At what age you complete your phD?

[Twukwuw]

hi,

At what age you competed your phD?

As I have calculated, I would have completed my phD right at the age of 28, is it too LATE?

I have heard that some professors completed their phD at 23 or even 21.
terrible.. ...

Twukwuw.

 

[Kalimaa23]

Around here the average would be in 26-28 range. So don't worry.
People who get their PhD's at 21 are freaks of nature who should be shot and have their remains studied.

 

[Twukwuw]

As I know, people completed their undergraduate study at 19-20 in last century.

Is it true?

 

[Just some guy]

Yes, but they didn't know anything in the last century so it was much easier ;)

 

[Pengwuino]

I remember a conversation with a few of my professors and they agreed that finding someone under 30 with a phd was somewhat rare now-a-days in the field of physics

 

[Mk]

People who get their PhD's at 21 are freaks of nature who should be shot and have their remains studied.

Ow! I always just thought they were smart. We got to radical anti-PhDist here.

 

[Evo]

Humanino is 26 and will have his PHD completed this year. He is an experimental physicist.

 

[Kalimaa23]

Ow! I always just thought they were smart. We got to radical anti-PhDist here.

Not really, I'm hoping to start one myself next year. It's just that those supersmart "hey let's finish 10 years of education in 4" wizkids get on my nerves

Here in Belgium the "usual" route under the new post-bologna system would look something like this

18-21 : Bachelor
21-23 : Master
23-28 : PhD

 

[Moonbear]

I was 26, but then turned 27 only 2 days later (I purposely planned my defense BEFORE my birthday so I could celebrate my birthday for the first time in 4 years ). I took a year off between college and grad school though, to figure out exactly what it was I wanted to do before committing. I still finished a bit more quickly than most because I was able to hit the ground running with a project (when your research project needs to be done between 2 and 8 AM, it really doesn't interfere at all with your class schedule, so you can fit more into a day ).

 

[Twukwuw]

Not really, I'm hoping to start one myself next year. It's just that those supersmart "hey let's finish 10 years of education in 4" wizkids get on my nerves

Here in Belgium the "usual" route under the new post-bologna system would look something like this

18-21 : Bachelor
21-23 : Master
23-28 : PhD

hi Dimitry Terryn,

here in Malaysia, usually peope start their first year undergraduate at the age of 20!
undergraduate: 20-->23
Master: 24-->25
phD: 3 --5 years

haha, I don't know why the government let people here start their undergraduate study so late... ...
anyway, I am studying my undergraduate at Singapore right now.

 

[Cyrus]

My friend is just finishing up his undergrad EE degree. He is going straight into Phd. He's a young guy. Hes only 20. I think he will have his phd by the time he's 25. He started college at 16.

His name is Mohammad Ali, hahahahah...that's funny.

 

[mathwonk]

what does it matter if there are smarter people out there? why should we resent them? this is a sign of insecurity. work on it.

 

[Ivan Seeking]

what does it matter if there are smarter people out there? why should we resent them? this is a sign of insecurity. work on it.

GE once did a long term study of their engineers and scientists. IIRC it covered about fifty years of research and engineering projects. It was found that the most successful employees were, on the average, B students.

 

[mathwonk]

I had a D average for 2 years in undergrad, flunked out, and took 12 years to complete grad school. so what? i enjoy what i do. i can't help it if i am not very smart. what matters is what i do with what I've got to work with.

 

[Evo]

I remember a conversation with a few of my professors and they agreed that finding someone under 30 with a phd was somewhat rare now-a-days in the field of physics

A member here humanino is quite rare, a phd in experimental physics, the most difficult to get at age 25.

 

[vanesch]

Humanino is 26 and will have his PHD completed this year. He is an experimental physicist.

In France, the PhD term is rather short: 3 years. So when you start your undergrad stuff at 18, you have your masters 5 years later (23) and hence your PhD at 26 indeed, if you do everything in a row.

 

[vanesch]

hi,

At what age you competed your phD?

As I have calculated, I would have completed my phD right at the age of 28, is it too LATE?

I completed mine when I was 29/30 (I submitted it when I was 29, but it took 6 months to find a date on which all members of the jury could unite, so I turned 30 in the mean time, and got a job). However, I completed two masters (physics and electromechanical engineering) before, so that put me in the "rather old age" class.

 

[Danger]

Never, for me. As mentioned repeatedly in the past, I never finished high-school. I quite irritates me, in fact, that a good friend of mine who is a petroleum engineering professor is trying to talk me into going back to school to get a degree. Daft bastard. I'm 50 bloody years old (about 6-8 younger than him). I have a good job, of which I actually work maybe 1 or 2 hours on an 8-hour shift, and up to 3 on a 10-hour one. The rest is whatever I care to do, which is PF, 'How Stuff Works', various Googling, and more damned games than a normal human can handle. Yeah, damn it, I'd love to be an engineer. But... I never realized that until I started hanging out in PF. Before that, my love was astrophysics. It took my interactions here to point out to me that most of what I've done in my life, on my own time, was engineering. Just a very ignorant approach to it.

