Completing a PhD While Working Full-Time - Reflections from My Defense

Created on July 01, 2024

2024   ·   phd,   education,   career,   research,   tropical-cyclones   ·   blog

Standing before the defense committee at IHE Delft last June, I had a surreal moment of clarity. I had been living in two time zones for two years—both literally and figuratively. My day started at 6 AM California time with a check-in with my PhD supervisors in Delft before my workday began at Deltares USA. My evenings alternated between night classes (thanks to the 9-hour time difference) and dissertation writing sessions. And now, at last, I was defending “Navigating the Storm: New Approaches to Tropical Cyclone Risk Analysis.”

The most common question: Why would you do a PhD part-time while working full-time?

Fair question. The honest answer is complicated, but it starts with a realization I had in 2021.

The Decision

I’d been at Deltares USA for three years, leading coastal hazard projects, securing federal grants, publishing regularly, and supervising graduate students. By conventional measures, things were going well. But I kept encountering a gap - not in my technical abilities, but in the depth of theoretical frameworks I wanted to explore.

The tropical cyclone forecasting methods I was developing for the U.S. Navy raised fundamental questions about uncertainty quantification that I couldn’t fully address in project timelines. The compound flooding frameworks I was building for USGS demanded a level of probabilistic rigor that required stepping back from application to dig into the science. I had practical problems that needed theoretical solutions, and theoretical questions that industry timelines couldn’t accommodate.

So in late 2021, I reached out to my former colleagues at Delft. Prof. Dano Roelvink, Dr. Ap van Dongeren, and Dr. Jose Alvarez Antolinez agreed to advise me on a part-time PhD program. The deal was clear: I’d continue my full-time research leadership role at Deltares USA, and the PhD would formalize and extend the storm risk analysis methods I was already pioneering.

My wife thought I was slightly insane. She was probably right.

The Reality

Here’s what no one tells you about part-time PhDs: they’re not actually “part-time.” They’re a second full-time job that you somehow fit into the margins of your first full-time job.

My schedule looked like this:

  • 6:00-7:30 AM: Dissertation writing or calls with Delft advisors (9-hour time difference meant early mornings)
  • 8:00 AM-6:00 PM: Deltares USA work - leading projects, writing proposals, supervising students, running models
  • 6:00-11:00 PM: More dissertation work, literature review, responding to advisor comments
  • 11:00 PM-04:00 AM (periodically): Classes live-streamed from Delft. My classmates were starting their day; I was ending mine.
  • Weekends**: Split between family time and research (I feel that my wife deserves a co-authorship on this PhD)

The evening classes were simultaneously the hardest and most valuable part. There’s something surreal about sitting in your home office in California, watching a lecture being taught in real-time in Delft, while your drink another cup of evening coffee. But those classes forced structure into the program. The fixed class schedule created non-negotiable boundaries.

My dissertation research on uncertainty quantification on tropical cyclone generation became the foundation for the ONR probabilistic forecasting project I was leading. The synthetic track generation I developed for Chapter 3 got tested in real-world USGS applications. My PhD literature review identified gaps that became grant proposals. My grant-funded work generated datasets that became dissertation chapters.

The research fed itself. But it required treating every project, every paper, every grant as part of a coherent research program rather than isolated tasks.

What I Learned

1. Industry research experience is an asset, not a liability

There’s sometimes a perception that if you’re in industry, you can’t do “real” research. Having to defend research choices to federal agencies, justify methods to practicing engineers, and see models fail in real-world applications made the science better. My dissertation wasn’t a set of theoretical exercises - it was battle-tested frameworks that USGS, the Navy, and state agencies actually use.

2. You need uncompromising advisors

Dano, Ap, and Jose never gave me a pass because I was working full-time. When a chapter wasn’t good enough, they said so. When my methods needed better validation, they pushed back. The PhD has value precisely because the standards didn’t bend for my circumstances. Some of my toughest advisor meetings happened at 6 AM California time after I’d worked late the night before. Those meetings made the work credible.

3. Your research program is bigger than your dissertation

By the time I defended, my dissertation represented about 30% of my actual research output during those two years. I’d also published papers on San Francisco Bay flooding, Alaska coastal erosion, and Puget Sound compound hazards - none of which were in the dissertation. The PhD wasn’t the entirety of my research program. It was the theoretical tropical cyclone core.

