Question: How long would your Ph.D. have taken if everything worked?
We can use mine as an example. I did my grad studies in Microbiology and Immunology, but basically I was doing biochemistry type work (cancer research with a lot of molecular stuff). It took me just over five years to finish this sucker which is pretty typical in North America. Of course, when I take a critical look at my thesis and calculate: “What if this thesis literally shows all of my work, because everything I did, worked? What if I had magic fingers throughout my research and never had a failed experiment!?”
Using this rubric, I calculate that my Ph.D. in biochemistry/molecular biology type work could’ve taken about, DUM-DUM-DUM…
6 months
Note that this figure also includes the 3 months needed to write the damn thesis itself! This means that technically my thesis is reflective of only 3 months of successful experiments: or as I like to think of it — four and a half years of failed experiments!
Bull.
OK, it’s possible that the pathway to a degree in Microbiology and Immunology is very different from that of physics, but other than the subject matter, I don’t think so. I’m perfectly willing to believe that the data one uses for one’s thesis is gathered in three months, and my experience is similar, but that’s not the whole story. A Ph.D. is not just the dissertation — you can’t just write off the experience leading up to it. To claim that you could just walk into the lab and take data means that you had the requisite knowledge and lab experience, which you must have acquired as an undergraduate. And I don’t believe it.
To get my physics degree, I had a summer research grant, followed by two years of classes, along with part-time research, before more than three years of full-time research, then writing. I didn’t come into an established lab; I arrived at grad schools the same year my eventual thesis advisor did, so building up the lab took some time. I could have saved some time if things hadn’t broken — a hole in a new vacuum chamber, requiring it to be dismantled and sent back for repair, a broken feedthrough and ion gauge, problems with the atomic beam oven, lasers dying left and right. All of that added to the time it took, but I didn’t know anything about trapping atoms when I started in the lab, and you can’t fake that experience. Even if you start in an established lab, with more senior students to teach you the ropes, it’s going to take time to learn how all the equipment works and how to run everything. Best case for me, I think, would have been four years — two in the classroom and two in the lab. In reality, it was just a titch over six years from start to turning in the finished copy of my thesis.
Anyone out there with realistic estimates of how long your grad school career would have been, had everything gone right? Compare with the actual.
My PhD took about 4 years.
Most of the results were really obtained in the last year. I would say that a few months would have been enough if one had all the background and had very clear goals to aim at. In reality, all the results I obtained were not set out at the start. They were more “stumbled upon”.
Getting the background and an overall education took the time.
I’m with you an the call of bull, mostly for the same reasons.
My PhD took 6.5 years. Most of the results were obtained in “bursts” of a month here and a month there, but building up the apparatus and getting the experiment to a point (debugging, learning) where we could get good data took years.
Regarding the delays due to things breaking, as a postdoc I worked on a pretty built-up experiment, and the only time I really learned how the thing work was when stuff broke.
So while it’s conceivable that I could have “witnessed” the work that resulted in my PhD in a time of less than 6 months if everything went well, there’s no way I could have had the understanding (or the semi-mastery of the experiment) that’s implied by a PhD in that period of time.
My PhD took four years, and to be honest, most of the stuff worked… so in an ‘ideal’ world I could probably shave at most half a year off it. (If I could skip the classes, probably another year). Most of the length was due to working with living animals, and having to do things on the schedule of their life-cycles rather than mine. If I had worked on flies, I probably could have done everything in a year, but I chose large caterpillars instead….
I’m still working on my PhD, but at best I could shave a year off for things that didn’t work, and maybe a month for days I’ve spent blogging and working on other projects. If I hadn’t had to spend the time develop new methods and learn from them, then sure, I could trim another year of trial and error, things that didn’t work, but from which I learned the lessons that enabled me to do it correctly. Unfortunately, those lessons learned were generally not how to do things from books, but rather learning and inventing new techniques for processing data.
Of course, this is bioinformatics,and I’m specifically in a field where every time I try something new, it IS new…
In contrast, I did my masters in Microbiology and Immunology, and there, the process was incredibly slow and many things simply failed to work, no matter how many times we tried them. Thus, I think the measure of how long a PhD “really” takes is very much field dependent.