orestes

Hey, guys. I know this isn't the most original topic on this board, but I'm having serious reservations about starting my PhD. I have been accepted with 5 years of full funding (but a paltry stipend) to an excellent university for a PhD in the social sciences. However, since I sent out applications, I have become more apprehensive of whether a PhD is right for me. I applied primarily under the urging of my parents and advisers, all of whom believe that I will excel at the doctoral level, and because I enjoy the idea of teaching. Since then, however, I've done plenty of reading and spoken to a few folks about their doctoral student life and the prospects after school. Between the attrition rate, the difficulty in finding a tenure-track position within reasonable time, etc., it seems like an unwise career choice unless you are fully committed. I am not obviously not fully committed. Making matters worse, while I do have professional experience, I have never really had to properly job hunt -- through luck, great opportunities just made themselves available to me during summer breaks + as part-time work during semesters -- so I don't think I have a full awareness of the professional options available to me. I went through undergrad, to MA, to my PhD application without pause, so Academia is all I really know at this point. Ideally, I would like to take a year off to better consider my options, but in reality, I don't have a great reason for deferment -- I applied under false pretenses (largely because I was digging through the Universities' website, and not adequately going through the wealth of first-person experiences). I don't want to dig myself deeper into a hole, so what is your recommendation for minimizing damage at this point? (To myself, my references, the schools, and to my future prospects should I decide a PhD is the right direction after all.) And how should I communicate that to my programs and advisers?

Thanks for the positive feedback, guys. I'm sure I'm just being paranoid. I just hope I get a response from the dean soon so I can have one less thing nagging me in the back of my mind.

Thanks, LJK. I'm sure I'm overreacting a bit -- I just can't keep myself from doing it (especially since I do see that I made some mistakes -- hence the question about 'plagiarism' becoming 'Plagiarism'). As schools start to contact me (another school notified me that they have recommended me for acceptance) and the whole PhD thing gets closer to being real, I've become really scared that I won't cut it out at the next level (I'm a hard worker, but I don't know if that's a sufficient substitute for intelligence at the doctoral level). I'm sure that's driving a lot of my anxiety right now... That said, if anybody else has additional perspectives (favorable and unfavorable to my predicament), please share.

Hey guys, wanted some feedback on a couple of things. I just received a call from the dean at a doctoral program I applied to and was invited for an interview. During the call, he mentioned that the program apparently runs all application materials through turnitin, and it turns out that my writing sample (the literature review and methods of my masters thesis) was flagged for additional review. He told me that he had yet to review the writing sample himself, but asked if there might have been a reason for that. I was completely surprised -- I definitely did not intentionally plagiarize anything. He was generally nonchalant about it, but said he'd let me know if he found any problems and I urged him to look into it. Now, I definitely looked at several other studies and did go through their literature reviews, taking notes, but every time they noted something interesting from another source, I went to the source and verified the claim and attributed it to the original source. Question #1: Is it plagiarism if you followed a citation and credited the root paper instead of the first paper you saw it in? (Keep in mind, I did go to the root paper to verify claims and in many (but not all) cases actually offered a slightly different interpretation or highlighted other findings.) Also, I just ran my paper through WriteCheck (which uses turnitin, but doesn't link you to source documents it matches text from) and it did identify small parts of text that I copied verbatim (unintentionally -- they were simply findings that I had noted in my notes). Those parts were fully cited, but not quoted, and were never more than a sentence long. (For example: I wrote, 'Benedict (2003) found that in Malaysia, not using condoms can double the likelihood of getting STDs' when I should have written, 'Benedict (2003) found that "in Malaysia, not using condoms can double the likelihood of getting STDs"') I think it amounted to a total of 5 sentences in a 4,000-word lit review+methods, with a handful more instances of "fuzzy" paraphrasing (changing a couple of words, but the rest still matches -- again, coming from my notes -- but fully cited). By the rule, I understand this is plagiarism and I do regret the error (it was sloppiness, and not ill intent). That said, I expect this does happen a fair amount. So: Question #2: Should I be worried that I have committed a serious offense? (And I guess the follow-up becomes, when is 'plagiarism' 'Plagiarism'?) Question #3: If that school does make a determination that I plagiarized, is it common for them to alert other schools? I mentioned in my application the different schools I applied to. (Also, the vast majority of the text matches were utter crap -- things like "Limitations and Future Research" came up as a match.) I'm really scared because I have never had anything like this happen before and I don't know how to react. I cited a large number of sources and tried to be very careful about things, but I can see that I did make a few mistakes. Until I hear back from the dean, I'm terrified that they will determine I intentionally did something wrong. Thankfully, I haven't turned my thesis in for my graduation yet and will definitely be fixing those problems...