A doctorate is very different from a bachelor's degree. The program is more difficult, of course, but it is also structured differently, with different expectations and requirements. This node is designed to explain the hoops that a student must jump through in many humanities Ph.D. programs in the United States and Canada. Much of what I am about to say does not apply to universities in the U.K. and Europe, which tend to focus much less on coursework and much more on independent research. Even within North American universities, programs can vary wildly. And degrees in the sciences and social sciences are a completely different beast from humanities degrees, with more of an emphasis on lab time and more possibilities for collaboration. With those caveats in mind, then, here is a general picture of life in graduate school.

1. The Admissions Process
   
   This has been covered very well in another node, so I will not rehearse it all here. I will simply say that, since most of the deadlines for graduate admissions are in November and December -- a full ten months before you start your program -- you have to start preparing early. If you are planning to go directly from the B.A. to the Ph.D. -- not an approach that students take very often any more, but which is still permitted in some American schools -- that means you're going to be gathering materials for your application package before you've even begun your senior year. If you're doing an M.A., the process is a little easier, particularly if you're planning to continue at the same university.



2. Coursework
   
   This is not too different from the coursework you experienced as an undergraduate. Just quintuple the reading and get used to writing the equivalent of a term paper every week, and you'll be fine. No, really.
   
   Graduate courses in the humanities are usually conducted as seminars, meaning that you will probably be leading discussion frequently -- you may have to summarize the week's assigned reading for the class, read out your most recent assignment, or prepare a short presentation on the theme of the session. Even when you aren't on stage, you can't really cower in the corner and hope that the professor doesn't pick on you with a really tough question, either -- graduate courses have few enough students that everyone will be expected to contribute.



3. Language Exams
   
   In many disciplines, particularly history, classics, religious studies, and comparative literature, graduate students will be expected to master the languages of scholarship in their chosen field. In my case, the required languages were French and German, since those are the languages in which most scholars of Biblical Studies publish their work. However, depending on your area, you may be required to take a test in Italian, Russian, or some other language instead.
   
   Note that this is not the same as mastering the language of your topic. I had to learn Greek and Latin so that I could read ancient documents -- I was not tested on these, but you might be. The modern languages, by contrast, prepare you for keeping abreast of what is going on in the discipline today.
   
   Unfortunately, language support in many North American graduate programs is very poor, and you may have to learn your languages on your own time, outside of regular coursework. If you take formal classes, you will either have to audit them or pay for them out of your own pocket. I had to learn German from a textbook in one single, awful summer. I passed the test, but at a high price: I detest the language now, associating it with drudgery and compulsion.



4. Comprehensive Examinations ("comps")
   
   These are also known as "qualifying examinations" ("quals") or "candidacy exams." Different universities deal with these in different ways: usually you write between three and five exams on a broad range of topics within your field, in order to prove that you have a general mastery of your discipline (specific mastery of your chosen topic will be proven later, with the dissertation).
   
   In my program, I had to submit a bibliography of 3-5 pages for each of five examinations; I was expected to know the general arguments of every book listed in those twenty-odd pages. The good news: my exams were open-book. The bad news: they were eight hours each. Some of my professors discussed the exam questions with me ahead of time, but not all of them did, and in at least one case I was nailed on a book I hadn't read. To this day I believe that is why I didn't pass with distinction.
   
   Oral examinations ("vivas") are not as popular in North America as they are in the U.K. -- at least not before the dissertation defense itself -- but occasionally comps will have an oral component.



5. The Dissertation Proposal ("prospectus")
   
   After you pass your comps, it is time to assemble a dissertation committee and present the outlines of your project to them. I was given some freedom in choosing the members of my committee, and I was fortunate in that all the professors were supportive and civil. However, as my interests changed over the next few years, and as certain professors retired and others came to replace them, my committee changed too, so I learned not to depend too heavily on particular individuals.
   
   I have heard dozens of horror stories about graduate students who clash with members of their committees, or what's even worse, graduate students caught in the middle of clashes within a committee (sometimes playing out rivalries that are decades old). The prospectus is a good time to suss these problems out, and to work to prevent fractures from opening up into chasms if at all possible. Of course, some departments are so dysfunctional that this isn't possible; if that's the case, well, all I can say is that you had probably best get out.
   
   In some cases, including mine, the dissertation prospectus itself has to be defended. My prospectus defense was gruelling, which upset me for a long time. Nevertheless, the hard questions that the committee asked forced me to refine my proposal and I think my dissertation was much, much better for it. My story has a happy ending, but I'd be lying if I told you that all stories did.



6. Congratulations! You are now ABD!
   
   ABD is an informal but very common acronym for All But Dissertation; I've heard that some people will even put it on business cards and treat it like a degree. A very few American schools will actually give you a degree when you get this far: sometimes called the M.Phil., it is a reward for doing what usually amounts to three years of coursework and exams. In most cases, though, ABD is not a degree or anything like it; it's simply a milestone.
   
   Some more old-fashioned universities say that an ABD student has advanced to candidacy; technically, a Ph.D. candidate is one who has completed comps and a prospectus. In other words, not everybody in a given program will be a "candidate" for the degree, but only the ABD's.
   
