My PhD took a long time and there’s no shame in that | Hacker News Reader

My PhD took a long time and there’s no shame in that

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37 pointsteleforce43 comments

You shouldn't shame the student, you should absolutely shame the system that wastes people's life-times like this.

7 1/2 years of being a PhD student means 7 1/2 years of missed career growth, missed retirement funds, missed personal growth (how are you going to start a family in poverty-wages?). In the US postdocs are also counted as trainees (another scam) so people enter their careers in their late 30s, early 40s, with empty retirement accounts, no savings, and vaguely applicable skills. This might have been possible 20, 30 years ago, when OP's PI was training, but nowadays it's just a huge loss that isn't worth the vague scientific gains.

Ty for saying this so true

The system is the cult of academia, which indoctrinates students to go down the funnel of becoming a tenured professor, even though most won't make it to the end. It hides career alternatives because those in the cult are largely ignorant of them. Interactions with loudmouth professors with big egos reinforce the will to persevere and avoid the shame of quitting the cult.

I encourage every PhD student to get industry internships, one per year. This needs to be commonplace. It shows them an alternative, gives them a dignified exit (whether they graduate or quit), creates heavyweight competition for the professors with big egos, pays students a decent wage for a while, and injects some novelty on both sides.

I encouraged my GF to do an internship in the filled she ultimately wanted to work in. She wanted to do her PhD to be more desirable for biotech, and although the program was in bacterial systematics or whatever, it would teach her the tools.

Not only she was more capable than she thought, she’s considering not doing the PhD at all. Learning in industry when working with 100 people vs alone with you PI in a lab is IMO much better

The biggest issue is that 30 years ago the odds of getting a tenure track position if you stayed in academia were much higher, and you often didn't need to do a postdoc for more than a year or two at that. I'm guessing PhDs were more consistently finished within 5 years back then too.

The real problem in this specific instance isn't changes to industry/the economy, it's actually academia that has changed in a bad way.

Glad it worked out for OP, but NGL that is a long program. Probably the most disappointing part of the essay is still the idea that good experiments proving hypothesis wrong is not publishable. Is that a problem with the research community, or a journal problem, or self-imposed problem? Probably all of the above.

I left my PhD program after 3ish years. It was not working out with my advisor. I felt he was abusing research time, more interested in university research as a business than hard science. I'm sure the line is thin for many programs, but he did get in trouble for it years later after I left. His students were shuffled to other advisers and he was removed. So many years lost for so many students. I'm very glad I left when I did, but it's also one of my biggest disappointments as a lover of hard science and engineering.

My EngD supervisor explained to me that it's harder to prove something doesn't work than that it does.

A negative result thus has to pass a much higher bar and prove that it wasn't methodologically flawed in any way, whereas a positive result has a much lower bar to pass.

That's an interesting theoretical argument but in practice the much larger reason is that a negative result is not sexy.

Regardless, I don't agree with this philosophy when it comes to the functioning of the scientific system. A field like biology has many real results that are highly context-dependent. If we are going to allow people to regularly publish highly controlled studies and then make grand conclusions based on them (with real $$$ impact btw), we sure as shit need people publishing their observations about when something didn't generalize for them.

Not every paper needs to be a rock solid scientific conclusion, and it's pretty obvious that in practice many papers now aren't anyway. Why we play this silly game of pretend with scientific formalisms is beyond me. Science is getting larger and more complex, and there is 0 reason to assume that the way to scale is to have every lab try to tackle questions from start to finish in a nearly identical way.

I'm inclined to agree. Another weird effect I've heard of (2nd hand) act against publishing negative results is the social cost of casting doubt over a colleagues work. If science isn't reproducible its basically useless

A well designed experiment will produce publishable results regardless of the specific outcome. As long as your error bars are small enough to learn something new it's a success. Not publishing unfavored but valid results is not normal, and myself and my colleagues would tend to place that in the territory of academic dishonesty. It's also counterproductive career-wise.

The most important grad school decision by far is choosing an advisor. The overall culture of the university and academia in general have a very small effect on things relative to the culture of the group you join.

When I did my PhD in the U.K(back in the early 90s) I had three years of funding to do it. Most people would take 4 years - 3 years full time at university and then the 4th year writing up whilst working. Well supervised students would do it in 3 years and would use the papers they had published as the basis for their thesis. You could only carry on for more than four years under serious extenuating circumstances.

yeah, I finished mine in 2021. It took me 5 years (had a year off for extenuating circumstances) 3 years of lab work + 1 year off + 1 year writing up.

We didn't get any papers out during my actual time there, I wrote up a bunch of my results after i'd finished my viva and that got published in 2022 after I'd switched career tragecteries from science to software.

