[An irrelevant aside to Ken: You just cost me US $20! (to purchase the
Kindle edition of Ian Morris's "Why the west rules -- for now").]
To Terry:
My note referred to PhD candidates. In most science and engineering fields,
in the United states, I hasten to add, students are admitted into graduate
school directly as a PhD student. The title "candidate" (in some schools,
this is an official designation, in others it is informal) is conferred
after the student has finished required courses and passed their qualifying
exams -- in the United states, graduate students usually take courses for
the first 2 years. The qualifying exam is usually in year 2 or 3.
In design, my experience is that students enter as MA or MS candidates and
then some small number of them go on to the PhD.
In science and engineering in some places (e.g., the UK), there are no
courses for the student: they are assumed to have finished all their
coursework prior to acceptance.
NOTE: Although my statement applied only to PhD candidates, every few years,
I am told -- or i see - a promising young undergraduate publish a paper in a
high-quality peer reviewed journal. One of
my undergraduates at Northwestern submitted a paper to the last Design &
Emotion conference in Chicago (without my knowledge) and to my surprise, it
was accepted. But personally, the Design & Emotion conferences, like all
design conferences, including IASDR, do a terrible job of quality
reviewing.) (I also should say that this was a very superior student who had
spent time as a visiting student at TU Eindhoven and interned for Frog
in Amsterdam and is now employed by Frog Design in San Francisco: so
conference quality aside, this was/is an exceptional student.)
Don Norman
Nielsen Norman Group
KAIST (Daejeon, S. Korea)
[log in to unmask] www.jnd.org
http://www.core77.com/blog/columns/
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