Time to get doctorate increases

[Swift]

I thought people here would find this interesting, especially those thinking about getting a Ph.D.

A recent study by the National Science Foundation (link) finds it now takes an average of 7.9 years to go from a B.S. to a Ph.D. Among some of the findings, chemistry averaged 6.9 years, physics and astronomy 7.6 years, and mathematics 7.9 years. It took longer if you received a Masters along the way and if you had a teaching assistantship (as opposed to a research assistantship or fellowship).

Some of this information was from an article in the April 3 issue of Chemical & Engineering News.

[TheBlackCat]

We aren't allowed to spend more than 7 years. That is the upper limit for a post-** PHD, 5 being the unofficial minimum. That is with getting the MS by default (very few people get an MS first).

[ToSeek]

A woman I know and only see at a particular Doctor Who convention once a year has been "almost done with her dissertation" on about the last three occasions, though I got the impression she really meant it this last time.

[Taks]

wow... i'll be 39 when i get mine, i think. i choose a dissertation topic this summer, with a comprehensive in september, then off to the races with research and writing (the writing part is easy for me). of course, i MUST be done by december 2007 as my advisor is fully retired by then... he's no longer teaching after this semester as it is. ugh.

the other statistics would be 3 1/2 years registered as an MS student (part time for half of it, and i switched focus half way resulting in two specializations) and 3 1/2 years registered as a PhD student so 7 total, with 17 years elapsed since my ** to completion of the PhD.

i'm pushing the north end of the bell curve on this one!

taks

[Andromeda321]

So all in all, I look forward to getting a PhD in a little over ten years.
I don't know if that's good or depressing.

[Taks]

it's depressing for me when i think about how long it has taken, and even moreso when i think about how hard it is to pick a topic when your advisor is no longer an active researcher (he's comm, i'm SIGINT, too, which doesn't help).

however, i have learned a lot and proven to myself that good grades only take a bit of effort and primarily, sober study.

taks

[crosscountry]

wow, bad news for me.


I figured I had another 4 years... already 1 down. Actually in my Physics department the average seems higher than 5, but it is possible.

Depends on the professor and the student.

[Swift]

Before any of you get too depressed, just remember... "Your actual mileage may vary". I did mine in 4 years, ** to Ph.D. I only had to teach the first year, and then was on an R.A.

[pumpkinpie]

So all in all, I look forward to getting a PhD in a little over ten years.
I don't know if that's good or depressing.

I'm sure you'll be on the faster end of the statistics!

[pumpkinpie]

I thought people here would find this interesting, especially those thinking about getting a Ph.D.

A recent study by the National Science Foundation (link) finds it now takes an average of 7.9 years to go from a B.S. to a Ph.D. Among some of the findings, chemistry averaged 6.9 years, physics and astronomy 7.6 years, and mathematics 7.9 years. It took longer if you received a Masters along the way and if you had a teaching assistantship (as opposed to a research assistantship or fellowship).

Some of this information was from an article in the April 3 issue of Chemical & Engineering News.

If I'm reading the article right, your bolded statistics report the "TTD" or total time to degree. That seems to be the time elapsed between completing the ** and the PhD. That includes any time the student took off before starting grad school. That skews the results higher, even if the student wasn't in school that whole time.

Of course, the "RTD" or registered time to degree (the amount of time actually registered in grad school) isn't much lower, roughly a year in the cases you reported. But then, to someone working on a Phd, a year makes a big difference!

Feel free to correct me if I'm interpreting it incorrectly.

[jrkeller]

I graduated from HS in 1979.
I got my ** in 1983.
I got my MS in 1985.
I got my Ph.D in 1989.

I was 27 when I got out of school, but other than summer jobs, I did go straight through. I had an excellent Ph.D advisor. He felt that a Ph.D. should take 3-4 years. Because of his efforts, I was the first person in five years in the Mech Eng department that graduated in less than four years.

I have a question. If it takes so many years to get a Ph.D., wouldn't the research be out of date? Or is it that specialized?

[Swift]

If I'm reading the article right, your bolded statistics report the "TTD" or total time to degree. That seems to be the time elapsed between completing the ** and the PhD. That includes any time the student took off before starting grad school. That skews the results higher, even if the student wasn't in school that whole time.

Of course, the "RTD" or registered time to degree (the amount of time actually registered in grad school) isn't much lower, roughly a year in the cases you reported. But then, to someone working on a Phd, a year makes a big difference!

Feel free to correct me if I'm interpreting it incorrectly.

Actually, the numbers I quoted were from the C&EN article about the report, so I will not question your more direct study. What I find most interesting is not the absolute numbers, but the relative changes from department-to-department, over time, and with such things as how much you have to teach. They certainly match my personal experience.