 

[EL]

If everything goes a planned, I'll have mine when I'm 28-29, which I think is quite ordinary here. Usually you can go to University when you're 19 (20 if you're doing military service, like I did). Then the master takes 4-5 years, after which the PhD takes another 4-5 years.

 

[rcgldr]

I've always wondered how most people afford to get phd's? What do they do for income while studying for a phd? In addition, you're in school until near 30, so this would seem to delay your career and family life significantly. Seems like a real commitment.

Rather than post a auto-biography here, the short story is while I was on forced "sabbatical" from college, I got my first programming job, so never returned. I had all my basic stuff done, english, history, government, first year physics, calculus, differential equations, and linear algerbra, so I just needed computer programming classes to get a degree. I ended up getting a BS degree through Regents College, AKA University of the State of New York, which is run by the regents that accredit other colleges and universities, mostly through tests like the GRE graduate subject test for Computer Science.

 

[Kurdt]

In the UK the PhD course is somewhat shorter and lasts at most 3 years although I do believe you can get extensions and whatever. I got my masters this year and am hoping to get my PhD in 3 years time when I'm 25. It doesn't really matter when you get it though just some systems wok differently to others.

 

[Kurdt]

In the Uk we get grants from various research councils while doing a PhD. These grants usually cover 3 years expenses (and hence that's why PhD courses are usually 3 years unless you get an extension). The money isn't much about £15k a year but its tax free and certainly more than enough to live on. There are other sources of funding but they are rare.

 

[EL]

I've always wondered how most people afford to get phd's? What do they do for income while studying for a phd?

Speaking for myself I've had a scolarship this year, and so I will another year too. Then I'll get employed "for real", with a "real" salary and all that, for the remaining years. (How I long for that!)

In addition, you're in school until near 30, so this would seem to delay your career and family life significantly. Seems like a real commitment.

Sure it is.

 

[Smurf]

GE once did a long term study of their engineers and scientists. IIRC it covered about fifty years of research and engineering projects. It was found that the most successful employees were, on the average, B students.

I've heard a lot about that. Which is good stuff for me, cause I've never been an A student. Been B, Been C, Been D, never A though. I was a B Student last semester. Woohoo for B Students!

 

[Zantra]

GE once did a long term study of their engineers and scientists. IIRC it covered about fifty years of research and engineering projects. It was found that the most successful employees were, on the average, B students.

I also read some study(the same study?) that concluded that the vast majority of successful people in the corporate world (ie CEOS CIOs COOs, etc) were B and C students. Not surprising, because I've been in more than one meeting where being the smartest guy in the room is bad, but being the most charismatic(read butt kisser) person in the room got you far. In office politics, being smart only means you're a threat to your boss, and will probably be squashed.

So much for the business world:tongue:

 

[mathwonk]

i have a lot of students who drop out of my challenging courses and take easier courses to get an A. So a B student could be one who is not afraid of a hard course. that could result in actually learning more and being challenged more thasn many fake A students.

 

[mathwonk]

in fact some of my college D's were in the hardest courses offered.

 

[mathwonk]

it is better for you though to get your phd younger. i got mine at 35, which means i will be 65 before i have 30 years credit at work. and i am getting a lot less energetic physically, which makes it way harder to do competitive research.

i used to work for hours and hours, often all night, to get out a project, but that becomes unfeasible eventually.

 

[Kalimaa23]

I've always wondered how most people afford to get phd's? What do they do for income while studying for a phd?

In Belgium, like in most countries in the world, you get payed during your PhD years. Most common sources of income are

Federal Science Fund (FWO) Scolarship
Technological (IWT) Scholarship
University Assistantship
Funds from a European Research Network (which is what I'm hoping for).

The first three a four years standard, with some possibility to add an extra year. The last one is variable, depending on how much money your research group has avaible and is willing to spend.

I've just turned 22, hopefully I'll be starting my PhD next october, so I'll be 26-27 when I get it.

 

[darius]

The more important question is not when one obtains a doctorate but how productive one is with it, at whatever age one obtains it. Of course, getting one early means one has more years to be productive. I really wonder whether the brain slows down with regard to math after a certain age? For in other subjects it is not so. Kant's Critique, was written when he was in his sixties. And new studies are showing that the mind is far more elastic than we thought, which is a good thing, because I thought with respect to Math, the mind hardens by late fifties. What are the thoughts of the older members of the fourm?

 

[Office_Shredder]

I saw a movie called "Proof" the other day.

Apparently, your mathematical ingenuity peaks at 23. So I guess you're all SOL :P

 

[Moonbear]

I've always wondered how most people afford to get phd's? What do they do for income while studying for a phd? In addition, you're in school until near 30, so this would seem to delay your career and family life significantly. Seems like a real commitment.

