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06-15-2025, 07:20 PM
(This post was last modified: 06-15-2025, 07:20 PM by NotJoeBiden.)
My understanding is a big difference is that it has less strict requirements than a PhD. A student can do a project rather than research. This works better for people in industry because you can do a project related to your work, but also dont have to publish it unlike most PhDs who want peer-reviewed research publications. I guess in many ways it is like any professional doctorate in that it focuses more on application than research, but there are certainly PhD that focus on applied sciences and professional doctorates that focus on research.
TLDR: It was developed as a way for people to get doctorates using engineering work they do without publicly releasing company secrets and/or using projects rather than research.
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(06-15-2025, 07:20 PM)NotJoeBiden Wrote: My understanding is a big difference is that it has less strict requirements than a PhD. A student can do a project rather than research. This works better for people in industry because you can do a project related to your work, but also dont have to publish it unlike most PhDs who want peer-reviewed research publications. I guess in many ways it is like any professional doctorate in that it focuses more on application than research, but there are certainly PhD that focus on applied sciences and professional doctorates that focus on research.
TLDR: It was developed as a way for people to get doctorates using engineering work they do without publicly releasing company secrets and/or using projects rather than research.
Excellent post. I fully agree with you. The scenario you mentioned matches mine. I was in a Ph.D. program. Passed the qualifying. Got the congratulations from my dissertation advisors research group. Yay. Now my advisor said that projects from sponsors can go only to full-time residential students, while online students have to get data from their company. I suggested to use public data sets, and he said no conference will publish work from public data sets, and it needs to be original research on original data (never seen-before data). He said he'll sign an NDA, but lol, if you publish to a conference, the whole world sees it, and I'm out of a job. I talked to National Univ and they said they can grant a Ph.D. without publishing to peer-reviewed conferences/journals. So the trade-off is a more desirable degree (Ph.D) from a Tier 4 school vs a watered-down doctorate from a brand name school. I think I'm okay with the D.Eng.