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My PhD took a long time and there’s no shame in that
- bennylava 3y agoHow can you tell someone has a PhD? Don't worry, they will let you know.
- x86hacker1010 3y agoMy partner has one and it’s something that never comes up in a social setting unless someone says “what do you do for work”.
- light_hue_1 3y agoIt doesn't even come up then! "I'm a scientist working on X" doesn't imply to most people "I have a PhD" Anyway, the novelty of the PhD sort of wears off after a few years.
- dillydogg 3y agoTo be honest the novelty of having a PhD is wearing off and I'm writing my thesis now.
- caddemon 3y agoIt can also come up in a more formal social setting if the Dr. prefix is on place setting or RSVP list. Before I was married I used to always RSVP with doctor just because I hated the Ms. prefix.
- tombert 3y agoMy dad has a real PhD in aerospace that he got from one of the “brand name” schools. He doesn’t have that diploma hanging in his office. Instead, he has a framed fake PhDs from “Thunderwood College” [1] framed in his office, because he thinks it’s funny. I think he feels like having a fancy title doesn’t fundamentally make you “more right” about something, and not having a fancy title doesn’t make you “more wrong” either, but he feels that people treat you like you’re smarter if you have a doctorate, so he never brings it up (outside of his resume and the like). [1] https://thunderwoodcollege.com/ https://thunderwoodcollege.com/
- watwut 3y agoUnless they continued in universities or youbare reading their CV, you can't. It is kind of like asking "how do I know someone has license to fly a plane?". You can't unless they tell you.
- iamflimflam1 3y agoI very rarely tell people I have a PhD - why would I?
- a_bonobo 3y agoYou shouldn't shame the student, you should absolutely shame the system that wastes people's life-times like this. 7 1/2 years of being a PhD student means 7 1/2 years of missed career growth, missed retirement funds, missed personal growth (how are you going to start a family in poverty-wages?). In the US postdocs are also counted as trainees (another scam) so people enter their careers in their late 30s, early 40s, with empty retirement accounts, no savings, and vaguely applicable skills. This might have been possible 20, 30 years ago, when OP's PI was training, but nowadays it's just a huge loss that isn't worth the vague scientific gains.
- catsarebetter 3y agoTy for saying this so true
- protastus 3y agoThe system is the cult of academia, which indoctrinates students to go down the funnel of becoming a tenured professor, even though most won't make it to the end. It hides career alternatives because those in the cult are largely ignorant of them. Interactions with loudmouth professors with big egos reinforce the will to persevere and avoid the shame of quitting the cult. I encourage every PhD student to get industry internships, one per year. This needs to be commonplace. It shows them an alternative, gives them a dignified exit (whether they graduate or quit), creates heavyweight competition for the professors with big egos, pays students a decent wage for a while, and injects some novelty on both sides.
- culopatin 3y agoI encouraged my GF to do an internship in the filled she ultimately wanted to work in. She wanted to do her PhD to be more desirable for biotech, and although the program was in bacterial systematics or whatever, it would teach her the tools. Not only she was more capable than she thought, she’s considering not doing the PhD at all. Learning in industry when working with 100 people vs alone with you PI in a lab is IMO much better
- caddemon 3y ago
- boberoni 3y agoThe real PhD was all the failed hypotheses you made along the way.
- extasia 3y agoThis is hitting close to home rn :')
- gumby 3y ago> “I think if someone takes more than 5 years the student is the problem,” the speaker replied tersely. I was devastated. This kind of shaming is common in academia, and disgraceful. Not generally on this topic, but there is no shortage of putdowns.
- vlark 3y ago7+ years is not unusual in the humanities. The sciences need to ease the hell up.
- ZunarJ5 3y agoI needed this, thank you.
- gyrovagueGeist 3y agoI just finished my 6th year, and also needed this, thanks.
- havnagiggle 3y agoGlad it worked out for OP, but NGL that is a long program. Probably the most disappointing part of the essay is still the idea that good experiments proving hypothesis wrong is not publishable. Is that a problem with the research community, or a journal problem, or self-imposed problem? Probably all of the above. I left my PhD program after 3ish years. It was not working out with my advisor. I felt he was abusing research time, more interested in university research as a business than hard science. I'm sure the line is thin for many programs, but he did get in trouble for it years later after I left. His students were shuffled to other advisers and he was removed. So many years lost for so many students. I'm very glad I left when I did, but it's also one of my biggest disappointments as a lover of hard science and engineering.
- extasia 3y agoMy EngD supervisor explained to me that it's harder to prove something doesn't work than that it does. A negative result thus has to pass a much higher bar and prove that it wasn't methodologically flawed in any way, whereas a positive result has a much lower bar to pass.
