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Wow. I just defended a few weeks ago, at 7 years. And honestly, until about year 5, I felt no rush whatsoever to get out. Not that I was derping around -- I finished with 20+ papers -- but I was enjoying it, and I realized that once I was out, two undesirable things would happen:

- I would have to start running the grant treadmill (and indeed, I'm just in the middle of finalizing a training grant that has as one of its requirements...that I must write another grant)

- In the US NIH, there is a 10 year "New Investigator" status that lasts 10 years from the PhD, where you are preferred for certain types of grant awards. So I reasoned it is much better to graduate late and start this clock from a strong position than to rush up the hierarchy and find yourself victim of the Peter Principle.

So for me, delay was a conscious strategy. Only downside was I had to live on a modest stipend. It was worth it for me, though. Another point that I'm making is that "productivity" is not equivalent to "graduating/getting promoted as fast as possible".

As for TFA, I would say that amazing quantities of work can get done by pushing yourself, deadlines, etc, but the creative work that lays groundwork for future growth only occurs during low-stress periods. I try, therefore, to set up alternating periods of both types.

Did you have trouble extending to 7 years ?

Not really. My salary was funded by my PI and he was happy to keep someone at my skill level as long as I wanted (and at a bargain salary to boot).

From my department and committee, I started to feel rumblings around mid-year-6 of the "you should get on with it" lines. But they weren't trying to force me out or anything, it was more like concern.

I was spending (and still do) a much bigger percentage of my time on collaborative work than my peers, and they were concerned I wasn't adequately focused on my own career. But that wasn't the case at all -- I was doing what I thought was in my best interests, especially considering my field (bioinformatics) is inherently highly collaborative compared to the wet-lab stuff going on around me.

However, there were some institution-level reasons I cut it off at 7. After that, the institution's policy is that you have to start re-taking some classes you already took (and passed). It was irritating to always have to go to an irrelevant journal club every week (I was in a department that really had nothing to do with my research). Also, I had some appealing opportunities available if I finished when I did. But in no way was I "forced out".

Interesting, very interesting. Thanks for the reply. Would you like to share a link to your thesis ?

Oh, God, I'm not sure anyone is totally happy with their dissertation, but I guess I should get over it. I got about 2/3 of what I wanted to done. I'm continuing with the project, though.

https://www.dropbox.com/sh/ujf73cdu4m6p1lj/AAD4vVwpCfgSf7GGo...

Don't worry, I cannot judge anything anyway. I just read you were into aging research. I went at a few senescence panels a few months ago and am very curious about the subject. Is your thesis a step into finding applications for this domain ? or more general ?

ps: sexy title

Well the project arose like this. I got interested in aging halfway through the PhD. I started collaborating heavily with aging people at my institution. But there are so many papers and so much data to get informed about the area.

So I wondered "is there some semi-empirical way to find out what is 'most important' in aging so I can focus my future efforts on that?"

The solution I hit on was to take all the available gene expression data and to build a system to ask "what genes/pathways/systems change most strongly and consistently with age across species, experimental conditions, and tissues"? This would be a "core aging signature", if it exists. Obviously this is only one of many ways to answer my question and neglects epigenetics, proteomics, etc, although we're currently extending the system to DNA methylation. There is not enough high-throughput proteomics data to make it possible to do this with protein yet. We do not use sequencing for now because it is much more of a processing burden and human RNA is behind dbGaP embargo. And at the time I started this, there really wasn't that much of it compared to GEO.

My boss's interests are much more general than aging, so he encouraged me to develop the system to be more generic while still answering my question, which I did. It became a general meta-analysis system for asking "what genes change expression with <arbitrary condition> across the available experiments in GEO?" We found other things we could do with such a huge amount of expression data, and some of them are in Chapter 5.

I would say the system itself is 80-90% done. But sadly I did not get to a really detailed analysis of aging yet, although my findings so far on that are in Chapter 4.

Aight, wonderful idea. I wish De Grey and his friends get to see this system.

Thanks for your interest. I've actually met him once -- a friend of his I was talking to over beers introduced us -- but at the time, he was seemingly more interested in his pending date with the blonde he had just picked up than talking with a lowly graduate student. Can't say I blame him :) His papers are excellent, though. A more philosophical and broad approach is needed in aging, I think. He has mellowed a lot from the exaggerated claims he was making in the early 2000s. Maybe he saw my poster which covered an early version of this work, but we didn't talk about that.

The best aging researcher alive right now IMO though is Jim Kirkland. I've had the good fortune to work a little with him and the man is a living encyclopedia. His brilliance is obvious even in a conference full of PhDs.

haha so not surprised by your anecdote, I met him only once but it seems very degrey. Doesn't waste time.