I'm incredibly lucky that my partner had a job that could make ends meet while writing up, and to find a company willing to take on a Chemistry PhD as a data engineer with no proven commercial experience.

My experience was a wild ride of high highs and crushing lows, I can't imagine doing that for over 7 years.

My one year of writing up was the hardest for me. I had an interesting job and was earning money that compared to my student grant was ridiculous. It was really hard to force myself to finish something that I quickly realised was not going to influence my career in any way.

Though I was pretty much hired on the basis that I would have a PhD and the hirer (who had a PhD) took great pleasure in filling the company full of PhDs purely to annoy the CEO who had dropped out of his PhD...

I feel like one stubborn unstoppable force of nature often.

17 years. Top that if you can.

Yes, I survived. Shook off all the daggers in my back, like a dog under a garden hose, and keep walking my own path, as usually.

And not, sometimes the problem is not the student.

Not excusing the length of the OP's PhD, but I'm assuming you entered with a master's? In the US you typically start a PhD straight out of undergrad, and then the first entire year (and usually part of the second) are essentially doing a master's in the subject. It might also be field dependent, but 5 years for a US PhD is not unreasonably long IMO because you hardly start the real research work until year 2 at best, probably year 3 by the time you're suitably competent to make legit progress. It's also very common to just staple together published papers here as one's thesis (in the sciences).

I think the real problems here are:

1. PhD admissions has gotten increasingly competitive, so now a lot of people need to take shitty predoctoral RA positions for 2 years before they even get to start the PhD. Though this means they should be quicker to be able to start a project once they're in, many programs are inflexible with the expected Y1/Y2 timeline.

2. Some advisors are real assholes and will purposefully hold back students because a 6th+ year PhD student gives very good value per dollar. This is something programs really need to do a better job of protecting against. There's also just advisors that are bad at mentoring/project management (it's not like it is part of their training really), and while a strict cap on the duration of the degree might nominally address this, it's not a good solution for the long term health of the system.

3. To get a tenured professorship is increasingly competitive, and already exceedingly so. Once you start a postdoc you are more "on the clock" in some ways, and where you do your postdoc(s) can be hugely important to if you will get a tenure track offer. So there are also many students that purposely keep PhD status for an extra year just to give themselves more time to find a postdoc they want and make sure they've wrapped up their PhD papers before starting.

My impression is that a lot of similar issues exist with academia in the EU, they're just not as baked directly into the PhD experience. Which makes the PhD there much more suitable for someone planning an industry exit all along. Kind of ironic given the US love of industry more generally.

Granted, I mostly meet international researchers who chose to exit to the US for one reason or another at some stage of their career, which is a biased sample. But there have been a lot of recent articles about postdoc protests in some European countries as well. The dragging on of career "training" in a ridiculously competitive job market, where the trainees are the primary labor source, is still a problem for academia regardless of when the terminal degree is conferred.

I was very very lucky, when I was at University it was mostly all funded by the government or government bodies.

During my undergraduate they had just introduced student loans, but there were no university fees and most people got some kind means tested grants for living costs. The student loans were intended to top up these grants.

I went straight from undergrad to PhD - the University had funding from SERC (or maybe it was the successor to this EPSRC) for a number of PhD places and they offered one to me.

From what I remember it was quite usual to go straight from undergrad to a PhD - at least the majority of PhD students I was around were straight from undergrad.

A few of my friends did masters - again the fees were paid (I think some of them got grants as well).

> “I think if someone takes more than 5 years the student is the problem,” the speaker replied tersely. I was devastated.

This kind of shaming is common in academia, and disgraceful. Not generally on this topic, but there is no shortage of putdowns.

>”I think if someone takes more than 5 years the student is the problem,” the speaker replied tersely. I was devestated.

I’m always shocked when adults give any fucks at all what some rando thinks of them. Got a problem with my work? Let’s have it. Give me the run down and we’ll see if you have a point.

“The student is the problem” is a completely content-free statement. I wonder if this line is actually made up to make a point, because I can’t actually imagine someone in academia saying something so empty.

> I can’t actually imagine someone in academia saying something so empty.

The percentage of people in academia that aren't socially gifted is probably higher than in other occupations. I don't see any reason why hearing something like that in academia would be more rare.

I worked in an office with about 8 other PhD students, was in a research group with another 10, and was friendly with another 10-15.

Social skills weren't lacking that much (don't get me wrong, we were a bunch of weirdos by some standards), but mental health certainly was.

There is a lot of pressure on PhD students and anxiety and/or depression affected all but a handful. Most people go into the programme wanting to be academics afterwards, so you look up to the academics that are there, listen to what they have to say. At the same time a whole lot of your ego is tied up into the success or failure of your work. If somebody shits on your work, that can break you.

I had therapy while in my final year, and so did a bunch of my peers, it's a meat grinder.

