Intensity (time wise) during PhD

[CitizenRunner]

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Can anyone share his or her experience of how "intense" the PhD portion was in comparison to the MD portion? Did you have more free time during the PhD portion or anything like that?

I currently work in a lab (at a school without a medical school so no MD/PhD students to see firsthand) where no one gets out in less than seven years, but many of the PhD students don't start working until 10AM or later. (In their defense, some stay later, come in on weekends, or have undergraduate students who can do some work.) I presume this isn't the norm for most labs, but as far as I can tell graduate schools seems very laid back which wouldn't be a horrible thing.

Thanks.

 

[atsai3]

Can anyone share his or her experience of how "intense" the PhD portion was in comparison to the MD portion? Did you have more free time during the PhD portion or anything like that?

I currently work in a lab (at a school without a medical school so no MD/PhD students to see firsthand) where no one gets out in less than seven years, but many of the PhD students don't start working until 10AM or later. (In their defense, some stay later, come in on weekends, or have undergraduate students who can do some work.) I presume this isn't the norm for most labs, but as far as I can tell graduate schools seems very laid back which wouldn't be a horrible thing.

Thanks.

It all really just depends on how ambitious you are and how quickly you want to finish. Sure, you can finish a PhD in 7 years with some first-authored papers in middling journals. But if you want to hit a home run (ie., Cell, Science, Nature) then for most people that means 90 hour work-weeks.

 

[Choculitis]

90s hours is probably a bit hyperbolic, but my understanding is that most people consider the PhD portion to be the more difficult part of the degree. I don't see why coming in at 10 means anything if they work late and on weekends; one nice thing about lab work is that (within reason) you can make your own schedule. I'm working at Penn now, and I can tell you that the grad students in my lab have been working pretty hard this summer. One guy graduated a couple weeks ago and has started a new job, but he's still coming in on weekends to finish things up for other people. Another guy had to come in at 6 am on weekends to get access to a specific machine. Another has been working around the clock on his thesis proposal. Granted, these are especially busy periods, and they don't usually work quite this much, but the point is that PhDs can be very stressful.

 

[nothingman]

But if you want to hit a home run (ie., Cell, Science, Nature) then for most people that means 90 hour work-weeks.

Others may disagree with me, but I think getting published in those kinds of journals depends much less on your individual efforts and much more on how politically connected your PI is, what else your paper is competing with that month/week in that journal's submission, how carefully your reviewers are chosen/assigned, and how those reviews are handled. If you are on a strong project and get lucky, you get those papers. But I think on average, maybe with the exception of Cell, the technical requirements for getting a paper into Nature or Science are less than into a leading "field" journal; the latter can have much more nitpicky reviews requiring actual work rather than creative wordplay. Sometimes we see the downside of that reality with big-time retractions from N&S. But I digress.

I think a lot of this is effective time management. Unless your experiment forces you to be in lab at odd hours/certain times, I think 50-60 hours per week is sufficient IF you spend that time efficiently. Not surfing Facebook waiting for a 3 hour incubation, but really multitasking. During my PhD (big lab, 4 years and 6 papers, ranging from PNAS x 2 to very specialized journals), I rarely spent any weekends in lab, but worked 10-12 hr days during the week, not taking significant breaks other than for lunch/coffee. I tried to make sure that my time was always occupied moving things forward, and for the most part that strategy worked out. Thus for me, it's less hours spent but how effectively you spend them. My PI also favored this strategy; we were only expected to be "around" in the late morning/early afternoon.

In general, your time during grad school is more flexible than during most of med school. Depending on the atmosphere set by your PI, vacations are easier to take and important events can be attended. I felt the time pressure with the combined program and worked hard, but burnout can easily set in in the face of months of no progress. Hence the late start times/short hours described by others, especially if you don't have this time pressure and your peers take 6-7 years to graduate. Unfortunately, and this is the downside to PhD life, your project won't happen unless you come in and actively work to make it happen. In med school, on the other hand, one can get away with passive hoop-jumping depending on one's goals afterwards (i.e. not derm or super high-end IM residency, etc.).

 

[Shifty B]

Others may disagree with me, but I think getting published in those kinds of journals depends much less on your individual efforts and much more on how politically connected your PI is, what else your paper is competing with that month/week in that journal's submission, how carefully your reviewers are chosen/assigned, and how those reviews are handled.

Yes. This is 100% true. While work plays a small role, in most situations you can't work your way into a Nature paper even with an infinite amount of work. Either your PI and research topic are in a position to get it... or they aren't.

I think a lot of this is effective time management. Unless your experiment forces you to be in lab at odd hours/certain times, I think 50-60 hours per week is sufficient IF you spend that time efficiently.

Again, I agree. 90 hours per week is totally exaggerated. While there may be people who spend that much time, it is by no means the norm. Additionally, it won't necessarily get you out faster.

If I have to choose between a person who spends 90 hours a week running every experiment possible and a person who spends 40 hours a week running only the well-planned, meaningful experiments I would take the latter every time. If I had a nickel for every time I saw a grad student toiling away to repeat something that you could already tell was not going to make a difference...

 

[QofQuimica]

Agree with nothingman, and would also add that how much time you spend in the lab isn't necessarily a constant throughout your PhD. Depending on where I was in a project and what else was going on in my life, there was a lot of variation in hours per week for me. Even on a daily basis, research is not a 9-5 job in many cases. You arrange your schedule around the work that needs to get done. Sometimes that means spending two or three hours that day, while other times it might mean sleeping over for a night or two.