- caddemon 3y agoThat's an interesting theoretical argument but in practice the much larger reason is that a negative result is not sexy. Regardless, I don't agree with this philosophy when it comes to the functioning of the scientific system. A field like biology has many real results that are highly context-dependent. If we are going to allow people to regularly publish highly controlled studies and then make grand conclusions based on them (with real $$$ impact btw), we sure as shit need people publishing their observations about when something didn't generalize for them. Not every paper needs to be a rock solid scientific conclusion, and it's pretty obvious that in practice many papers now aren't anyway. Why we play this silly game of pretend with scientific formalisms is beyond me. Science is getting larger and more complex, and there is 0 reason to assume that the way to scale is to have every lab try to tackle questions from start to finish in a nearly identical way.
- 3y ago
- GianFabien 3y agoIn my experience one of the big problems is that negative results are not published. So it is probably more common than generally recognised that obvious hypotheses have been explored in the past and found to be false. The key premise of PhD research is to expand the body of knowledge. Incremental results under an experienced PI are easier to come by than substantial steps outside of the popular research areas.
- isykt 3y ago>”I think if someone takes more than 5 years the student is the problem,” the speaker replied tersely. I was devestated. I’m always shocked when adults give any fucks at all what some rando thinks of them. Got a problem with my work? Let’s have it. Give me the run down and we’ll see if you have a point. “The student is the problem” is a completely content-free statement. I wonder if this line is actually made up to make a point, because I can’t actually imagine someone in academia saying something so empty.
- cinntaile 3y ago> I can’t actually imagine someone in academia saying something so empty. The percentage of people in academia that aren't socially gifted is probably higher than in other occupations. I don't see any reason why hearing something like that in academia would be more rare.
- el_oni 3y agoI worked in an office with about 8 other PhD students, was in a research group with another 10, and was friendly with another 10-15. Social skills weren't lacking that much (don't get me wrong, we were a bunch of weirdos by some standards), but mental health certainly was. There is a lot of pressure on PhD students and anxiety and/or depression affected all but a handful. Most people go into the programme wanting to be academics afterwards, so you look up to the academics that are there, listen to what they have to say. At the same time a whole lot of your ego is tied up into the success or failure of your work. If somebody shits on your work, that can break you. I had therapy while in my final year, and so did a bunch of my peers, it's a meat grinder.
- caddemon 3y agoI don't disagree but the statement is also weird from the perspective of objective reality in 2023. My old PhD program's current 5 year graduation rate is way below 50%. I think it's like 10% if you don't count the MD/PhDs that are more likely to get pushed through quickly, but even including them it's not more than 25%. The 6 year graduation rate is barely hitting 50%! I don't know if it's field-dependent or if the Prof was just very out of touch, but graduation in 5 years is an anomaly at this point that actually suggests the person is more likely to have a planned industry (or medical school) exit. Weird to conclude the student is the problem en masse.
- snailtrail 3y ago[flagged]
- iamflimflam1 3y agoWhen I did my PhD in the U.K(back in the early 90s) I had three years of funding to do it. Most people would take 4 years - 3 years full time at university and then the 4th year writing up whilst working. Well supervised students would do it in 3 years and would use the papers they had published as the basis for their thesis. You could only carry on for more than four years under serious extenuating circumstances.
- el_oni 3y agoyeah, I finished mine in 2021. It took me 5 years (had a year off for extenuating circumstances) 3 years of lab work + 1 year off + 1 year writing up. We didn't get any papers out during my actual time there, I wrote up a bunch of my results after i'd finished my viva and that got published in 2022 after I'd switched career tragecteries from science to software. I'm incredibly lucky that my partner had a job that could make ends meet while writing up, and to find a company willing to take on a Chemistry PhD as a data engineer with no proven commercial experience. My experience was a wild ride of high highs and crushing lows, I can't imagine doing that for over 7 years.
- iamflimflam1 3y agoMy one year of writing up was the hardest for me. I had an interesting job and was earning money that compared to my student grant was ridiculous. It was really hard to force myself to finish something that I quickly realised was not going to influence my career in any way. Though I was pretty much hired on the basis that I would have a PhD and the hirer (who had a PhD) took great pleasure in filling the company full of PhDs purely to annoy the CEO who had dropped out of his PhD...
- pvaldes 3y agoI feel like one stubborn unstoppable force of nature often. 17 years. Top that if you can. Yes, I survived. Shook off all the daggers in my back, like a dog under a garden hose, and keep walking my own path, as usually. And not, sometimes the problem is not the student.
- caddemon 3y ago
- aaron695 3y ago50% don't finish PHDs, so it's a humblebrag. (Figures put it at 30%-50% depending) > But as the years passed, I began to worry. I investigated 10 different hypotheses—just to prove each a dead end. We didn’t want to publish papers that raised more questions than they answered. These should have been written up, that would be real science. The system might be broken, but the student should acknowledge that here.