Experiences of a doctoral training centre

The stereotype of the PhD model is that some aging professor gets grant money out of thin air, offers some magic beans to a wide-eyed recent graduate and three years later the jaded, bitter PhD candidate emerges, moaning they haven't seen their supervisor for two and a half years, thesis in hand to take their viva. This system seems to have sufficed for many a year, but now the EPSRC and others are starting to offer something different.

This is where my  PhD, finished about a year ago, comes in. I became a part of MOAC, one of the EPSRCs first doctoral training centres (DTCs). The idea is that you take in a cohort of students, teach them together for a year, ending with an MSc, then send them off to various parts of the university to do a PhD for three (ish) years.

Does it work? In my opinion it has a lot of strengths and is a good complement to the traditional system. Here's my advice on how to run a good DTC:

1.  Get the right people through the door. Able, motivated, independent students. They will not belong inside a cosy, traditional department and are likely to be presented with unfamiliar problems, academic and otherwise - it's not all about raw intelligence, but also about being adventurous.
2. Good administration. The difference between DTCs that I've seen succeed and fail is the administrator. Bad administration means the students feel permanently lost and like they don't belong anywhere.
3. Leadership. Alison Rodger at Warwick drove through the creation of MOAC and got the science departments and university management behind the idea. It simply wouldn't have happened without her. A balance of shrewd politics and pastoral attention seems to be the best mix.

What's different about a DTC?  Well, one thing to consider from the MOAC model is that when choosing a PhD subject the students come with money and can approach an advisor with a project idea. This puts the student in quite a powerful position. Turning down a project doesn't have anything like the consequences of the traditional system where you're wondering 'where will the next offer come from'. Good or bad? I'm not sure, but it does not seem to lead to silly projects. At the same time there must have been a few good projects that failed to get a student.

There's just a few points to contemplate. For some more info on MOAC, see http://www2.warwick.ac.uk/fac/sci/moac/ and for a list of all the EPSRCs DTCs: http://www.epsrc.ac.uk/funding/students/centres/Pages/byuni.aspx