You only hate grad school because you think you're supposed to.

[TakeruK]

 In the social sciences your hours are really a product of how smart you work. Again, not as much of a luxury in the physical sciences. 

 

I think that is an interesting point, but I don't think it's always true. For those of us without lab work, we can pretty much come in at 9, write code for 8 hours, and punch out at 5. If we plan our time efficiently, and with a bit of luck, we can even time it so that running our data analysis (which could take hours or days) so that we write stuff in the day, run it before we leave, and then check back in the next morning and fix anything if necessary. 

 

So, in the physical sciences, in non-lab fields, you might be able to say your hours are a product of how smart you work too. However, I don't think that part is true either!

 

I actually think your hours are really a product of how much you want to work, which might be influenced by how much you are expected to work. I don't think this is field specific either. If you're a student that is working smart and get a lot done in 6 hours a day, many profs and students would just expect that person to work really smart and hard for 8-10 hours a day instead and get even more done than someone who works hard but not as smart for 8-10 hours a day. In academia, students are expected to work as much as they can. Whether or not this pressure is explicit or implicit, I think it is there at some level for everybody. This is one big valid complaint against grad school! 

 

This is why how much you will work really depends on your choice. Many profs I know (in the physical sciences) all told me that they didn't get where they are today by just working 9 to 5, Mondays to Fridays. I'm not surprised to learn that the biggest names in the field worked 80+ hour weeks during grad school and post-docs. After all, even if you are smart and/or work smart, to get ahead, you have to use that to your advantage, and the way to do that is to work more. However, my goal in life is not to become a big name in my field, so I don't push myself to work that hard. And I think grad school will be better for everyone if profs realise that not all of their students want to become like them. There's no doubt that what you get out of grad school is correlated to  how much work you put in. It's important to realise what you actually want to get out of grad school so that you put in the right amount of work to achieve your own goals.

[DerpTastic]

The time required probably depends more on the specific student and research than the field. If you're researching something, such as I don't know, something that involves a chemical process that takes hours, you might have to put in tons of hours at the lab even if it means just being there. I'm sure there are people in the same field who are dealing with processes that take a lot less time and attention and don't need to work quite as many hours.

 

I'm doing some research with optics right now, and I notice every now and then you "waste" a ton of time aligning things and setting things up. There's no way around it and it needs to be done, but it doesn't really relate to anything being accomplished.

 

It just depends.

[rising_star]

I'm also in the social sciences, and I'm telling you that you are kidding yourself if you think that you work more than those in the physical sciences. You're also acting as if those in the physical sciences aren't publishing (where acceptance rates are often times much lower than our journals) or helping write grants and plan new experiments. You are also making it sound like it's a 9-5 where they punch into the lab and are done. 

This is the problem with advice threads. Everyone wants to believe they are suffering through it equally just like everyone else. Social scientists are the worst. Let's face it: Our field has a rich tradition of following the lead of the physical sciences, in many ways to get broader credibility. There's no need to have a chip on your shoulder about it. 

I'm not even going to respond to the rest because whether or not your work hours reflect your smartness is really field specific. I will say that we must be in different social sciences because in addition to doing research and teaching and taking classes, I also write grants, IRBs for research, and publish both book reviews and manuscripts. So, how is that less work than someone in the physical sciences? I'm asking in all seriousness. We all have to do the same tasks to be successful, as you've already pointed out. So why is that you believe that someone in the social sciences can get those tasks done in less time than someone in the physical sciences? Is it because sometimes work in the physical/lab sciences doesn't work the first time? Well, same thing happens in the social sciences. Ask anyone that's ever come up with a questionnaire that's flopped, had trouble recruiting enough participants for a sample, or run into the countless other roadblocks that can affect research and its progress in the social sciences. It's not like I just sit at the computer and make up data. I go out into the "real world", ("waste" loads of time trying to schedule appointments, help people with transports, etc.), ask questions, get answers, transcribe and code those data, revise the questions and my thinking, and then repeat the whole thing over and over and over and over. Oh, and unlike my colleagues in the physical/lab sciences, I do it while teaching my own course (from scratch; they don't hand us syllabi here) AND for less money than they make.

