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Comment by patrick451 | Hacker News Reader

> First, let us dispense with the first lie you will hear: ‘this doctoral program is a five year program.’ What that actually means is that the program has five years of ‘guaranteed’ funding. I am sure that somewhere there is a student who went from having a BA to a PhD in five years. I have not yet met them.

I guess engineering must be a lot easier. I started my PhD program with only a BA from a different field and finished in 5 years. That by no means made me an outlier.

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It depends on field and more importantly, country. I was the last person in my year (that I know of) at CMU to get a PhD, a whopping 9 years after we started. A friend had to re-enroll to get his 10.5 or 11 years in.

Meanwhile, I knew tons of people who got PhD's in CS in 4-5 years back in Australia. They typically did zero coursework or breadth stuff, and they were able to start dissertation work within a few months of the clock starting on their degree, without the undignified business of having to propose their thesis formally in public or even defend it in public.

The process of getting a PhD isn't order-of-magnitude different from field-to-field or place-to-place, but there's definitely a good factor of 2-3x between the most arduous process and the least (which does not mean that one degree is 2-3x better, of course).

p.s. Extraordinarily gifted and organized students at CMU were referred to be "on the 4 year plan". Interestingly, some of the most speedy completers of their PhD work were among the least well prepared for the MSc coursework - there was very little correlation between people who blitzed tons of coursework fast with high grade (the 'hares', like me) and the 'tortoises' - who seemed to struggle with the breadth requirements but had solid research ideas that they plugged away on from Day 1. So a woman who didn't have a formal CS background and completed her MSc requirements slowly was the first person to get a PhD in our year.

In my math PhD program I have not heard of anybody finishing in the 5 years allotted.

I got through a PhD in algebraic combinatorics in five years, but was definitely an outlier.

I had also taken and/or crashed a lot of grad classes during my last two years of undergrad (out of six, total, spread over five schools), so was probably a bit better prepared for the early years than others in my cohort. (There was also a funny system of allowing incoming students to take the first year prelims if they thought they could hack it. I aced algebra and bombed analysis in a legendary fashion, but didn't have to take the algebra test the following year as result. This /significantly/ reduced my stress load in the first year.)

Add in my undergrad time, though, and I graduated at a totally normal age...

I know several brilliant people who each spent between eight and eleven years getting their MSc and PhD in computer graphics. In theory, the MSc should take two years and the PhD should take four, but it always takes longer.

That's just absurd for computer graphics with how much has changed in the past decade.

Technology moves quickly, but is irrelevant to most computer graphics research. In practice, graphics is often similar to pure math, physics or biology. The fundamentals change slowly, and that's where academic work is usually done.

That said, it is indeed an absurd length of time. A decade is a significant fraction of your life.

Yes, engineering is a lot easier. You can look at published statistics on average graduation times and you'll find that engineering PhDs graduate people on time very often while humanities PhDs can struggle.

Depends on which country and which exact field. If you sit in front of a computer for most of your work, it’s possible your field has shorter graduation times.

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