Say someone wants to get a Ph.D. Let’s pretend they already have a Master’s.
I know it has something to do with picking a topic and researching it and going before a committee, but that’s about it.
How long does it take the average person to finish?
What happens when you’re done? Does the committee go “um, ok, you’re a Ph.D.” or is there a ceremony or a certificate or what?
In the states at least it’s similar to getting a masters in terms of officialness. I will describe my experience-- I’m workign on art history, so this is typical for humanites, more or less. Like for a masters program you apply to schools. One lets you in. You have one or two years’ worth of class course work to do-- usually some method-type things and small-enrollment seminars. You write a lot of 18-20 page papers on things you don’t really care about. You may also have to take enough foreign language classes (other otherwise come to grasp) to pass competency exams (2 in my department). At this point, you are done with course work (which sometimes has requirements as to how varied the classes are) and after some deal of studying you take your minor field exams-- two people read these and pass you or not. Now you start sweating and studying for major field exams (this is the point at which I am now, next month). In my department this is a 6 hour written exam on semi-expected topics with which you are to prove your familiarity with the field. My advisor says that this is the point where you start to really become a colleague of your professors and get to be an authority. Then there is an oral exam, inquisition style, which usually concerns, among other things, your proposed dissertation topic. Ideally at this point you’ve come up with a topic and have written (in my department) a 10 or 12 page prospectus-- sort of what you expect the paper to look like, method, etc. At the oral exam your committee of three readers (or so) picks you to pieces to hash out initial problems with this proposal WHILE also throwing more general questions about the field at you. You pass your exams and have a nervous breakdown, briefly. You have now reached “candidacy” and are "ABD (“all but dissertation”). Then you do your research, scrabbling desperately for funding to enable your digging for things abroad, say, then write write write and eventually have to get all three of these people happy with what you’ve done. There is a final “defense”, inquisition-style-- hopefully you’ve been in enough touch with everyone on the committee that there are no big shocks. You make the suggested changes. Then you spend a half year trying to appease the people at the graduate dean’s office about the margins and font you printed it in. At many schools there is a filing date/deadline and your degree will have a particular date it is awarded. You may choose to take part in commencement which is like graduating with a bachelors degree except the robes/hood-cope thing cost 500 bucks (or something ridiculous like that) instead of 50 but look much cooler and color code you per school and degree/department. Basically some official at the grad deans office does say “congrats, yer a doctor.”
“Normative time” in my department is 7 years. It’s “possible” to finish faster and everyone at the start thinks they can but they, in fact, can’t. It varies. I think the sciences don’t take as long.
Wheh. Bitter? No!
The committee skips the “um” part.
capybara pretty well covered it. For my doctorate (biology), i had to have written entrance exams (essay, covering about general topics, like cell biology, ecology, evolution), followed by an oral inquisition. Then take classes, propose a topic in front of the department, teach, do the research, finish the classes, and take the final exams. These were specialized - I took two animal behavior exams, one evolutionary ecology, one evolutionary genetics, statistics, and a couple I’ve forgotten). Followed up with another oral exam. Make sure all the foreign language requirements were completed. Give the required national meeting presentations. Present the final document to the department and university with visual aids. Go in to the final defense with your committee. Clean the document to fit university standards and then stand in front of family and loved ones while your advisor hoods you. Took me only 9 years (I came in with a psychology masters and had a few classes to take. :))
ISU also offered a DA degree, which is the teaching version of the Ph.D. Oddly, although the DA required more units, the Ph.D candidates, on average, took about half again as many units. That, plus having to teach or otherwise make a living is one reason why it took us so long.
Ah, that’s something I forgot–as Brachy says, there is usually some requirement of teaching or TAing (teaching assistantship-- like running 20-student discussion sections or labs or whatever) – at my school one year although most people do it for several years to feed themselves/ get experience/line on the c.v.
…practice, practice, practice.
[sub]somebody had to say it[/sub]
7 years? 9 years? Are those typical? In my field (Astrophysics) they tell us 5 years, sometimes 4. And that’s starting with just a Bachelor’s.
Everybody’s pretty much summed it up:
And for the other part of the OP–
4 to 7 seems typical, based on Ph.D.'s (mostly Geologists) I’ve known who finished their’s since the mid-80’s. Almost every older Ph.D. I’ve known, however, seems to have gotten theirs more quickly–2 to 4 years.
Me? 5.5 years. Unless I really screw something up within the next month.
Go to Tractor Supply.