 

Like I said, I work hard. I'm being defensive because I hate being told that somehow my work isn't as meaningful because I don't spend hours upon hours and days upon days locked in a lab. Maybe I would if my research could be done that way but it can't. My "lab" is a community in the real world and, especially if you do participant observation as I did, you end up spending several months literally living in the lab. I doubt anyone in the physical sciences actually does that and certainly not for months on end.

 

I actually think your hours are really a product of how much you want to work, which might be influenced by how much you are expected to work. I don't think this is field specific either. If you're a student that is working smart and get a lot done in 6 hours a day, many profs and students would just expect that person to work really smart and hard for 8-10 hours a day instead and get even more done than someone who works hard but not as smart for 8-10 hours a day. In academia, students are expected to work as much as they can. Whether or not this pressure is explicit or implicit, I think it is there at some level for everybody. This is one big valid complaint against grad school!

To me, this hits the mark. My advisor is a workaholic but I'm not. I don't feel pressured to work as much as I can (unless there's a grant due or a manuscript deadline) but, I do work when I want and how I want. For me, that means working smartly and not wasting time on stuff. I don't have the "downtime" of cleaning equipment, waiting for an experiment to run, etc. All of my work involves me and my brain and being on task, whether that's reading, writing a lit review, writing a grant app, creating an assignment for students, making a lesson plan for class, writing a manuscript or dissertation chapter, etc.

 

When I work, I work. I don't check facebook, read email, chat/Skype people, etc. I put in dedicated hours of work (50 min work, 10 min break for food, drink, bathroom, email each hour). And when I'm done, I'm done. Now, I can't work this way for 12 hours a day without experiencing declines in productivity. When I start seeing those declines, I take a break, do something else, and then come back to it if I still have energy, but not always. If I've already put in 8-9 concentrated hours of work, I don't necessarily feel pressured to go back to it at 10pm for another hour just because I still could (in theory). There's no sense in spending 2 hours at night doing what I could do in 30 minutes during the day when my focus is there.

 

Gotta go! Break time is up!

[Arcanen]

This is why how much you will work really depends on your choice. Many profs I know (in the physical sciences) all told me that they didn't get where they are today by just working 9 to 5, Mondays to Fridays. I'm not surprised to learn that the biggest names in the field worked 80+ hour weeks during grad school and post-docs. After all, even if you are smart and/or work smart, to get ahead, you have to use that to your advantage, and the way to do that is to work more. 

 

Post hoc ergo propter hoc.

 

Just because some big names worked insane hours in their day doesn't mean they are big names because they worked big hours. As I mentioned before, the research on efficiency, time management etc shows that you get less done working longer hours than with shorter hours. Meaning, you get less done overall working an 80 hour week than a 40 hour week. It's not even about "working smart". It's simply because we as humans are not generally capable of working such hours without suffering extreme fatigue that makes us work less efficiently, making mistakes that take time to fix, causing mental health issues, physical issues etc. These people who succeed by working crazy hours are not succeeding because of them. They are succeeding despite them. A healthy schedule and work/life balance (e.g. 40-50 hours a week) doesn't just mean you produce better quality work, it means that you actually produce that higher quality work in a shorter amount of time (i.e. one year of 40 hour weeks will produce more and better work than one year of 80 hour weeks). If I recall correctly, increasing your hours increases your productivity for about three weeks, after which point lack of physical/mental well-being catch up with you and your productivity drops below pre-increase levels for the remainder of the duration of increased hours.

 

Many professors are stuck in their ways and believe (incorrectly) that the way the do well is massive hours. THEY ARE WRONG. THE RESEARCH SAYS THEY ARE WRONG. As academics, should we not strive to follow the evidence?The worst thing is for us grad students to buy into this and perpetuate the madness. Because all that happens as a result is that we make things unnecessarily tough for ourselves and future generations of grad students.

