Currently, I teach a graduate course in molecular techniques, but also have the privilege to generally interact with a lot of grad students from many different disciplines. Anyway, if I haven't seen anyone in a while, I usually (jokingly and probably annoyingly) query with a "Are you done yet?"
how long would it have taken to get it all done?)
I guess the length of time it takes to do a Ph.D. or a Masters (especially in the sciences where you are bound by your ability to generate meaningful results from experiments) can be a bit of a sore point.
Several years back, myself and some colleagues (all in the molecular biology genre) had a discussion about this over some drinks. Specifically, we tried to calculate how long our doctorates would have actually taken, if we assumed that all the experiments we did in our theses worked right off the bat. Always with the first time success, reproducible results in triplicate no problemo, no troubleshooting required, or literally, a case where we had "magic fingers" for the entire length of our graduate career.
And so, if we assumed that taking courses was not factored in, and that we would have about 3 months to actually write up the damn thing, we all agreed that our Ph.D. would have taken somewhere in the 6 month range to complete. 6 freakin' months!
Anyway, in the end, I took just over 5 years, which means for the 3 months or so of "thesis bound" results, there also existed about 54 months of "non-thesis" bound results. And that is like a 5% success rate - which ultimately means that, really, you just have to work one day every three or so weeks, and as long as you pick the right day, you'll still get your degree in the normal length of time.
My point, I guess, is that things usually don't work in the sciences, and that's normal. It's also sort of why things like troubleshooting are one of the most important skills to get good at, especially if you plan on doing this sort of thing for a while. Still, I'm guessing it's a totally different scenario from doing a Doctorate in something like literature or history.
Anyway, I'm on the hunt for some comments - how long would your degree have taken?
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I did this calculation once off the top of my head, and came out to the same answer -- about 3 months of actual work.
One of my favorite axioms about this is Hofstatder's Law
http://www.beefpile.net/Todayland/2007/03/02/fridays-law-hofstadters-la…
and
Jason: Hofstadter's double and unit-conversion rule rapidly makes me think of the pi*seconds = 1 nanocentury approximate conversion constant.
as a current first year graduate student getting my phd in biochemistry, i have to say that i am incredible depressed right now...thanks David!!!
although i have to agree...we have 4 nine week rotations and i have come to the conclusion that i only get any meaningful results during the last two weeks so i guess i should have figured this out by now
I think I would have been done in 6 months if everything worked. I'd say about 10% of what I do actually produces publication-quality or interesting results, and we probably will only use about about 1/5th of that in a paper. The rest is really just to convince ourselves that we did something correctly.
The converse of this rule is - beware those scientists for whom everything works. There is a chance they're fabricating. You hear it a lot when people uncover fraud in science. Usually you hear they were a god in the lab and always got results right away. Such people are either really lucky or full of it, either way, regard them cautiously and ask for raw data.
Interesting question David,
I'm a current PhD student who has been working for 5+ years now and I have to agree with your estimates. I will probably be closer to the 6 month number, just because of the system that I work in.
I think that another important question is whether so much time is really required for the degree? Is the PhD based solely on the 5-10% of the work that is successful? If not, could a candidate earn a degree with only the unsuccessful work?
I feel that the PhD should be a training process and should not be so dependent on the successful results. I think that the frustration of 95% unsuccessful work for 6+ years with low pay is burning out lots of great scientific minds. I would like to see a PhD program that is focused on training scientists rather than rewarding experiments that work.
The other important part of this issue is technical help. How much of a PhD actually requires PhD thinking and how much could be done by a trained pair of hands? Are we wasting scientific minds by making them run simple experiments over and over again? A PhD student should not be a poorly paid technician. How much shorter would your PhD have been if you had a technician to help you?
Not any shorter. I did many experiments simultaneously. If all of them worked, the thesis would have bin thicker, that's all.
And the other very important thing, which I didn't mention, is that a bug chunk of that 95% turns out to be just as important as the 5% or so that becomes bound. Negative results are just as crucial as the ones that reviewers see fit to display, arguably more so. It's what you try to find out when you go for drinks with collaborators, attend poster sessions, etc.
