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How long would your PhD have taken if it had all gone right?
07 September 2010
By Hannah Dee
A recent BoingBoing article raises an interesting question: "How long would your PhD have taken if everything worked?"
The author reckons about 6 months - and if you look through the comments to that article, people are naming similar figures. I expect people with engineering and science PhDs will estimate that it could have been done in much less time - for me, it's hard to say. If I'd gone into my PhD knowing how to program well I'd have saved months. If I'd not tried to write my own polygon class, I'd have saved months. I read loads of articles that weren't, eventually, relevant. I travelled up many a blind alley, barked up many a wrong tree...
But what's a PhD for? I think it's not just about the research - it's about learning the tools to do the research, the background of the research area, how to read papers, how to give talks, how to write papers. All of these are not, strictly speaking, the PhD. But they're part of the PhD experience, as is making mistakes. Indeed, it's part of the research experience. To paraphrase that old quote about advertising - "Half of what I do is wasted, I just don't know which half".
So how long would your PhD have taken if you'd got it all right first time? What would you have missed out on, if by some lucky accident that had happened to you?
Sarah Davies08 September 2010 at 10:01 AM
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I think 6 month figures are *utterly* ridiculous - and not just because, as you say, this ignores the fact that a PhD is about learning to be an academic alongside doing a piece of original research. I think the discussion probably reflects the (naive) ideas of a lot of scientists that 'research' is doing some experiments in a lab and then getting some answers. You simply can't think about social science, arts or humanities in these terms - I would say in these disciplines you need every second of your three years (or longer).
Having scrolled down the discussion on the boingboing page a bit I also notice some people are pointing to the specificities of the US PhD, in which students take two years of classes. Presumably this counts as 'wasted' time...
Tennie Videler09 September 2010 at 01:09 PM
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In the Netherlands and I believe Germany a doctorate takes at least 4 years to do (and is done while a salaried employee rather than a student). Wellcome has moved to 4 years of doctoral funding in recognition that three years is just not enough to get to where they want their researchers to be. I agree with both of you that the 6 months idea can only come about if you completely ignore some really important aspects of the process of learning!
Andy Humphrey10 September 2010 at 04:26 PM
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In the sciences particularly, the "6 months" notion is ludicrous. Most people starting a science Ph.D. have fairly limited experience of being in a lab and little or no experience of planning experiments themselves - or of troubleshooting when experiments go wrong. Much of the first year (and some might argue the whole Ph.D!) is about learning to be in the lab environment, how standard techniques work and how to interpret the results, as well as just doing the experiment, so it's inevitable that the work rate of a scientist in their first year of Ph.D. is going to be nothing like that of somebody in their last 6 months.
Back in the mists of time, when I was doing my Ph.D., I was quoted an apocryphal figure of around 10% of first-year work being likely to make it into my Ph.D. thesis. In my case, this was about right. But the other 90% of what was in there simply wouldn't have existed if it wasn't for the time I spent learning how to do things.
So in my case, the answer to "how long would my Ph.D. have taken if everything went right" is: exactly as long as my Ph.D. actually took. Which was 3 years in the lab, more or less on the nose, plus 3 months to write up. Anything less would have been selling me, and the Ph.D., short.
Matthew Salois13 September 2010 at 02:27 PM
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Well, I actually do think that had everything 'worked' the writing of my PhD thesis would only have taken like 3 months! Not only did I spend months and months of reading and writing a pointless literature review (which in the end was barely relevant to the main part of the study), but I was also really floating around of how to get my idea to work until the semester before I defended.
Now, being in social science, I worked with secondary data and the major problems in my dissertation were theory and statistical methodology.
But who knows if I am right about my 3 month estimate, it is hard to guage what really would have happened. Plus, that estimated does not take into account classes and other parts to the PhD which, as Sarah and other have pointed out, are pretty essential.
David Proctor14 September 2010 at 12:50 AM
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I was told on day 1 of my PhD that it would take 5 years and 3 first-author publications for me to graduate. This was my advisor's rule, and it turned out to be ok since that's exactly what happened. As a US PhD student, I had to do 5 graduate courses, qualify in 3 of 5 areas in my discipline (chemistry), teach for at least 1 semester (did 4), and jump through umpteen other hoops. I don't regret any of it; the varied experiences provided me with a wealth of experience that I wouldn't have had otherwise.