From I what I could hear, he has to spend a lot of time managing funding for sub parts of the foundation and other efforts. Maybe this dilluted his claims a bit in time. All of his friends seemed to be pretty high grade researchers, it was a bit of an SF experiment sitting among that crowd.

Thanks for the name, there's another Kirkland studying aged things https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Kirkland_(paleontologist... but well .. couldn't resist that joke.

The panel I attended was the ICSA 2017 at Paris (Pasteur) http://www.icsa2017-senescence-on-the-seine.org/

Kirkland wasn't there but a nice international bunch

They were supposed to plan for a sequel since a few hundred people attended their surprise talk; we'll see.

Congratulations! I should have clarified in my initial post that:

1. I had no intention to stay in academia after my PhD, it was the best paying gig I could find in 2008 when the world was ending financially and the project was interesting with very little supervisory oversight as the area was new to him as well. 2. If you are enjoying the work, the funding is there and you feel like you are achieving what you want then taking your time is totally cool - I was more focussing on their other end when people want to finish up and can't get done.

I definitely think the UK system for PhDs is more focused and therefore more productive. On day one of my PhD my advisor showed me to my desk and told me to start researching what I wanted to research. I think in the US you do courses for years before you start actually researching, which is what you're there to do in the first place. And many US students seem to spend hours teaching.

> I think in the US you do courses for years before you start actually researching, which is what you're there to do in the first place.

This varies a lot by program in the US. Some schools want you to take 10 classes in the first two years. You can, of course, do research but your mind will be elsewhere. Others don't care as long as you pass your quals and take the required number of courses by the end of your PhD.

>Doing a PhD in the UK helps, in and out before the funding dries up in 3-4 years is expected along with no class requirements and no masters needed (can go in straight from Bachelors)

I think this is the key sentence for a US perspective. 2 years of course work + 3 years of research for 5 years total is common in STEM fields.

> PhDs taking forever is generally a lack of initial work by the student rather than any external factors.

Not in my experience, especially for pre-tenured professors who are in an existential "publish or perish" scenario that defines their careers. It may sound harsh... but they invest a lot in their early students & lab setup, so their goal is to keep students around, publish as many papers as possible, and win enough grants as possible off their work before letting them graduate. I know plenty of folks who did thesis-level work in their first 2-3 years... but then their advisor made them keep grinding for another 2-3 years before "letting" them submit to committee.

I want to second Xaa's point. When I was a PhD student, my advisor told me to enjoy the time because I was free from concerns like funding. We were poorly paid, but it was a good time to just be able to concentrate on research. It was common for people in my physics program to take 6 years to finish. But I wouldn't say that most of us "derped" around. During my PhD, I had a portfolio of projects--some that I thought had a high likelihood of success and others that could (and sometimes did) fail miserably.

As Xaa mentioned for NIH, there are clocks that start ticking after your PhD. This is true for other funding agencies as well. Also, when it's time to start hiring faculty, the fact that someone took 3 years vs 7 years for their PhD is not as important as their publication record and their plans for future research. We recently brought on a guy with 80+ publications (with a large number of those high impact) during his PhD and one postdoc.

I think "rushing" to finish isn't a worthwhile goal (even though I will admit that when I was a student, the stipend was horribly low, so there was a huge opportunity cost for those who decided to do something else later). Being productive during your time is worthwhile. Asking yourself if you are still being productive or if it's time to move on is productive. Not being a technician during your PhD is worthwhile. In that sense, the article has some good advice about taking time out to think. But, in some fields you sometimes just have to grind it out. Say for example, someone is doing an x-ray experiment at a synchotron, or doing MBE synthesis, there are times you just have to put in the hours to get results.

> Doing a PhD in the UK helps, in and out before the funding dries up in 3-4 years is expected along with no class requirements and no masters needed (can go in straight from Bachelors).

This is a key point. My wife's university in the UK actively tried to get its PhD candidates in and out in 3 years (with an optional 4th year for writing, typically part-time), and more than half of her cohort achieved that. While it's possible to get through a US PhD that fast, the norm is much longer. My wife's PhD is in biomedical materials.

This is generally why I think it's a good idea for undergraduates to get a couple of years of work experience in before returning for their PhDs: the experience of grinding out work that you really don't want to be doing is salutary and acts as motivation to get on with things once in the program.

It seems like early PhD work often involves working at a critical piece that's often overlooked: learning the social landscape of academics (and maybe figuring out what kind of academic they want to be).

I don't want to generalize to others, because a PhD can be a really painful experience, but you got me spot on. I wasn't willing to iterate and try enough paths forward until one stuck. I'm still not sure why that was, because it seems obvious now and I saw others doing it right, but there was a lot of wasted time.