[juilletmercredi]

rising_star simply said that students in the physical sciences don't necessarily work more than students in the social sciences.  Since you aren't her, and you aren't in her program, I'm wondering how it is you think you she's "kidding herself" by thinking she works more than those in the physical sciences.

 

I know some English lit and history PhD students who work hours as long as, or longer than, some students in the physical sciences.  They spend hours and hours in the library or archives.  Some anthropologists spend years doing fieldwork hundreds of miles away from home, sometimes thousands.  Being that you're a psychology student, you already know that many psychologists spend many hours in the lab doing experiments.  I'm in the health sciences and our journals, just like physical science journals, have a wide range of acceptance rates.  I've also helped write a grant and have planned 2-3 new studies here.

 

The hours in any field are influenced by how "smart" you work, but there's no denying that there IS a minimum amount of work that you have to put in.  Physical and natural scientists may have to be in the lab whereas I may be able to do that work from the comfort of my home or in a coffee shop.  But there are also many physical scientists who DON'T have to go the the lab (math, theoretical physics, perhaps computational sciences…)

 

We all have our own struggles; there's no need to devalue any one field's.

[TakeruK]

Just because some big names worked insane hours in their day doesn't mean they are big names because they worked big hours. 

I agree that this is not the right correlation but I think there is some connection. For example, someone who is willing to put in 80 hours a week is someone who really loves what they do and this will probably help them. But I was not trying to say that we should all put in 80+ hours per week. However, because many profs did work a lot, and they see themselves as successful, many of them will also want their own students to do the same. And some students will do the same, either because of pressure from their supervisor, or that they also think working more hours is what they should do to be successful. Which was the original point of what I was saying -- that the people who work 80+ hours a week are mostly choosing to do so. It's perfectly possible to finish a PhD in a reasonable time while keeping 40-50 hours of work per week. You just have to choose to do so, and be disciplined in managing your time as well as managing what people expect from you. As I and other have said, grad school can completely eat up all of your time if you are not able to say no to things and force yourself to keep to whatever hours makes you happy.

[Andean Pat]

OK, I will just drop in for one comment only since I have not started my PhD yet. 

 

It has been recently stated, mostly by philosophers of the alternative, that this social/natural science division is an inheritance from the 19th century and, according to these same people, sometimes collides with the "needs" of our time. I will elaborate in two points:

 

1) (Watch this video) As a teacher I have been increasingly concerned on the requirements of the 21st century and the division and subdivisions of subjects we have at secondary level. Students need to make connections among subjects but we teachers do not plan together or we don't share the same class. At higher level similar things happen. When I was an undergraduate, teacher demanded we applied theroy to practice, but out professors wouldn't even come on the same day, leave alone meet to coordinate the classes (it's not like in the US).

 

You can enlighten me on this aspect, but don't we, as researchers, need others' collaboration? Don't we reach out to other disciplines? When writing my undergraduate thesis, I worked with architects, philosophers, geographers, engineers, and tourist guides, among others. So this thick line between "we" and "them" is somewhat unclear today. Moreover, in the "real world", as I've read many of you call whatever is outside academia, other skills are needed that stress collaboration, interpersonal skills, leadership, and efficient management. 

 

2) One of the aspects I research are National Parks. National Parks were founded in the US, Canada and elsewhere afterwards as a immaculate untouchable land, separated from society. Hence the dichotomy society-nature: social sciences vs natural sciences. You can read more of this in Val Pluwood (1998). And this duality, according to this philosopher, is exclusive, since one 'field' excludes the other. The 21st century is more than that. Look at us! this forum is meant for collaboration, not division. The fact that our research aims at different things does not  mean they do not aim at the truth.

 

I only mean to humblely say that I don't think we can truly assess who works more than whom, whose work is more valuable or who is suffering the most. I think I did not choose physical sciences because I would not like to be in a lab all day! So, let's be friends again

Edited July 5, 2013 by Andean Pat

[TakeruK]

1) (Watch this video) As a teacher I have been increasingly concerned on the requirements of the 21st century and the division and subdivisions of subjects we have at secondary level. Students need to make connections among subjects but we teachers do not plan together or we don't share the same class. At higher level similar things happen. When I was an undergraduate, teacher demanded we applied theroy to practice, but out professors wouldn't even come on the same day, leave alone meet to coordinate the classes (it's not like in the US).