Could I have finished in under 5 years? No, probably not. But some of my classmates finished in 3 years despite having to jump through all of the same hoops, and one of them was a PI before I started my postdoc. (Nerd. I never liked him anyway.)
I think the structure of a PhD program is beneficial to most, and I worry that too many UK researchers are pushed out before they're ready to be independent.
Andy Humphrey23 September 2010 at 03:35 PM
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Depends what you mean by "independent". I could never have gone straight from my Ph.D. to a lectureship (I'm a chemist, too). I could never have gone to a lectureship after my first, or even my second, postdoc. In fact it probably took 8 or 9 years (and at least one wrong turn, in research terms) before I was at the point where I could even consider anything like putting a grant application together. And by then, of course, I was too old to apply for most of them!
There are different types of independence. Being independent enough to direct a project you're working on on someone else's grant, and possibly to supervise Masters or Ph.D. students, is one thing. Being independent enough to bring in your own research funding, and plan for and train your own research students, is a step up again. In the UK, I don't think it's expected that *ANY* scientist would be at that stage as a newly qualified Ph.D. Even if they got in, I imagine most would probably burn out from the sheer stress of what's expected.
Elizabeth Dodson27 September 2010 at 11:39 PM
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I probably could have shaved a year off my PhD if I'd focused on the right questions from the beginning - but that period of trial and error was incredibly important, so I agree with you Hannah, that the journey itself was all important.
However I would go back and change the recording equipment that I used for conducting inteviews. The poor quality meant that I had to run every recording through a computer to painstakingly improve the audio. The transcription could have been 10x less painful and lengthy and this would have saved me months. My mistake was to just use what was available in my department - rather than push for something better. I think in hindsight I would probably have bought better equipment myself if necessary...
So maybe I could have taken 6 months off my eventual 4 years - but complete a PhD in 6 months...? No way!
Sarah Davies28 September 2010 at 11:35 AM
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I'm really intrigued that people are talking about their writing potentially/actually taking about 3 months. Really? Again, it may be due to disciplinary differences but I allowed a year - out of three - for analysis/writing (the two aren't easily untangled in my work). Did others really manage 70-90,000 words in 90 days?
Elizabeth Dodson30 September 2010 at 03:08 PM
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I spent a year writing up - like you this was also tangled in with some continued analysis - however at the same time I was working full time in a demanding job and taking teaching qualifications. I imagine I could have completed sooner if I'd devoted all my time to the PhD, however by the nature of a doctorate I could have easily spent a whole year just writing the thesis. Whether or not I would have emerged with my sanity intact is a different matter - there is a lot to be said for maintaining some variety in life!
Blanka Sengerová02 October 2010 at 03:08 PM
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Much has been already said about the usefulness of the PhD experience per se, and I can only agree with that. Although I spent the first three months of my PhD optimising the separation of two oligonucleotide isomers on an HPLC machine (that's high pressure liquid chromatography, basically you put things down a column, they stick to it, and then are eluted in order based on size by using a gradient of a solvent in the liquid phase), trying everything from different gradients, temperature changes, different liquid media, I eventually found that all was solved with a new column (the old ones, and I tried a large number, were simply knackered, a bit like Elizabeth's recording equipment). Ok, that time could have been seen as wasted and I wish I had convinced my supervisor to spend some money earlier, but on the other hand, when applying for jobs later I could validly say that I have fairly good experience with HPLC. So all part of a learning curve.
What I wanted to comment on, though, was the difference in the length of writing time by the natural scientists and the social scientists. Sarah and Elizabeth both said that they took closer to one year for writing, whereas others have suggested 3 months. I think the 3 months is pretty bang-on for the lab-based/natural scientists who will usually do an experiment, analyse it there and then, and store it on the computer for later use (eg. the efficient chemists in my office were keeping NMR and mass spec data for all their compounds as they went along in a format suitable for the thesis). In the end, what you need is possibly a final analysis and the collation of your data into the thesis, which is where 3 months is probably reasonable (if you're efficient). With the social sciences, I expect the writing period also involves an awful lot more reading time (with lab-based work, you've probably already done the reading by then as you needed to look up other people's methods and results that you were basing your experiments on).
But maybe the difference in the PhDs of the lab-based/experimental researchers and the PhDs of the library-based/historical/liguistic/etc. researchers would be something for another post altogether? (The only problem is that all of us have only experienced one side of the equation!).