It is a real commitment, so not something to just jump into thinking it's the "next step" without thinking through what it's the next step toward. As for affording it, generally one gets paid a stipend when doing a PhD, either off of a funded grant their mentor holds, or through some sort of assistantship or fellowship. It's enough to pay rent and buy food. As for delaying career and family like, not necessarily. You're just doing your coursework while others are starting at the bottom of the food chain in the corporate world, or whever they go, but when you start your career, you start higher up. Once you're past the post-doc years, there's a huge leap to being an independent investigator with the salary that accompanies that huge leap, and with a much more satisfying career too, which is not to be underestimated. As for families, it's a little tougher on women than men, but I've seen people do it in all different ways and all seem to manage to make what's important for them happen. Some do delay having kids until after grad school (post-doc years are a good time to have children), some have them before they start and return to grad school at an older age when their kids can be more independent, and some have them while in grad school. The main thing there really is the level of support one has from a spouse. Usually, raising kids while in grad school requires having a spouse who earns enough to support the family and really good time management, and that your spouse is understanding of the hours you're going to put in on your education. A lot of people I've known preferred having their kids during their post-doc years because they could afford to take a little more time away to spend with the infant when first born, and just switched from balancing classes and research to balancing baby care with research, plus, you don't yet have the stress of trying to get grant support for your own work and working toward tenure. Ideally, you land your first job just before your kids start school, so you move once before they're settled into schools and then stay there, or they are only in the early grades with plenty of time to make new friends in a new town.

And, well, for some of us, it doesn't matter, because we just haven't met the right person to marry anyway, or that's not something very important to us.

 

[rcgldr]

Well based on my experience as a programmer, the degree you have doesn't seem to have much bearing on your salary as a programmer (at least not for embedded software, operating systems, or device driver type work that I do), but then again, I've only had two co-workers that had phD's, and neither of them were phD's for computer science. Part of this is probably due to the fact that software isn't rocket science or physics.

Then again, phD's in computer science seem to be rare, maybe because there isn't a lot of research on software itself, but on specific applications of software. The hardware aspect of computer science is more often covered as an electronic engineering degree.

Just how unique and contriibutary to science does a phD thesis have to be these days? If multiple phD candidates are all working on the same research grant, how will their thesis vary?

 

[Moonbear]

Well based on my experience as a programmer, the degree you have doesn't seem to have much bearing on your salary as a programmer (at least not for embedded software, operating systems, or device driver type work that I do), but then again, I've only had two co-workers that had phD's, and neither of them were phD's for computer science. Part of this is probably due to the fact that software isn't rocket science or physics.

Yeah, you don't need a PhD to do computer programming, so there's no need or point in obtaining one if that's what you plan to do, unless you're someone who just has thirst for knowledge for knowledge's sake, but there are easier ways of acquiring knowledge if you don't need a PhD for what you want to do.

Then again, phD's in computer science seem to be rare, maybe because there isn't a lot of research on software itself, but on specific applications of software. The hardware aspect of computer science is more often covered as an electronic engineering degree.

I'm not too familiar with what CS includes or not, but you're probably right there.

Just how unique and contriibutary to science does a phD thesis have to be these days? If multiple phD candidates are all working on the same research grant, how will their thesis vary?

It does have to be novel research. Usually, you won't have more than one student working on one research grant, but if they do, then they each will be addressing different aspects of it. Generally, though, the mentor's grant should be their jumping off point, not their ending point. They should be developing their own, unique project (usually the basis of a new grant proposal, not an existing one). There are people who just assign a student to a couple aims on their existing research grant as their entire thesis project, but I don't think that's good training for PhD. That's more what you do for a Master's degree, or bring in undergraduates to work on their senior projects, or give to a post-doc as a side-project while they familiarize themselves with the new area of research they're learning to start up their own project in the new lab. The entire point of getting PhD is to learn to come up with your own ideas for experiments, and if your mentor just hands you a complete project, you aren't going to learn that and will struggle to gain independence later.

 

[rcgldr]

The most techinical aspect of my programming work has been with error correction codes. This involves a subset of finite field math, but a well developed one, because there's a commercial need, and so a lot of grant money comes from corportations, including the company I work for.

I got to correspond with a professor that specialized in error correction codes, on some of the more advanced stuff, since I was designing algorithms for both hardware and software impementation. He is based in Hawaii (must be nice), but occasionally teaches small weekly classes at various locations in the USA. It was interesting to work with math algorithms that were relatively recently developed instead of ones that were hundreds of years old.

Some of the more advanced stuff helped reduce the gate count in chip for hardware implementation, but chip technology has evolved to the point that gates are almost "free", obviating a lot of the need for some of the advanced stuff, so I was fortunate enough to have learned about it before it became just interesting with no commercial demand.