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Grad school is difficult and stressful, but doing novel things normally is. Comfortable boring things make for not-so-good research topics. Also a median time
by cozzyd 7y ago
Grad school is difficult and stressful, but doing novel things normally is. Comfortable boring things make for not-so-good research topics.
Also a median time of 7.5 years for a PhD sounds unlikely... in my field (physics) that's probably more like 90th percentile. Perhaps that length is right for humanities, which do tend to be longer than the sciences, but there are an order of magnitude more STEM PhDs than humanities PhDs and many STEM PhDs are likely shorter than physics.
- pmiller2 7y agoI agree. I couldn't find any statistics, but my impression is that in math, 4-5 years would be typical. At the school I went to, if you started without a Master's degree, 8 years would be roughly (give or take a semester or 2) the maximum amount of time one could spend on a math PhD, so there's no way it can be close to the median time.