If you're wondering about humanities equivalents, where we don't have to wait for experiments that work or not, but have to spend endless time in the field or archives or both, it isn't very heartening: average time to degree in my field was about 7-8 years. (I was fortunate to live on the quick end of that, at about 5.5.)
Had my masters been recognised for what it was, I would have converted to a PhD, added *5000 words*, and had my PhD a decade earlier! As it was I published most of it. But I didn't know I could even do that - nobody told me.
Hmmm, well I spent six months just doing fieldwork! I'd say maybe 15-20 months, if I could have avoided all the headbanging between me having 90% of my data and getting the 10% which actually made sense of it all.
I don't know about you science guys, but isn't thesis work often something that isn't done as continuous as one wants to do it in the ideal case? How many "thesis work days" are there in average, if you also have to do some teaching, or attend courses, or do other things, or assist some professor?
Till, in my field (chemistry) you work almost every day on your thesis project. There might be minor interruptions for teaching, seminars, and an occasional day off here or there, but other than that it's pretty steady.
As a biotech scientist, who doubles as a tech service rep, it is clear from my own work and from that of my customers that troubleshooting is a HUGE part of science...maybe the most important part of bench work. The 95% of unsuccessful or unpublished work is where all the important learning takes place. "An expert is someone who has already made all the mistakes, at least once."
About the same amount of time, except that I would have spent about a week on the research and had enough to spend the next 3 years writing about it. My experiment was conceptually very simple, but EXTREMELY effing delicate, and most of my time was spent tuning it and replacing broken parts.
18-24 months, but a lot of that would've been bottleneck lead time for delivery of custom optics.
It wasn't a thesis, but for my recent 2nd year project, if everything had gone right, it would have taken one and a half hours. 2 hours tops. Instead, it took 25-30 hours.
Most of my dissertation "work" involved time at sea on commercial fishing boats, so there was no way to get around at least the basic 180 days of gear comparisons. So, even if all had gone as well as could be expected, the research component could have taken a minimum of one year. As it was, I stayed on at the same institution for the PhD where I had gotten my MSc, so many of my classes transferred over as well -- scarce few have mentioned the coursework required in many doctoral programs, which is NOT at one's own pace.
One other point: the 90-95% of your dissertation research that isn't used in your final, handed-in dissertation certainly does have other uses -- it's often far from "wasted" time or money. I've ended up using much of it for the basis of my own research program, as sort of a research "nest egg" of ideas and tempting bits of data. In fisheries science, you also have the problem of sample sizes for some species, so some projects by default can take up to 10 years and are thus (hopefully) beyond the patience of student and advisor both. However, the fieldwork can be used to archive specimens, etc. for when you *will* have the sample sizes some time following graduation.
It took me 5 years, too. If everything had worked perfectly, it would have taken ten years.
Didn't you know that grad school is something you slave away at until your masters release you? If you're the student with the golden hands who can do no wrong, they're not going to let you escape until they've wrung you dry.
I think I could have knocked it out in 1 month-2 constructs, 2 crystals, both grew overnight, fairly easy data collection and processing.....the 99.99% that didn't express/crystallize/diffract took up the other 4 years 10 months....
As for PZ: "grad school is something you slave away at until your masters release you? If you're the student with the golden hands who can do no wrong, they're not going to let you escape"
Anyone in that position should try the "significant other" strategy. It works: My {wife/partner} (real or imaginary) has {taken a job/become pregnant/other} in {as geographically remote a location as plausible}, and I'm moving {this summer/next week/I'm already there, jackass}. As I've met the requirements for graduation, I think we should schedule a thesis defense, or discuss what is necessary to complete my degree with {the executive committee/my bookie cousin and a Louisville slugger/your mom}.
Just don't frequent the departmental hangouts AFTER you've moved to 'Singapore'.
1 month! Wow - it might be extra interesting to see who has the "potentially" fastest thesis.