Botton