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Comment by chrisseaton | Hacker News Reader

> but I’m not sure I can ever go back to having to wake up early in the morning, sit in a boring seminar, be pressured to take on teaching duties, and not be able to escape to a warm country in the cold winter

This really isn’t what a PhD is like. A PhD is a research degree - you do research in your own time. You don’t have to be in seminars if you don’t want to and you don’t have to teach (unless you need the money.) Think of a PhD more like a sabbatical to focus on your own research. There’s a goal you need to achieve but freedom in how you get there.

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No, this differs from field to field and from country to country. There are only a tiny handful of departments dedicated to my subfield worldwide, and I know that they all require, at the very least, attendance at a weekly seminar so that you can share with your fellow students what you have been up to. In some places, the department can demand that one teach in order to hold a PhD position, or that one take part in the editing of publications produced by the department (which can be so much work that it distracts from one’s own research).

Ah ok that does sound a bit rough.

Ha, in a "First World Problems" sense, maybe!

Not trying to say Mediterraneo10 should get a PhD, but PhD life probably sounds very nice to many people in the world without the kind of freedom and financial stability Mediterraneo10 describes. Credit to him/her in achieving such enviable life circumstances!

Or credit anybody pursuing a PhD for being smart?

Very condescending comment tbh.

There isn’t much “fun” about PhD. People who “do it on the side” without “university housing, pay and support” are borderline masochists.

Doing so on your own motivation without family/peer-pressure has my respect. In a First World country generally you don’t have any benefit from a PhD... Much different in “not first world”.

I mean, that ignores the Master's requirement. All PhD programs I've ever looked at have a Master's as part of them, which has all the coursework.

For example, a political science PhD at Columbia (including the Masters) requires a full 12 courses, as well as teaching for at least a year (more if you receive a fellowship, up to 20 hrs/wk).

And you can't do your Masters somewhere else first and then just do the PhD part at Columbia, that's not an option.

https://polisci.columbia.edu/content/phd-requirements

The requirements vary from department to department. I knew one math department that didn't require any coursework for the PhD (nor a MS degree).

Of course. But I was responding to GP which claimed "you don’t have to be in seminars if you don’t want to" as a blanket fact about PhD programs in general. For many (most?), you clearly do, despite there being exceptions of course.

> This really isn’t what a PhD is like. A PhD is a research degree - you do research in your own time. You don’t have to be in seminars if you don’t want to and you don’t have to teach (unless you need the money.)

At least in france there are some minimum legal hours of seminars you have to attend and classes you have to teach during your phd.

> there are some minimum legal hours of seminars you have to attend

True, but that's like a few dozens hours over 3+ years.

> and classes you have to teach during your phd.

Nope. Might depend on the “École doctorale” or the lab you are attached to, but that's not a universal requirement.

In the US the first two years of a PhD are heavily focused on classwork, with a research component; the latter years are the "sabbatical to focus on your own research." People who quit after the first two years are often granted a parting Master's degree, because that's basically what a Master's is - the two years of graduate coursework that kick off a PhD.

This does, of course, differ by program.

From my possibly outdated research, it might be because you don't normally leave university with Master's degree in the USA, just the Bachelors, and there is no "normal" Masters program - essentially you do mastery as part of PhD and then get "moved over" automatically to PhD.

Of course you can leave with Master's degree at that point, it's just that it seemed to me that USA generally didn't got for MSci style degree, not in CS related areas at least.

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