Btw, I am a PHD student now.

[Starchild]

Originally posted by Jon Miller
After a 3 years BS degree?

So your PhDs only have 7 years or less of post high school education?

I admit that in the US 6 years and going is long. I didn't find a group in my first 3 years, and was very rusty after that, or I would have graduated at the 5.5 or 6 mark.

Anything under 5 is very rare though.

If we don't have any breaks, we mostly graduate at age 27 or so. Are you saying that you all graduate at <25 (if no breaks)?

If so, why does anyone from over there come here?

JM

We don't have the same breadth pre-uni, instead we go for more depth. So at 16, you picked 3-4 subjects to study for two years to prepare you for uni. You don't have a major or a minor, instead you do a degree in a particular subject and there's less room for taking courses not part of your studies (for example, my degree was in Biochemistry from the start). Finally, its possible to avoid having to do a Master's prior to doing a Ph.D. if your degree classification is high enough (a high 2:1 or a First like mine).

So it is possible to have a Ph.D. by age 25 if you take no breaks.

But there are advantages to the North American system. Less start up stress for one. It took me about six months to de-rust from the gap between my research dissertation in the final year of uni and the start of my Ph.D. That's 1/6 of my funded time and 1/8 of my total deadline gone in a flash.* Your institutions tend to have more money (at least the ones that foreign students would go to).




*note this fun: My deadline to submit is in four years. My funding lasts only three. It's an....incentive not to sleep.

[Jon Miller]

So at 18 you start uni, just like us. You than have 3 years for BS and than you do a PhD in under 4? That is really fast.

I have heard that even in the field, europeans don't have the breadth, considering the europeans I know aren't head and shoulders above us, that must be it.

The first year or so after starting a PhD program is pretty much just classes. If you do research + thesis in under 3 years, you are amazing also. In fact, in my subfield*, it is common to take ~1 year just in finishing analysis and thesis writing (a reason why nuclear and high energy experiment sucks). So if you take 2 years for classes (not unusual) and 4 years for research + thesis (also not unsual) you come out with 6.

JM
(*Because the experiments are so big, thesis are expected to be 150-200 pages including *lots* of stuff that you didn't do but was still crucial to the experiment. My oberservation is that some of the europeans come out of it relatively ill prepared.)

[AngieC]

Good luck Heresson!

[Alinestra Covelia]

Yay! Good work, and good luck to you!