how long does it take to do a genetics/genomics md/phd

[angrygunner]

I've done research before in genomics and it seems like those labs publish papers a lot faster than say, biochemistry or immunology labs, especially if they're doing GWAS's or analyzing sequencing data computationally.

I was wondering if anybody did a phd in this area and how long it took you guys? Is it possible to finish everything in 6-7 years? Our PhD program requires us to take 4 classes (on top of med school courses) and to TA for one course. Unfortunately our program director doesn't seeem to care about getting us out in a timely manner and won't let us cut corners..so to finish this quickly we'd have to finish our thesis quickly..only problem for me is the PI i wanted to work with has never graduated an MD/PhD student or a PhD student (only post-docs and med students taking a research year) so don't know how to judge his track record. His 2 main collaborators have PhD students that consistently take 5+ years to graduate though, which seems like a red flag..

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[bd4727]

I've done research before in genomics and it seems like those labs publish papers a lot faster than say, biochemistry or immunology labs, especially if they're doing GWAS's or analyzing sequencing data computationally.

I was wondering if anybody did a phd in this area and how long it took you guys? Is it possible to finish everything in 6-7 years? Our PhD program requires us to take 4 classes (on top of med school courses) and to TA for one course. Unfortunately our program director doesn't seeem to care about getting us out in a timely manner and won't let us cut corners..so to finish this quickly we'd have to finish our thesis quickly..only problem for me is the PI i wanted to work with has never graduated an MD/PhD student or a PhD student (only post-docs and med students taking a research year) so don't know how to judge his track record. His 2 main collaborators have PhD students that consistently take 5+ years to graduate though, which seems like a red flag..

I did a computational genomics PhD and am ready to graduate in 3 yrs with 5+ first author papers. I have many friends in similar situations.

The trick for me was I only worked on projects where the data was already available, and all I had to do was analysis. The rate limiting step in biomedical research, in my opinion, is the generation of data (waiting for cells to grow, scanning enough patients, etc), so anything you can do that bypasses that step will speed the time to publication...

My suggestion would be to find a lab where they have a project that already has all the data gathered or will have all the data gathered and processed (ie sequenced and aligned) by the time you get there. Then sit down and learn the computational tools necessary for a few months and start doing analysis on the data as a learning tool. Obviously when you can graduate is program and PI dependent, but in general I think you can finish fairly quickly in bioinformatics if you work on projects where the data is already generated.