Decide if you need clamshell or auger type.
Takes about 20 min.
Phd= Posthole digger.
I don’t know whether this is true across the board, but at my university, time to degree in the humanities is considerably longer than in the sciences. Part of the problem is poor funding and advising, since humanities departments tend to be perpetually short of resources. Also, as Pantellerite noted, degree requirements in the sciences are often more streamlined. E.g., in my program (English), all students are required to have a decent reading knowledge of three languages, including Old English; if you’re starting from scratch, this could easily add an extra year or two to your degree. I doubt that any science programs have a comparable requirement.
Good luck with the exams, capybara; I’m taking mine in October (ouch!)
Yes, good luck to both of you, capybara and Fretful Porpentine! And an early congratulations to Pantellerite!
Well, on thinking about it a little more, I guess I was there for 8 years, and the first year was finishing up my masters from Bucknell (done on a typewriter, so you can see it was a while ago, and my memory is…um…what was I saying?)
The program I was in was pretty traditional for the time. Two languages (I was able to substitute statistics as one) and a minor field (plant ecology). We actually had only a couple of classes we were required to take, but committees and interest kept piling them on.
Some of us are also restricted timewise by when we can do experiments (for part of my studies, I did vasectomies on Black-billed Magpies). You have to be ready for it or wait until next year. As I tell all the grad students in the department, “Biology waits for noone.”
In cell and molecular biology programs nationally, the average person takes 5.5 years to finish, starting without a masters. (Having a masters may shorten it a bit by reducing your class load, but since classes are mostly besides the point (usually between six and ten classes spread out over the first four semesters), it’s not that significant a reduction timewise.) During the first year, one does several rotations (at most schools it’s three, some four) of about 2-3 months each in different labs. After rotations, you choose one lab, where you spend an incredible amount of time until you’ve done ‘enough’ to graduate. This ‘enough’ involves passing qualifying exams after the second year (a few schools give a formal master’s at this point, but most don’t bother), and publishing at least one (but usually more) paper in a peer-reviewed journal. Then one may have to write a formal dissertation, or sometimes just present one’s publications, to a several-professor committee, before whom one then makes a defense (they grill you mercilessly, poking whatever holes they can). Then you’re a PhD, although formal recognition waits until the next time the school holds its formal graduation ceremonies, stupid hats and all.
I’ve never heard of a language requirement in any cell/molecular program. It’s common for there to be a teaching requirement, although there are plenty of schools without it (thank God!)
The amount of time depends on dedication, but more on luck. If your experiments work out, you could be done in four years. Poor unfortunate souls can take over a decade if they have to start over again (as when somebody else publishes what you’ve been working on for the last three years) or things just don’t work out at all.
All this is based on my recent adventures in applying to and choosing amongst grad programs, so it’s based on the practices of about nine schools in a limited geographic area in the US. I’m only starting the whole process now, so I might be a bit inaccurate on some of the details.
In Australia, New Zealand and Britain, a PhD is usually pure original research, few if any PhD candidates do course work - you would have had to do this at masters level. In these countries you can specialise much earlier on at bachelor level as we don’t have ‘general education’ as does the states - so maybe the course work stuff gets done earlier on?
Once you finish, which can vary between 3 - 9 years, you have to ‘defend’ your research in an oral exam type situation.
The thing that bothers me is the current trend to dumb down degrees. In Australia (not sure about Britain yet) there are many universities that offer one or two year masters degrees that are course work only, no empirical research. The one year master’s thing seems to stem from international student pressure - they don’t want to spend more than they have to for a master’s degree and universities want the money. The no research thing, I don’t really understand - it would really put you on the back foot should you decide to go on and do a PhD.
Let me chime in about a PhD in math since no one has written about that yet. My degree was some decades ago, and the requirements might be a little different today. The requirements were: (1) completing course work (graduate level subjects); (2) passing two foreign language proficiency tests to prove that you can read foreign research articles; (3) passing qualifying examinations (“quals”) in three subject areas – mine were of the oral variety and quite nerve-racking to say the least; (4) giving two talks in seminars on advance subjects; and finally the big enchilada (5) write a dissertation. A defense of the dissertation research is also customary but not always required. Expected time for completion was 4 years which I was fortunate to achieve. Of the requirements, I’d have to say that the two biggest challenges were the quals and the dissertation. Many students dropped out after the quals. Some just left. Some left with consolation masters. Completing an acceptable dissertation is a matter of finding the right topic and the right faculty advisor who can help as oppose to hinder your progress. Looking back, it was a grueling experience and I don’t know if I’d want to do it again. I did TA and RA work, but that was to support myself, not to satisfy any teaching requirements for the degree.
