You have to find that middle ground where you are productive enough to get the degree signed. It is in between that place where you such are a clear danger to everyone that you are asked to get the heck out immediately (I would presume that grinding 100g of high explosive with a mortar and pestle qualifies) and that other place where you are so competent that your boss shackles you to your bench and loses the key.

The good news is that S. A. Scoggin’s tale of the above and more is now free for download:
http://www.scribd.com/doc/36568510/A-Novel-and-Efficient-Synthesis-of-Cadaverine

Sure, the PhD is in the journey, but trying to get my mother to understand that there are few tangible benchmarks is hard. She asks about progress and I never have a good answer. I might send her here.

Thus far, I’ve been in my current PhD program 2 years, and I think I’ve gotten done less than a month of *tangible* work, most of which has been VERY recent (and still could not work in the end). We’ll see how long this takes.

During that time, I also had a “hobby research” project on online distance education (2 conference presentations and a book chapter out of that one), and was very active in student advocacy and support. I probably could have completed a year or so sooner, but would have missed out on many of the important experiences and learning, and certainly missed out on many of the deep friendships and relationships.

A PhD is a transformative process if you allow it so. It can be so much more so than an instrumentalist, qualifying paper chase as many people in the STEM disciplines seem to construct it.

But then again, I DID mention that I’m in the social sciences, right? :)

My wife can never know…

SC

In real life, my PhD in pharmacology took 5.5 years. If I could delete the multiple failures (including having to rewrite my entire thesis proposal because the hypothesis was based on something that turned out to be a tissue culture artifact, and the aforementioned 6-month period where controls refused to come out right) and a year-long period of depression where I had trouble dragging myself out of bed due to aforementioned failures, I could have completed my dissertation research in about 6-8 months. Tack on another 3 months to write and two years of coursework, and I put the entire thing at about 3 years.

I’m not in laboratory research anymore.

So, time for reading, understanding, and developing skills, thought processes and judgement usually needs to be factored in.

The PhD is not just doing the experiments and getting the results; it’s formulating the experiments and understanding why you want to run them, and what the results mean in a broader context.

My PhD took just over five years. Even if all the experiments and programming had worked without error, and other human factors had not occurred to slow things up, a decent number of years would still be needed for developing an understanding the field and formulating the right questions. Less than three years seems unlikely, given my starting point.

In much the same way, undergraduate courses take a number of years, and the person who graduates successfully is very different from the younger person who entered the course.

Often, gaining the necessary maturity can’t be rushed.

All the coursework was done, all the cumulative exams were done, it was down only to the work.

I came to conclusion that the area had actually been played out, and I got tired of the academic games. The work I did actually led me to believe the underlying mechanism was not what my prof. believed it was, but I couldn’t take it that direction. In some labs, it’s not about the science, it’s about products and hype unfortunately.

Eventually, I just couldn’t do it anymore. I don’t consider it time wasted in my life, and I really don’t regret anything.

I could have copped out and wrote a crap dissertation like so many others and I would have ended up in a completely different place than I am now (a completely different field), and where I am now isn’t bad at all.

It’d be nice to lay claim to the doctorate to have letters after my name, I have to admit.

Tenure track is hard enough.

Those extra 4.5 years in your PhD probably consisted of more than just failed experiments. If you were to go back now and repeat all the experiments you performed—those that failed as well as those that didn’t—you probably would not take 5 years to do them all; my bet is it’d be more like 1.5 or 2. If this is true, what explains the discrepancy?

You were probably taking classes during some of those years. You probably also work more efficiently now than you did then. But in addition, the point of grad school is to learn how to do research, and that learning is a slow, time-consuming, error-prone process.

My observation has been that if you took a graduating PhD and somehow erased their memory of all their research, experiments, results, conclusions, and writing, but were able to preserve in their minds the lessons about *how* to do all those things that they’d learned over the course of their PhD experience, they’d be able to re-do all the work in about two years.

Of course, in a research career there’s also the ramp-up time for a long-term research agenda, grant-writing, etc., and the apparent time to produce any given result or publication doesn’t necessarily take that into account.

Conclusions: I would have never become a researcher in 1 year, but the final thesis numbers took 1 year to produce.

He said that what he did was choose a project for which the data was readily available (I think it was a demographics thing using Census data, not really sure). Also important was that he was motivated by the fact that he was paying for the whole thing himself (his family was poor and living in Puerto Rico).

Obviously this is an extreme outlier… it took me four years just to get my Master’s.

Pretty interesting professor… his lectures frequently went off on tangents, and I learned more about Puerto Rican cockfighting than I ever thought I’d learn in my life.