I don't disagree but the statement is also weird from the perspective of objective reality in 2023.

My old PhD program's current 5 year graduation rate is way below 50%. I think it's like 10% if you don't count the MD/PhDs that are more likely to get pushed through quickly, but even including them it's not more than 25%. The 6 year graduation rate is barely hitting 50%! I don't know if it's field-dependent or if the Prof was just very out of touch, but graduation in 5 years is an anomaly at this point that actually suggests the person is more likely to have a planned industry (or medical school) exit. Weird to conclude the student is the problem en masse.

> I’m always shocked when adults give any fucks at all what some rando thinks of them

It is completely normal human psychology to care about what people think. It used to be Nirmal I literally any historical period and is still normal.

That you think it is not virtuous and adults should seek to not care is one thing. But acting like it is shocking when people display normal psychology is weird. If you find adults caring about what others think shocking, then issue is in your social skill.

Not just “others,” but other people who have no business whatsoever making such a judgement.

If a person comes up to you on the street and, out of the blue, says “you’re ugly!” Do you care? Surely not! You don’t know them, you’re not attempting to get a date with them, they’re not on your hiring committee.. their opinion simply doesn’t matter.

Moreover, this analogy is a generous one. At least “you’re ugly!” Has some sort of meaning. “The student is the problem” is so vague that it’s essentially meaningless. It contains no actionable component.

Taking things personally is rarely beneficial, mostly because it’s rarely about “you” anyway.

Eh I think it's different when someone senior in your field makes a general judgement that would apply to you. That's not at all the same as a random person on the street. I also think it depends on how subconscious you are about the thing to begin with, and I imagine this student had their degree length on the back of their mind a lot.

Whether it's beneficial or not isn't really the question. But it's a natural human response in this sort of scenario, and it does make sense why that became a natural response. Someone with more power than you openly doesn't like something that you were already worried about in yourself.

Overcoming 'natural human responses' is key to growing as a person. Just because a response is 'natural' doesn't make it 'right' or 'healthy.' I get that the person who said this to the student is some kind of expert, but again -- taking it personally has no benefit at all. Until people learn how to differentiate opinions from people that matter from just noise, they'll continue to have anxiety about things they can't control.

It is not some rando, it is a speaker publicly propagating a horrible message that is already being used aggressively to filter out students from post-doctoral positions. It is one of the most prominent "soft" arguments to reject applicants in postdoc committees.

In my experience one of the big problems is that negative results are not published. So it is probably more common than generally recognised that obvious hypotheses have been explored in the past and found to be false.

The key premise of PhD research is to expand the body of knowledge. Incremental results under an experienced PI are easier to come by than substantial steps outside of the popular research areas.

7+ years is not unusual in the humanities. The sciences need to ease the hell up.

Or the humanities need to tighten up, to build a system that encourages and enables students to get on with their lives.

6-7 year is not at all unusual in the sciences, at least in biological sciences. 7.5 is _very slightly_ longer than usual.

The real PhD was all the failed hypotheses you made along the way.

This is hitting close to home rn :')

I needed this, thank you.

I just finished my 6th year, and also needed this, thanks.

50% don't finish PHDs, so it's a humblebrag. (Figures put it at 30%-50% depending)

> But as the years passed, I began to worry. I investigated 10 different hypotheses—just to prove each a dead end. We didn’t want to publish papers that raised more questions than they answered.

These should have been written up, that would be real science. The system might be broken, but the student should acknowledge that here.

How can you tell someone has a PhD? Don't worry, they will let you know.

My partner has one and it’s something that never comes up in a social setting unless someone says “what do you do for work”.

It doesn't even come up then! "I'm a scientist working on X" doesn't imply to most people "I have a PhD"

Anyway, the novelty of the PhD sort of wears off after a few years.

To be honest the novelty of having a PhD is wearing off and I'm writing my thesis now.

It can also come up in a more formal social setting if the Dr. prefix is on place setting or RSVP list. Before I was married I used to always RSVP with doctor just because I hated the Ms. prefix.

My dad has a real PhD in aerospace that he got from one of the “brand name” schools. He doesn’t have that diploma hanging in his office. Instead, he has a framed fake PhDs from “Thunderwood College” [1] framed in his office, because he thinks it’s funny.

I think he feels like having a fancy title doesn’t fundamentally make you “more right” about something, and not having a fancy title doesn’t make you “more wrong” either, but he feels that people treat you like you’re smarter if you have a doctorate, so he never brings it up (outside of his resume and the like).

[1] https://thunderwoodcollege.com/

Unless they continued in universities or youbare reading their CV, you can't.

It is kind of like asking "how do I know someone has license to fly a plane?". You can't unless they tell you.

I very rarely tell people I have a PhD - why would I?

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