I've been meeting with students who are entering their 5th year in the program over the past month or so. One purpose of these meeting is to keep JCBO informed about student progress so as to avoid surprises at the annual August review. I hope these meetings will also give the students an opportunity to discuss anything else that may be on their minds as they begin to think about what comes after graduate school.
I won't presume to speak for the rest of the Committee, but I think we need to keep an eye on the time to degree for a number of reasons. First, the longer a student stays in the program, the more likely significant life events are to occur: students get married, have children, have to deal with "two-body problems", etc., just like faculty do. These are, of course, all good things---but they do make earning a Ph.D. a bit more difficult.
Second, the longer that a student takes to complete the degree the more likely they are to require financial support from WHOI. This means less support for other education programs (e.g. Postdoctoral Fellows) and less money that can be used to admit new students.
Finally, time-to-degree is a statistic that prospective students care about. (I had one prospective JP student ask me about it just today.) They now also have access to the data. Check out the website PhDs.org, for example. Students can get data on all kinds of statistics, including time-to-degree, to help them rank graduate programs in the ocean sciences (and many other fields). There they will find that students in the Joint Program (all disciplines) take 5.7 years to finish, as compared to their colleagues at Florida State (5.2 y), Scripps (6.2 y), URI (6.2 y), Oregon State (6.7 y), or U. of Washington (6.7 y).
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I enrolled in the Joint Program in Sept1986 with one son born the year before. I graduated in June 1991 with 4 sons. So I guess I had a five body problem, but it didn't slow me down. My adviser gave me all the time I needed to be a parent. I think it is a mistake to equate such commitments with a drag on thesis timing issues. Indeed one could argue that a healthy extra curricular life actually enhances productivity.
ReplyDeleteIt's good to keep an eye on time to degree, of course. And I understand that in a way time equals money. But I've always thought the Joint Program rushes things at the end. I don't think there are enough controls on what constitutes a "defendable" draft or enough time to make significant revisions. The best advice I could give to students in this area is to take your writing seriously, and make every effort to publish as you go along.
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