Interdisciplinary: Ph.D. Program In The Built Environment
Who Are Our Students?
How Many Students? How Long Are They Here?
3 to 6 students per year will be admitted to the CAUP Ph.D. in the Built Environment (1-2 per specialization). This represents the availability of faculty and financial-research support resources and an equitable distribution across the three areas of specialization.
Expected Time for Program Completion:
The expectation is that students will normally take five to six quarters to complete their coursework and two to three years to complete their dissertations (very likely a shorter time for students with an engineering or computational background than for students with a design or humanities background). Thus, each cohort likely will be enrolled for approximately four or five years.
Who Are Our Students?
Applicants to our Ph.D. Program largely come from two major groups.
1. Applicants with a graduate professional degree in a relevant field who are seeking the final credential for an academic career or pursuing research and
2. Applicants with a Master's degree in a relevant field and a "liberal" interest in pursuing a core area that actually focuses—as a mode of specialization—on the built environment as a complex, unified phenomena in its own right (rather than as "atomized" or somewhat incidental to the goals of other disciplines and practices).
There are a substantial number of such professionals who are finding either that they now need the Ph.D. given the increased requirements of universities or who are interested in mid-career transition (inquiries frequently come from already-employed faculty who want to go on to complete a Ph.D.). In the academy, there is an increased demand for people who can teach the professional core curriculum and also direct advanced research; in the non-academic research sector, there is increasing interest in sophisticated researchers who understand the concerns and speak the languages of professional practice.
Students will come who want to focus on the built environment itself, since in this Program the subject matter would be studied within the context of the explicit integration of the relevant elements, rather than as a fraction of the larger set of different concerns proper to art history, art, engineering, or as an isolated "silo" in the world of professional and industrial activity. There is a substantial body of theory and research literature that demonstrates that it is precisely because of the disciplinary specialization that now exists, a unified understanding of the built environment is not occurring (for example, Henri Lefebvre, The Production of Space); similarly, the professional practitioners and firms who provide counsel to the College contend that just such a unified focus is what is needed to change practice as well as research.