[crosscountry]

I have a question. If it takes so many years to get a Ph.D., wouldn't the research be out of date? Or is it that specialized?

It is only out of date if someone beats you to it.

[Eta C]

I ended up on the 8-year plan. Illinois required you to finish within seven after beginning, but I got a one-year extension. Part of the problem was external. I spent 1.5 years working on an experiment that didn't pan out. The second was my own damn fault. Once I did start on the right experiment, I wasted at least a year before a sense of urgency set in.

Typically, high energy physics took longer than other fields. My friends in condensed matter usually took about 5 to 6 years to finish. This was 20 or so years ago, but from my contacts in the field, I don't think things have changed that much. I interview a lot of new Ph.D's for my company, and I haven't noticed many that have taken in excess of seven years.

[tofu]

How are you guys paying for this? I know that you get paid for teaching. Is that covering your bills?

I'd like to get a PhD in software engineering, but none of the schools near me offer it. So, (correct me if I'm wrong) I'm going to have to find a school, quit my job, move, find a tiny appartment to live in and subsist on ramen.

Is that pretty much it? Or could I maybe take some grad-level SE courses locally and then transfer to another school for the thesis (actually, a project normallly for SE)

[Dr Nigel]

Hmmm, seems things are a bit different this side of the pond. The UK generally expects practical work for a PhD to be finished in 3 years, although it often takes a bit longer (my own took 5 1/2 from starting to submitting, but that was just before they announced an initiative to make people stick to the time scales). I think typical figures in other European countries are around the 4-5 year mark. So much seems to depend on the supervisor.

[Swift]

How are you guys paying for this? I know that you get paid for teaching. Is that covering your bills?

I'd like to get a PhD in software engineering, but none of the schools near me offer it. So, (correct me if I'm wrong) I'm going to have to find a school, quit my job, move, find a tiny appartment to live in and subsist on ramen.

Is that pretty much it? Or could I maybe take some grad-level SE courses locally and then transfer to another school for the thesis (actually, a project normallly for SE)

All I can speak for is Chemistry, and 20 years ago, though my impression is this is still generally true in the physical sciences...

As a graduate student you get some sort of assistantship or fellowship. The assistantships are either Teaching Assistant or Research Assistant. The TAs are paid by their department to teach or help teach courses, labs, etc. The RAs are generally paid for out of grant money or other support that their research advisor has. So if your prof has money, you can get an RA, otherwise it is TA. Fellowships are honors that you apply for and are awarded.

Whatever the source (TA, RA, fellowship), the money is about the same. You get your tuition paid for (this seems to be an invisible transaction - the university moves it from one pile to another) and enough money to live on, ie. barely above the poverty level. I don't know what the going amounts are.

The advantage of an RA or fellowship over a TA is that you are not spending that much more time teaching, and so have more time to work towards your degree.

[TheBlackCat]

How are you guys paying for this? I know that you get paid for teaching. Is that covering your bills?

In my department we are guaranteed full funding. The first year we are paid for by one of several grants, allowing us to do laboratory rotations and take classes. We don't have to join a lab until the summer after the first year or the beginning of the second year, depending on the grant. You are only allowed to join a lab if the lab is guaranteed to have enough money to pay for the entire time you are there. If anything goes wrong the school will pay you until you find a new lab. You also get health insurance, and I am in a special program that gives me $1000 a year to spend on either attending conferences, books, or technology useful to your research. This year I spent it on my textbooks and a bunch of computer upgrades. All in all, I am eating well, get some entertainment, live in a pretty big one-bedroom apartment that is only a 5 minute walk from school, and I am still actually making money off my stipend.

[Gillianren]

A guy who lived across the hall from me my senior year in college got paid to go to grad school, I know that. He was part of Evergreen's apparently illustrious viral phage program. However, my best friend (a disertation away from her MFA) will be piled high in student loans as soon as she gets the thing. (Or stops going to school for six months.)

[gethen]

And I thought it seemed like it was taking forever for my son. He got his masters in Human Genetics, a masters in physics, and will have finished his Phd work this fall in astrophysics, having spent about 7 years. Doesn't seem out of line, looking at those statistics.

[Eta C]

All I can speak for is Chemistry, and 20 years ago, though my impression is this is still generally true in the physical sciences...

As a graduate student you get some sort of assistantship or fellowship. The assistantships are either Teaching Assistant or Research Assistant. The TAs are paid by their department to teach or help teach courses, labs, etc. The RAs are generally paid for out of grant money or other support that their research advisor has. So if your prof has money, you can get an RA, otherwise it is TA. Fellowships are honors that you apply for and are awarded.

Whatever the source (TA, RA, fellowship), the money is about the same. You get your tuition paid for (this seems to be an invisible transaction - the university moves it from one pile to another) and enough money to live on, ie. barely above the poverty level. I don't know what the going amounts are.

