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Comment by 1123581321 | Hacker News Reader

It seems that to satisfy this person, all I have to do is compliment their work ethic, ask when they're hoping to finish, ask if they are tired of pursuing degrees, and confirm that they have no free time.

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You should read more closely.

Don't ask when we're hoping to finish. Research is not a course, it's a job. It's like asking, "when is your start-up's IPO?"; it makes a lot of assumptions and implies your career is a paint-by-numbers affair.

Don't even talk to us if we seem like the kind of kvetchy grad-student who bitches about having no free time. Maybe it's just that I'm at Technion instead of some American university where everyone's a careerist workaholic, but over here many grad-students do have lives, at least until we actually get into doing our thesis. We know there are no new professorships, without illusions, so we're a little less hasty to finish.

I think he read it just right.

Part of being an adult in the real world is handling questions and issues that may make you uneasy or just make you say "what the hell?!?" inside your head. Your mission is to suffer the fools gladly or gently educate them, not publish missives about how special of a snowflake you are and how you should be treated.

It's a big world out there and we're all unique snowflakes.

"Landmines"? Seriously?

Personally, I like learning about what other professions are like, and how to avoid asking questions that make me seem ignorant. I would love to read more articles like this from people in other oft-misunderstood occupations.

I don't see the problem with educating a general audience through a blog post in addition to doing so in one-and-one conversation.

A PhD is a three year programme of study. I would certainly assume that every PhD student at least has the intention to complete it in three years. Some will take longer, but this isn't desirable because the grant money won't continue to pay you after the three years are up. Some unis even have hard deadlines of four years - you can't submit after that. The finish date is therefore likely to be important to the student and therefore is a natural and logical topic of conversation. The only assumption and implication here is that you do intend to complete. If you don't then you probably shouldn't be doing a PhD. Even as a post doc, when your research really is your job, people will still ask you when is the funding completion date for each project you work on, when will you submit papers, etc.

Where are you that a PhD is a three year programme of study? It's absolutely not the case in the United States that a PhD is expected to be completed in three years, and a hard deadline of four years would be exceptionally tight.

In Europe and Australia, a PhD is commonly a "three" year program. I put "three" in quotes because the truth is closer to 3.5 or 4. This is still very short and oddly specific to North Americans where a PhD is nominally a 4 year program, but in practice is more typically 6 (depending on whether or not you do a masters first). It is not unusual for it to take 7 or 8 years. North Americans are not being slow or lazy, they come out of it with far more research and teaching experience and are generally far more capable than the equivalent overseas. It is sort of like already having one postdoc under your belt.

Wow! Not remotely close to my experience. I don't know anyone who's finished a PhD in 3 years, and know a few who have gone on 7 or 8 years (fully funded). My perspective is US-based, mostly with MIT/Harvard PhDs.

You should probably qualify your statement, because I don't know what country/context you're speaking from.

This may be true for some fields in some countries at some universities, but it is certainly not the norm for, for example, Computer Science in the United States at any school I know of.

"A PhD is a three year programme of study. "

That might be the case in the UK but not the U.S. 4 years is closer to a minimum here than a maximum, and some fields (e.g., history) it may be ten years or more.

For people downvoting this: This is correct in the UK and judging from the spelling, that's a good guess for where billyjobob is, despite the Texas sounding handle.

To avoid downvotes, billyjobob should avoid making dismissive generalizations that are trivially shown to be untrue. This detracts from the conversation. What billyjobob should have said was, "In the UK, a PhD is..."

A PhD is a three year programme of study.

And now a lesson in international academic culture.

In European-style universities, you do a Masters of Science first, followed by a PhD. The MSc might take 2 years, then the PhD another 3. This leaves you with 5 years of postgraduate studies before you're "done" (or rather, before you have to "up or out" into a new position).

In American-style universities, you do a 5-year PhD (median is more like 6 years for certain fields where actual experiments take a long time). This will involve roughly two years of coursework equivalent to an MSc, followed by a "qualifying exam" called "quals". This exam could be either a research/engineering project or a series of actual paper exams.

Quals, or passing your MSc, is a very important time in the life of a graduate student. It marks the full transition from "student" to "worker". PhD students past quals are only nominally students, and in fact will only take courses at very advanced levels of knowledge and only to help them with research. MSc/pre-quals students still have a coursework requirement, but it's already getting more research-focused and less heavy than an undergraduate course-load.

As a founder, I would be so depressed if everyone around me was too doubtful and embarrassed to ask if I would ever be successful. However, I can satisfy this additional restriction by asking in what manner you hope your doctoral research to terminate or if you intend to pursue it perpetually.

Additionally, the odds of degree completion are much better than that of an IPO. I might put successful IPO (as opposed to the desperate fund-raising kind) and a feature article in the New York Times, possibly a Nobel, on about the same level. Most doctoral candidates finish their degrees in a timely manner; most of my friends with them have had theirs since about age 29-32.

If you have lives, then I can ask when you take time off. The original article suggested there was not such time. I don't think the restriction of not talking is realistic given that the original article assumed two people would find themselves in a conversational setting with time to talk.

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