Re: phd

["Colin McHenry" <cmchenry@westserv.net.au>]

Ho ho, this should get some good responses....

>i'm curious, how long does it take one to get a phd in
>something like vertebrate paleontology, on average.  I
>ask because i have been told at least 7 years for a
>phd (this being from someone who w/a phd in sociology)
>and i have seen that some people take as little as a
>single year.  So whats the story?  How much of an
>investment in time is a "typical" program. What are
>some not so typical numbers too.

Well, in my case, I enroled in mid 1994, and I still haven't finished!

There are some mitigations here, though (or excuses, as my supervisor would
put it).  In mid 1998 I suspended my enrolement for the sake of a paid job,
and literally didn't  touch the thesis again until mid 2002.  I am now
hoping to get it done by mid 2004, on part time enrolement.  So that makes 4
years full time plus 2 years part time equals 5 years full time equivalent.

Mine is by no means the worst case that I know of in palaeo / zoology.  One
person in my lab (mentioning no names) had been going for 4 years when I
started and has still not finished.  In fact, I imagine that, in the context
of people I know, my schedule is somewhere around average.  Of course, some
people do get it done in the requisite three years, but I have no idea how
they do it.  I think it must help if you do an honours project that relates
to the PhD program - gives you a head start.  In my case, my honours was on
the evolutionary ecology of mimicry systems in butterflies.  I'm still
waiting to find an application of that to plesiosaur palaeontology.  When I
started the phud I had to learn anatomy, geology, and fossil prep from
scratch.

I think that after the first three years (i.e. after your funding runs out)
life tends to get in the way of finishing up.  Which is a shame, because it
sometimes takes that long for you to actually figure out what's going on
with your animals, and to formulate some decent questions.  I'd be
interested to hear the rest of the list's experience with this, because at
the moment the university admin nazi types (who have taken over the asylum
over here in recent times) are starting to make it very hard for anyone to
go over 3 years full time enrolement.  I keep arguing that this is just
unrealsistic for a lot of disciplines, such as ecology where you need at
least three seasons of good data (and very rarely does your first season
count as anything more than invaluable experience).  I would consider that
palaeo, with the need to visit collections around the world, prepare
specimens, etc, requires more than three years.

My impression is that PhD programs in Australia and the UK, for example, are
roughly equivalent in times of time and average quality.  I have to
begrudgingly admit that the yanks probably end up better trained - there is
more coursework in US doctoral programs, more teaching experience (and more
money, more good collections, more people to talk to, etc...).  This
proabably means that a doctrate in the US is takes longer than is the
average in other places - although I have not idea about Germany, France,
Spain, etc.  Am I right in thinking that PhD's in Germany take a very long
time?

> Feel free to respond
>off list, as this might not be of much interest to
>everyone on the list.
>thanks


Awh, I think we should have a survey.  Come on everyone, be honest....


Colin

"If the vertebrate fossil record of Australia tells us anything, it is this;
dinosaurs, bad; plesiosaurs, good."

Colin McHenry
56 Gaskill St
CANOWINDRA,  NSW 2804,  Australia
Ph: +61 2 6344 1009
Mobile phone: 0428 131 858
email: cmchenry@westserv.net.au
-----Original Message-----
From: Robert J. Schenck <nygdan@yahoo.com>
To: dinosaur@usc.edu <dinosaur@usc.edu>
Date: Wednesday, 14 August 2002 10:12
Subject: phd