The advantage of an RA or fellowship over a TA is that you are not spending that much more time teaching, and so have more time to work towards your degree.

My experience was the same. I had a TA for the first two years, and then I was picked up on an RA for the remainder. The tuition, stipend, etc were payed from the department's DoE grant for high energy physics research. Another advantage of the RA (at the time, laws may have changed) was that the stipend was not taxable. The TA stipend was taxed as it was considered a job.

As others have said, the stipend was pretty much just enough to live on. But that's better that taking out more student loans. I basically came out of grad school flat broke, but not in debt.

[swansont]

I have a question. If it takes so many years to get a Ph.D., wouldn't the research be out of date? Or is it that specialized?

The research that ends up in your thesis is often very recent stuff. It depends on the situation (my area is experimental atomic physics), of course, but if it's an experimental degree you often are in a chain of students, so while you are learning the ropes, you are helping the most senior student with whatever his/her experiment is. Even if that's not the case (as with me; I latched on to a new professor and was his first Ph.D. student) you spend time building equipment and getting an experiment to run.

And it is often that specialized. It also depends on what your advisor's/school's criteria are for constitutes "new" research. You can do a measurement that someone else has done but get better results, or do it in a different way.

My degree took six years from the time I showed up, but that was ~a decade ago. A TA for a year, a hybrid RA/TA for one, and then an RA from that point on. I know of very few students that paid their own way, and those were only for one or two years until they could get some kind of stipend that paid tuition.

[crosscountry]

Wow, with all of these P.h.Ds around here do we have any professors?


I'm going to apply for other schools when I finish my Masters.

[tofu]

The research that ends up in your thesis is often very recent stuff. It depends on the situation (my area is experimental atomic physics), of course, but if it's an experimental degree you often are in a chain of students,

Take a look at this, I found it kind of amusing. It's a paper I used as a reference recently.

link to PDF

The paper is only a page and a half long, but it has SIX authors.

The paper references 8 other papers. 6 of the references were authored by the one or more of the authors of this paper! That means they could only find two people outside of themselves to support their work.

[pumpkinpie]

How are you guys paying for this? I know that you get paid for teaching. Is that covering your bills?

As a physics PhD student 1998-2000*, tuition was paid for by my department and I received a yearly stipend of about $16,000. I was a TA, I think RA's got a little more. It was enough to pay my rent and bills and food and a little bit of entertainment. But PhD students in situations like min certainly don't have extravagant lifestyles or come away with any savings.

I'm not sure how it works outside of the sciences, but I know most of those are fully funded.

*I didn't finish the program, and I'm glad I didn't have to live on so little for 6-7 years!

[jfribrg]

Lets see..... I got my ** in 1984, my MS in 1998. I keep thinking about going for a Phd, but probably wont start until the kids are out of the house, which will by around 2015. Give me a few years (6 or so) to finish it, and I should graduate in 2021 at the age of 59, only 37 years after getting my **. The problem for me is that in my field (computer science), there isnt a great demand for a Phd and therefore no financial incentive to get the degree.

[TheBlackCat]

I have a question. If it takes so many years to get a Ph.D., wouldn't the research be out of date? Or is it that specialized?

For us you don't actually start your research until after the third year. At least in my field, your research topics are usually limited by your PI's grant. Since grants last for years, often 5 or so, things can't change that quickly. Also, you generally try to pick a thesis topic that is pretty safe, one where you are sure to get results that are useful no matter what. You probably wouldn't pick something that is going to be obselete very soon. It also depends on the area. Like in my area, the overall body of knowledge grows very rapidly because so little is known but that also means a given line of research can be fruitfull for a long period of time.

[papageno]

I got my degree in Physics in Italy in 5 and a half years (degree = pre-reform laurea), including the "diploma work" in experimental Solid State Physics that took about one year (in Germany).

Six months after my graduation I started my Ph.D. in experimental Solid State Physics in the UK. Tuition and maintenance cheque for 3 years were paid by the EPSRC. I finished in 4 years, the last six months being employed as a research assistant (I still owe my supervisor for finding the money!).

The last paper on that very specific research topic was published 14 years ago. And I started to do real work on it after two years, when the labs and my skills were finally in shape.

Between my graduation and the start of my Ph.D., I managed to squeeze in a very short-term contract, and a few weeks as a civil servant (the alternative to the military service, a.k.a. national service).

[crosscountry]

I got my degree in Physics in Italy in 5 and a half years (degree = pre-reform laurea), including the "diploma work" in experimental Solid State Physics that took about one year (in Germany).

Where were you in Italy and Germany?

[jrkeller]

For us you don't actually start your research until after the third year. At least in my field, your research topics are usually limited by your PI's grant.

Well I guess that explains it. I started on my research project the first semester in the program.