Hours per week for statistics /biostatistics phd?

[Aspiring_stats_student2312]

Just saw someone saying they did 90 hours / week in Bioinformatics PHD during the summer. I just wanted to confirm what the experience for you guys?

I know that phd is supposed to stretch your limits, but I just wanted to hear other people experiences.

[cyberwulf]

90 hours? I'm not sure I believe that for one week, let alone a whole summer. In fields like stats and biostats, where virtually all of your work time involves intense thinking or doing (unlike lab-oriented fields where a decent chunk of "work" time is waiting for experiments to finish), it's just not possible for most humans to put in more than 50 or so productive hours per week. In grad school (at a top program), I was probably putting in about 40 hours/week spread across 7 days; some weeks less, others a bit more but rarely more than 50 and certainly never exceeding 60. I don't think I was way outside the norm.

If you have to put in anything near 90 hours per week on a regular basis to be successful in a program, then I would argue that you're in the wrong program (or, at the very least, should be looking for a different advisor).

[bob loblaw]

The workload varies a lot but 90 is excessive. My upper bound so far has been 60 hrs. 

There's also a general culture in PhD programs of over-working and doing way more than necessary IMO.