   One short generation ago, being ABD meant that it was time to start applying for academic positions. Even ten years ago, Ph.D. candidates could sometimes be hired into tenure track jobs. The job market is so glutted now, however, that this almost never happens any more. Want ads do often say that ABD's will be considered for positions, but in practice, people who have finished their dissertations and who already have some teaching experience under their belt are in competition with ABD's and have every single advantage it is possible to have in the search. Unless you're some kind of prodigy, you're not going to get hired for anything but adjunct (what Canadians sometimes call sessional) work until you defend. It all boils down to this: you've got to write the dissertation. And this is when things get bad.



7. The Dissertation ("the diss"; rarely on these shores, but frequently in the U.K., the "thesis")
   
   There are a few highly organized and efficient people who can whip off a dissertation in six to eight months. The rest of us are... not like that.
   
   Let's say, just for the sake of this node, that now it's time for you to write a book. A dissertation is not a book, for reasons that I might go on to describe in another node some day. Still, it's like a book, in that it's between two and five hundred (or, in the case of one of my colleagues, a thousand) pages long, and it's filled with footnotes, and it's trying to answer a question or explain a concept or translate or annotate an obscure text. Or something. You worked that out in your prospectus in step 5 above, though a few months later your prospectus is starting to feel more and more hopeless and naive and unworkable, and your advisor is pushing back in ways you weren't expecting, and your reading is going so fucking slowly, and your funding has run out, and WHY OH WHY AM I HERE.
   
   For most graduate students, writing the dissertation is a long, arduous process, filled with misery and self-doubt. No longer blessed with the structure of coursework or the up-front pressure of comps, and often isolated from their peers, graduate students' days stretch out into meaningless grey expanses of time. I remember experiencing months at a stretch in which I literally did not know what day of the week it was: all I knew was that accusatory blank screen and elbow-high piles of overdue library books. If a graduate student was even slightly prone to procrastinating before beginning her program, then suddenly she would find herself taking part in activities that she didn't even enjoy just to get away from the diss. And if things were especially bad, even things she had once enjoyed become darkened by guilt and shame, obsessive word-counts, and (these days, though not in my time) constant self-pitying Livejournal updates.
   
   If you think I'm exaggerating, you've either never been in graduate school, or you've never read the time-to-completion statistics for humanities Ph.D.'s -- the average these days, according to a recent study, is approximately seven years. (Warning: that links to a large .pdf)
   
   Here is an etiquette tip: never, ever ask an ABD how his dissertation is going. Unless you've caught him on a good day, the question will always frustrate and embarrass him. Just don't do it. Ask him about anything else. If he wants to talk about his dissertation (and if you're interested), then of course you'll be a good friend by listening to him hash out ideas. But odds are pretty good that he doesn't need any reminders from you that he hasn't written a paragraph in two weeks because he's been humiliated into paralysis by the brilliant counter-argument in a book by some hotshot scholar about whom he knew nothing until just this month.



8. The Dissertation Defense
   
   You're done? Really? Really really? And your supervisor thinks it's okay? Well, then, defend the thing.
   
   A defense is basically a question-and-answer session in which you address the concerns that the committee has about the work you've done: for an hour or so, they will try to find holes in your argument; support the authors you criticize; criticize the authors you support; question your interpretations of difficult texts; and so on. The final form of the committee meets here, which will be made up of your advisor, two to three other readers, and a chair, usually drawn from another department, who does not engage in the discussion but makes sure that protocol is followed.
   
   In an open defense, your fellow graduate students and other interested professors may sit in and watch; the defense might even be advertised on a university listserv or with flyers posted on bulletin boards. Most defenses in the U.S. and Canada are closed, meaning that you are locked in that room with your committee until they're done with you.
   
   If your committee is made up of sadists, the questions that are asked at the defense can be petty or mean, or they might amount to nothing more than grandstanding about a given professor's own pet theories. However, if a defense is done well with a good group of people, it can be truly invigorating. I have no complaints about how mine went, though I have heard plenty of horror stories about nasty, uncalled-for grillings.
   
   Very few people fail defenses. If they had it in them to make it this far, then they will probably pass. However, if the dissertation is a real mess for whatever reason, then the student may be asked to make substantial revisions before earning the degree, and those revisions might be so demoralizing that it is basically equivalent to not earning the degree at all. That's pretty rare, though. The defense can be stressful, but most graduate students come out of even the bad ones all right.



9. Fallout
   
   After this, you will need to take care of some tedious administrative details: making suggested revisions (usually minor ones, such as tweaking footnotes and fixing typos), acquiring signatures from various powers that be within the university, having your dissertation professionally bound and/or providing electronic copies of it for the university's archives, taking care of copyright details, and so on. It won't take long, but it'll feel like FOREVER.

So why do this, anyway?

It's a good question without an obvious answer. Graduate school has its rewards, but they come slowly and at great cost (both financial and emotional). Also, given the nature of the academic job market these days, it is by no means guaranteed that you will get a cushy position as a professor immediately after you finish: you may have to adjunct, sometimes for years, with lousy pay and no benefits, and you might not actually be better off than your friend who's spent the past seven years in retail. In fact, you yourself might have spent that seven years in retail just to keep food on the table while you got the diss written -- and that, needless to say, is its own source of stress and frustration.

For my part, though, I have no regrets. Though I had a lot of long, dark nights of the soul, and though there were a number of points where I was very close to dropping out, and though I got so overwhelmingly sick of my dissertation that five years later I still haven't cracked it open since the day of the defense -- despite all that, overall the experience was a good one and I think I learned what the system was designed to teach me.