4. Time zones are brutal, but they force clarity

When you have one 90-minute video call per week with advisors across nine time zones, you learn to communicate efficiently. Every meeting had a clear agenda. Every draft chapter came with specific questions. Every email was precise. There’s no room for ambiguity when your next conversation is seven days away. This constraint made me a better researcher.

5. Evening classes connect you to a community

The live evening classes were exhausting, but they were also the moments when the PhD felt most real. Seeing other doctoral students wrestling with the same writing questions, hearing their research challenges, getting feedback on preliminary results - this created intellectual community across 5,000 miles.

The Defense

The defense itself felt anticlimactic in the best possible way. After two years of intense work, the questions from the committee felt almost… enjoyable? They pushed hard on my uncertainty quantification approaches (as they should have), questioned my synthetic storm validation methods (fair), and challenged my assumptions about future hurricane climatology (excellent point).

But here’s what struck me: the questions weren’t about whether the work was rigorous enough. They were about where it goes next. What new research directions does this enable? How do these methods extend to other hazards? What are the fundamental limitations we still need to solve?

One committee member asked: “You’ve developed these methods for tropical cyclones in the main ocean basin. Could this framework apply to compound flooding from cyclones that affect the Europe under future conditions?” I realized in that moment that yes, absolutely it could - and that’s probably my next research direction.

I realized the defense wasn’t really an end point. It was the committee’s way of saying: “Okay, now you’re equipped to ask harder questions. Go do that.”

Was It Worth It?

Absolutely.

Not because I needed the credential - I had a successful research career before starting. And not because it made me a better modeler - I was already doing this work.

The PhD was worth it because it gave me permission to think bigger. To spend months investigating a fundamental question about forecasting hurricane uncertainties without worrying about project deliverables. To write papers that explored theoretical frameworks rather than just reporting results. To train myself in probabilistic methods that I knew I’d need for the next decade of research but didn’t have time to learn properly in project work.

It forced me to step back from doing coastal science to thinking about how coastal science should be done. That shift in perspective, from practitioner to methodologist, is what I needed to build the research program I want to lead.

The evening classes, the early morning meetings, the weekends spent coding while my friends were hiking in the Sierra Nevada, all of it was an investment in being able to ask questions that span fundamental physics and operational applications. In building research that matters both for advancing the field and for protecting communities.

What’s Next

I defended in June 2024.

That part-time PhD was never just about finishing a dissertation. It was about building the foundation for a research program I want to spend the next 30 years developing. About training myself to ask questions that span fundamental physics and operational applications. About earning the right to supervise the next generation of coastal hazard researchers.

Growing up in the Netherlands, where half the country sits below sea level, I learned early that coastal adaptation isn’t academic—it’s existential. But making it work requires both: the rigorous science that universities enable and the operational implementation that industry and government demand.

The PhD taught me how to bridge that gap. Now I want to build a research group that does it at scale.

Dissertation: “Navigating the Storm: New Approaches to Tropical Cyclone Risk Analysis and Their Implications for Coastal Flooding Predictions”
Defense: June 2024, Delft University of Technology / IHE Delft
Advisors: Prof. Dano Roelvink, Dr. Ap van Dongeren, Dr. Jose Alvarez Antolinez Full text: Available here

To whoever is considering a part-time PhD while working: yes, it’s difficult. Yes, it’s exhausting. Yes, you’ll question your sanity at midnight on a Tuesday when you’re in a night class while receiving work emails about a deadline. But if your work and research can inform each other, if you have advisors who challenge you to uncompromising excellence, and if you’re asking questions that have consequence—then it’s not just possible. It’s life-changing.

The evening classes were harder than I expected but more valuable than I could have imagined. They gave rhythm, community, and accountability. They reminded me that I wasn’t just doing a PhD—I was becoming part of a community of scholars pushing the boundaries of coastal science.

Two years later, I’m not just Dr. Nederhoff. I’m a researcher with frameworks, methods, and questions that will shape the next decade of my work. That’s what made every 6 AM advisor meeting and every midnight class worth it.