 

You can enlighten me on this aspect, but don't we, as researchers, need others' collaboration? Don't we reach out to other disciplines? When writing my undergraduate thesis, I worked with architects, philosophers, geographers, engineers, and tourist guides, among others. So this thick line between "we" and "them" is somewhat unclear today. Moreover, in the "real world", as I've read many of you call whatever is outside academia, other skills are needed that stress collaboration, interpersonal skills, leadership, and efficient management. 

 

You bring up a point that really resonates with me about working with other disciplines. Personally, I have found that I enjoy my work more and more as I moved from fields that were more or less its own discipline (e.g. Physics) to fields that are much more multidisciplinary (Planetary Science is a combination of Physics, Astronomy, Chemistry, Geology, Geophysics!). Granted, these are all still science disciplines, but I'm much happier having a breadth of skills rather than extreme depth in just one or two things.

 

2) One of the aspects I research are National Parks. National Parks were founded in the US, Canada and elsewhere afterwards as a immaculate untouchable land, separated from society. Hence the dichotomy society-nature: social sciences vs natural sciences. You can read more of this in Val Pluwood (1998). And this duality, according to this philosopher, is exclusive, since one 'field' excludes the other. The 21st century is more than that. Look at us! this forum is meant for collaboration, not division. The fact that our research aims at different things does not  mean they do not aim at the truth.

 

This is also an interesting point! I haven't thought of our natural parks as a way to separate society and nature. I'm not sure if I am in 100% agreement that this is analogous to social vs. natural sciences, but it is interesting to think about nonetheless. But this made me think of my undergraduate school, which was actually located in a Provincial Park. The whole campus is pretty far removed from the rest of the city of Vancouver -- so much so that the few residents that live on or near campus actually vote in a separate electoral district. I always saw this as the University being removed from the city -- i.e. academic independence and freedom -- as a good thing, but now I'm thinking that isolating academia is probably a bad idea in terms of outreach and getting people interested in our work etc.

[Andean Pat]

This is also an interesting point! I haven't thought of our natural parks as a way to separate society and nature. I'm not sure if I am in 100% agreement that this is analogous to social vs. natural sciences, but it is interesting to think about nonetheless. 

 

Absolutely. When I came across it for the first time I was all WTF? However, the more I read about it, in the context of the early 20th century, the more I found it a very interesting approach to help explaining the building of citizenship through natural landmarks. The discussion is very long (and awesome!) to describe here, but, as you put it, interesting to think about. 

 

In the same way, social and natural sciences were separated from one another as if they had absolutely nothing to do. Of course, there are areas, as you said, where interdisciplinarity is not necessary nor welcome. In my case, I need other areas of expertise!

 

But this made me think of my undergraduate school, which was actually located in a Provincial Park. The whole campus is pretty far removed from the rest of the city of Vancouver -- so much so that the few residents that live on or near campus actually vote in a separate electoral district. I always saw this as the University being removed from the city -- i.e. academic independence and freedom -- as a good thing, but now I'm thinking that isolating academia is probably a bad idea in terms of outreach and getting people interested in our work etc.

That's an interesting comment... In my country that is not common at all, most of university campuses are scattered all over a city.  But if you look at Europe, there are several towns that are the university. In its medieval origins, academia was isolated from anything around it.

 

Thanks for your comments!!! It has triggered my mind!

Edited July 5, 2013 by Andean Pat

[rising_star]

Interdisciplinary is where it's at. My work is interdisciplinary, though I describe myself as a social scientist. I've spent time in the classroom and now reading the journals of various life sciences type fields. It really is a false divide, in many ways, especially for someone like me. And, in thinking about it, the reason I didn't like MAME5150's characterization is because I do know how much time people spend in lab since friends of mine (in my discipline) do lab-based work. They don't spend any more time working than I do, from up close and personal experience.