Most universities in the US have extensive online information about their degree (including Masters’and Doctorates) programs. Figure out what you what to do, what your doctorate would have to be in, then research the universities that have the best reputation in that area and are geographically feasible for you. If their degree programs aren’t sufficiently explained online, write away for information.
You beat your head against a wall until a thesis forms.
That’s what it feels like, anyway.
If you’re brilliant and/or lucky you can go through all you need to get your doctorate in less than five years (I know a guy who did it in three). Five years is pretty typical. It’s not unusual to take longer. It took me ten years, all told, to get mine, but that was a bizarre case, and involved two different universities.
I know some people who worked on theirs for more than ten years, and never got theirs. I know another guy who actually failed his oral exam – a virtually unheard-of situation, since your completion is virtually guaranteed by the time you’ve gotten that far. Stories like those break your heart. I know I was getting pretty paranoid as I approached the end of getting my degree.
A couple more points…
The qualifying exams are stressful but in an odd way they are also one of the easier parts of getting the doctorate, because it's pretty much the one time in the whole process where you actually know exactly what you should be doing (studying your ass off). The hardest part is the next step -- identifying a thesis topic and getting your thesis proposal approved by the committee. In my field (computer science), this is where most of the time goes by. Some rare people come into grad school with a preconceived research agenda that happens to mesh with their advisor's, and they pretty much shoot through. More often, though, there's an iteration through: research a topic, write up a proposal, present to committee, rinse, repeat). At any point in the process you might find out that the topic has been pretty much exhausted by other researchers or lacks intellectual heft or that you're just not interested. It's not uncommon (as happened to friends of mine) for the advisor to change research interests multiple times during the proposal process, leaving his/her students to have to repeatedly abandon their current topics and choose new ones.
Once you've got the proposal nailed, you're once again in the position of knowing exactly what you have to do to get the doctorate (the thesis proposal is pretty much a contract between you and your thesis committee). A lot of people spend a lot of time in this phase because it's the most enjoyable period -- you're doing research, you've got a goal, as long as the money holds out, things are good.
Another reason that doctorates are taking longer now is that the bar has been raised considerably for getting an academic position. It used to be that you’d write your thesis, turn it into a journal article, and maybe have a few conference papers when you hit the job market. Now the competition for positions is fierce and you’d better have several journal articles, possibly a book chapter or two, and have participated in several conferences and workshops to generate contacts and build a reputation. (I know people whose vitas leaving grad school looked like tenure cases, and they still had trouble finding jobs.) All this writing (and the accompanying research) takes time.
On the other hand, if you’re looking for a somewhat less involved process, I have an e-mail sitting in my in box right now offering:
I’m sure that a PhD diploma from a “prestigous non-accredited university” :rolleyes: will win you the “admiration from all” you desire.
Okay, as the OP as probably realized, every field is different in terms of what’s required to start, and what’s required to finish.
In my field (chemistry) PhD’s typically take five years. At the top-tier schools, the first year is generally spent taking classes (typically about five or six) and serving as a teaching assistant for undergrad classes. During this first year the student picks a research group to work with based on his or her interests. From the second year on (including summers) graduate students spend their time working in the lab (no classes and in many cases no TAing) on their research project(s). The eventual results of these projects get written up as a thesis, at the very end. (At my school, thesis-writing generally takes up the last three to four months of a five-year Ph.D.) The thesis and defense are almost minor in a way, because the fact that you’ve gotten that far is taken as a sign of competency.
At the big-name schools, grad students in chemistry typically receive stipends to cover living expenses. Students generally spend 55+ hours per week in the lab so there are no part-time jobs (hence the stipend). Other requirements are some kind of written exam set (typically cumulative exams held on a regular basis which you take until you have passed the requisite number) and an oral exam part-way through. These, plus the grades from your classes, are minor. The major part of the experience is the research you do and the results you get.
Another further note: masters degrees in chemistry are a pretty minor phenomenon at the big schools (more important at smaller schools though). Only about 1 in 20 PhD students at my school come in having masters degrees. MS chemists aren’t paid more than, and don’t have many more opportunities than, BS chemists so people typically go straight for the PhD and the MS is like a consolation prize for those who can’t finish the PhD for some reason. Sad but true.