3 ms·

When 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

When 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 ago
yeah, 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 ago
  My 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 ago
  I 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
Not excusing the length of the OP's PhD, but I'm assuming you entered with a master's? In the US you typically start a PhD straight out of undergrad, and then the first entire year (and usually part of the second) are essentially doing a master's in the subject. It might also be field dependent, but 5 years for a US PhD is not unreasonably long IMO because you hardly start the real research work until year 2 at best, probably year 3 by the time you're suitably competent to make legit progress. It's also very common to just staple together published papers here as one's thesis (in the sciences). I think the real problems here are: 1. PhD admissions has gotten increasingly competitive, so now a lot of people need to take shitty predoctoral RA positions for 2 years before they even get to start the PhD. Though this means they should be quicker to be able to start a project once they're in, many programs are inflexible with the expected Y1/Y2 timeline. 2. Some advisors are real assholes and will purposefully hold back students because a 6th+ year PhD student gives very good value per dollar. This is something programs really need to do a better job of protecting against. There's also just advisors that are bad at mentoring/project management (it's not like it is part of their training really), and while a strict cap on the duration of the degree might nominally address this, it's not a good solution for the long term health of the system. 3. To get a tenured professorship is increasingly competitive, and already exceedingly so. Once you start a postdoc you are more "on the clock" in some ways, and where you do your postdoc(s) can be hugely important to if you will get a tenure track offer. So there are also many students that purposely keep PhD status for an extra year just to give themselves more time to find a postdoc they want and make sure they've wrapped up their PhD papers before starting. My impression is that a lot of similar issues exist with academia in the EU, they're just not as baked directly into the PhD experience. Which makes the PhD there much more suitable for someone planning an industry exit all along. Kind of ironic given the US love of industry more generally. Granted, I mostly meet international researchers who chose to exit to the US for one reason or another at some stage of their career, which is a biased sample. But there have been a lot of recent articles about postdoc protests in some European countries as well. The dragging on of career "training" in a ridiculously competitive job market, where the trainees are the primary labor source, is still a problem for academia regardless of when the terminal degree is conferred.
- iamflimflam1 3y ago

el_oni 3y ago

yeah, 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 ago
My 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 ago
I 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

Not excusing the length of the OP's PhD, but I'm assuming you entered with a master's? In the US you typically start a PhD straight out of undergrad, and then the first entire year (and usually part of the second) are essentially doing a master's in the subject. It might also be field dependent, but 5 years for a US PhD is not unreasonably long IMO because you hardly start the real research work until year 2 at best, probably year 3 by the time you're suitably competent to make legit progress. It's also very common to just staple together published papers here as one's thesis (in the sciences). I think the real problems here are: 1. PhD admissions has gotten increasingly competitive, so now a lot of people need to take shitty predoctoral RA positions for 2 years before they even get to start the PhD. Though this means they should be quicker to be able to start a project once they're in, many programs are inflexible with the expected Y1/Y2 timeline. 2. Some advisors are real assholes and will purposefully hold back students because a 6th+ year PhD student gives very good value per dollar. This is something programs really need to do a better job of protecting against. There's also just advisors that are bad at mentoring/project management (it's not like it is part of their training really), and while a strict cap on the duration of the degree might nominally address this, it's not a good solution for the long term health of the system. 3. To get a tenured professorship is increasingly competitive, and already exceedingly so. Once you start a postdoc you are more "on the clock" in some ways, and where you do your postdoc(s) can be hugely important to if you will get a tenure track offer. So there are also many students that purposely keep PhD status for an extra year just to give themselves more time to find a postdoc they want and make sure they've wrapped up their PhD papers before starting. My impression is that a lot of similar issues exist with academia in the EU, they're just not as baked directly into the PhD experience. Which makes the PhD there much more suitable for someone planning an industry exit all along. Kind of ironic given the US love of industry more generally. Granted, I mostly meet international researchers who chose to exit to the US for one reason or another at some stage of their career, which is a biased sample. But there have been a lot of recent articles about postdoc protests in some European countries as well. The dragging on of career "training" in a ridiculously competitive job market, where the trainees are the primary labor source, is still a problem for academia regardless of when the terminal degree is conferred.

iamflimflam1 3y ago