PhD programs in mathematics, statistics, philosophy, and theoretical computer science tend to give you a great deal of free time and flexibility, provided you can pass the various qualifying exams without too much studying.
Bolding the parts to which I object.
I have never seen anyone in a rigorous postgraduate program who had a lot of free time and could pass their quals without large amounts of studying.
Of course, I could just be, like magic, on the lower part of the intelligence curve for graduate school, but given that my actual measured IQ numbers are pretty in-the-middle for scientific academia (I won’t tell what they are, though), and given that almost everyone else says they have little free time and have to study hard in graduate school, I’m inclined to believe the bolded phrases only accurately describe a narrow slice of lucky individuals.
Are you talking about free time pre- or post-quals? And do you include work that goes towards your thesis but that you “have” to do (e.g. for a conference or internal deadline) as free time or non-free time?
My experience (and I would guess many of my labmates, though I don’t know for sure) is that quals are really easy to pass, you spend at most 2 weeks of your life studying for them, and otherwise you’re just doing research plus a few classes. Stanford is an outlier in that it has particularly few class requirements compared to other top CS departments, but it seemed like MIT grad students also often started doing research fairly early on, from my perspective as an undergrad there.
Depending on your funding situation, your actual time spent doing research may be more or less beholden to what grants your advisor has to do work towards. I’m on a fellowship and so can do whatever I want, the only consequences being that if my research after 5 years is uninteresting then I’ll have trouble getting academic jobs.
I’ve only gotten up to doing an MSc (currently volunteering for Vikash Masinghka in my Copious Free Time), but I do know a hell of a lot of academics.
From my (second-hand) knowledge, easy quals are an artifact of something very like economic privilege: your school is very prestigious and doesn’t need to cull its grad-student herds as much as others, so quals are allowed to be easy. In other places, quals are used to evict many grad-students from their PhD program because resources are more scarce.
but it seemed like MIT grad students also often started doing research fairly early on, from my perspective as an undergrad there.
I don’t know anywhere where grad-students don’t start doing research as early as possible. Do some programs really involve whole years of just classes?
A lot of it is historical accidents + inertia. When I was a greenhorn at UCLA, CS quals (the WQE, aka “the wookie”) were two 5 hour tests (on two consecutive days) covering all of CS (e.g. networking, databases, AI, theory, systems, everything). They were not easy at all. At some point it was realized this was stupid, and neither teaches nor prepares one for research, and washes out good people. So it was changed.
That sounds a lot like Technion’s course exams, which were usually designed to be two “levels” harder than the entire rest of the course, and could only really be studied for by obtaining graded copies of old exams.
In Berkeley CS there are enough course requirements that I don’t think people do serious research until their second year (although I’m sure they do some preliminary reading / thinking in year one).
Absolutely. It’s a function of grant money. MIT has more grant money than anyplace else on Earth, so it’s easy to start grad students on research projects. At the U. of Buffalo, there were only 2 professors in my department who had grants, so getting onto someone’s project was hard, and anyway you were taking 4 classes a semester and TAing at least one for the first 2 years, while studying for the qualifiers. I don’t know anything about this “free time” OP talks about.
Few students did research before their third year, after passing their qualifiers at the end of the second. A prof wouldn’t really be interested in a student who hadn’t passed the qualifiers. That’s why the average CS PhD there took 8 years of grad school.
You could do your own research, of course. I did that, but I eventually had to throw it all out, because I couldn’t get anyone interested enough in it to be my advisor.
Bolding the parts to which I object.
I have never seen anyone in a rigorous postgraduate program who had a lot of free time and could pass their quals without large amounts of studying.
Of course, I could just be, like magic, on the lower part of the intelligence curve for graduate school, but given that my actual measured IQ numbers are pretty in-the-middle for scientific academia (I won’t tell what they are, though), and given that almost everyone else says they have little free time and have to study hard in graduate school, I’m inclined to believe the bolded phrases only accurately describe a narrow slice of lucky individuals.
Are you talking about free time pre- or post-quals? And do you include work that goes towards your thesis but that you “have” to do (e.g. for a conference or internal deadline) as free time or non-free time?
My experience (and I would guess many of my labmates, though I don’t know for sure) is that quals are really easy to pass, you spend at most 2 weeks of your life studying for them, and otherwise you’re just doing research plus a few classes. Stanford is an outlier in that it has particularly few class requirements compared to other top CS departments, but it seemed like MIT grad students also often started doing research fairly early on, from my perspective as an undergrad there.
Depending on your funding situation, your actual time spent doing research may be more or less beholden to what grants your advisor has to do work towards. I’m on a fellowship and so can do whatever I want, the only consequences being that if my research after 5 years is uninteresting then I’ll have trouble getting academic jobs.
I’ve only gotten up to doing an MSc (currently volunteering for Vikash Masinghka in my Copious Free Time), but I do know a hell of a lot of academics.
From my (second-hand) knowledge, easy quals are an artifact of something very like economic privilege: your school is very prestigious and doesn’t need to cull its grad-student herds as much as others, so quals are allowed to be easy. In other places, quals are used to evict many grad-students from their PhD program because resources are more scarce.
I don’t know anywhere where grad-students don’t start doing research as early as possible. Do some programs really involve whole years of just classes?
A lot of it is historical accidents + inertia. When I was a greenhorn at UCLA, CS quals (the WQE, aka “the wookie”) were two 5 hour tests (on two consecutive days) covering all of CS (e.g. networking, databases, AI, theory, systems, everything). They were not easy at all. At some point it was realized this was stupid, and neither teaches nor prepares one for research, and washes out good people. So it was changed.
UCLA math quals are .. formidable.
That sounds a lot like Technion’s course exams, which were usually designed to be two “levels” harder than the entire rest of the course, and could only really be studied for by obtaining graded copies of old exams.
In Berkeley CS there are enough course requirements that I don’t think people do serious research until their second year (although I’m sure they do some preliminary reading / thinking in year one).
Absolutely. It’s a function of grant money. MIT has more grant money than anyplace else on Earth, so it’s easy to start grad students on research projects. At the U. of Buffalo, there were only 2 professors in my department who had grants, so getting onto someone’s project was hard, and anyway you were taking 4 classes a semester and TAing at least one for the first 2 years, while studying for the qualifiers. I don’t know anything about this “free time” OP talks about.
Few students did research before their third year, after passing their qualifiers at the end of the second. A prof wouldn’t really be interested in a student who hadn’t passed the qualifiers. That’s why the average CS PhD there took 8 years of grad school.
You could do your own research, of course. I did that, but I eventually had to throw it all out, because I couldn’t get anyone interested enough in it to be my advisor.
At the U. of Buffalo, just taking the quals took at least a week. They were, if I recall, 7 exams, 5 taking half a day each and 2 24-hour exams.
Agree. The lab work in CS is also large, though it comes in huge blocks rather than on a steady schedule.
Quals are the GRE, right?
Nope. No.
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