Program Information


College: Communication & Information
Degree: PhD in Information
Limited Access: Yes
Contact: iSchool Student Services
Address:
Louis Shores Building (LSB)
Florida State University
Tallahassee, Florida 32306-2100
Phone: (850) 645-3280
Email: ischooladvising@cci.fsu.edu

Ph.D. in Information


The Ph.D. in Information is a research degree designed to produce astute and creative researchers for academic, corporate, nonprofit, or governmental settings. Doctoral students analyze, evaluate, and explain a variety of information phenomena and become familiar with and develop backgrounds in such areas as the social sciences, information science, and/or the humanities, as they relate to information phenomena. Doctoral students will also become aware of the multiplicity of problems in the information field to which these research techniques may be applied. To demonstrate this familiarity, they will perform original research, and report the results of their research in a clearly written dissertation.

The degree is granted only to students who:

  • Have mastered definite fields of knowledge so that they are familiar not only with what has been done in their specific fields but also with the potential and opportunity for further advances;
  • Have demonstrated capacity to do original and independent scholarly investigation or creative work in their selected fields; and
  • Have the ability to integrate their selected fields of specialization with the larger domains of knowledge and understanding (Graduate Bulletin).

Doctoral students participate in research at the Information Use Management & Policy Institute, the eHealth Lab, the Social Media Lab, the iSensor Lab, DETOUR, Innovation Hub, the Institute for Digital Information and Scientific Communication, and the Data Center Server Lab.

FSU’s iSchool PhD students travel nationally and internationally to present research at conferences including the annual meetings of the Association for Information Science and Technology, iSchools, American Library Association, ACM CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems and more.

Most PhD students at FSU receive assistantships in research or teaching with tuition waivers and competitive stipends, health insurance subsidies, opportunities for additional scholarships and travel support, and work in research collaborations with iSchool professors.