Why Are Grad Students Expected to Work Extreme Hours?

[LogicX]

I'm doing chemistry undergrad research right now, and I'm pretty shocked at the hours that grad students are required to work. A lot of the groups I have seen require 6 days a week of work with 10 hour plus days, they come in on every holiday but like Thanksgiving and maybe like a few days at Christmas, and they have to come in extra on Sundays sometimes as well.

I don't get why graduate school is different than any other job. What, they give you a degree at the end of it and so all of the sudden they can make you work 60+ hour weeks for half of minimum wage with no overtime? It just seems like the whole graduate school complex is built on exploitation of cheap labor, but you can't do anything about it because in order to progress in science you need a PhD. And from what I've heard, the better the school, the more time you have to put in every week.

I can't think of justification for these practices. Sure, the more you work the faster you get out, but shouldn't they pay you more if you are working more? Everyone just accepts the whole "zomg it's grad school suck it up, this is special" and moves on without questioning anything.

Thoughts?

 

[Phyisab****]

So that only the hardcore get graduate degrees? I dunno, it sure seems like they are trying to kill me sometimes though.

 

[QuarkCharmer]

They have 108 hours off a week?? Slackers.

 

[jowens1988]

I'm doing chemistry undergrad research right now, and I'm pretty shocked at the hours that grad students are required to work. A lot of the groups I have seen require 6 days a week of work with 10 hour plus days, they come in on every holiday but like Thanksgiving and maybe like a few days at Christmas, and they have to come in extra on Sundays sometimes as well.

This seems to be pretty common. It depends on your research adviser, though. There are some professors at my school who give their students a month off every year and don't expect them to be at school more than 40-50 hours, most weeks. You still may be required to do a bit of work from home. These are typically the professors who study theory or computation. If you are doing experimental work, you can almost be sure that you will work the number of hours you listed.

I don't get why graduate school is different than any other job. What, they give you a degree at the end of it and so all of the sudden they can make you work 60+ hour weeks for half of minimum wage with no overtime? It just seems like the whole graduate school complex is built on exploitation of cheap labor, but you can't do anything about it because in order to progress in science you need a PhD. And from what I've heard, the better the school, the more time you have to put in every week.

You have to keep in mind that you are getting your tuition paid by your research adviser, out of their grant money, in addition to your stipend. This has a pretty huge value. I am studying at a private university, so the tuition alone is over $40000 a year. That's a pretty big chunk of change. Also, a lot of times you get a something of a raise when you start research versus being a TA. Combining this with a stipend of ~$24000/year, you're looking at about $64000 in total benefits. Does that sound like a more reasonable compensation?

I can't think of justification for these practices. Sure, the more you work the faster you get out, but shouldn't they pay you more if you are working more? Everyone just accepts the whole "zomg it's grad school suck it up, this is special" and moves on without questioning anything.

Thoughts?

I don't think people move on without questioning anything. In general, graduate students are passionate about what they are studying and understand the heavy workload when they enter. I know I did. The fact that I am getting paid to do something I love is pretty awesome in my book. I may make less and work more than if I were doing some coding for about $40000. I would also be much more miserable doing that. Personally, as long as I can pay rent, feed myself, feed my dog, and afford some beer, I am happy - and I certainly can on my little stipend. Not to sound harsh, but if you're overly concerned about your hourly wage, graduate school may not be for you.

 

[eri]

My university didn't expect me to work 60 hour weeks as a grad student, just like my current college doesn't expect me to work 60 hour weeks as a professor. That's just what it takes to get the job done. The people who only worked those 20 hours they were being paid, or even 40, took longer to graduate and didn't have as much to show for it - they didn't get the jobs they wanted. Science is a competitive field. You need to be willing to devote all your time to it, and even love doing so, or you're not going to get anywhere, because there are many other people willing to do that instead and jobs aren't easy to get.

 

[Choppy]

One question I have is whether the numbers the original poster is giving us are based on data or anecdotal graduate student testimony.

I don't doubt at all that there are graduate students who work as much as is claimed or even more - particularly in crunch times (leading up to a candidacy exam, finishing the thesis, preparing a conference abstract, etc). But you also don't have to look too hard to find graduate students who saunter into the office at 10:00 am, spend an hour surfing the internet, do a little bit of work, take a 2 hour lunch and then leave by 04:00 pm.

 

[ParticleGrl]

Grad school is hardcore because there aren't many jobs in science, and there is a large crowd of people that want to work in it. When you have a glut of labor, people are willing to work excessive hours at low pay for the "privilege" of having any job at all.

Working 60-80 hours a week for several years, keeping your head down and focusing on research to the exclusion of every other aspect of your life is the ONLY way to get a ticket to the postdoc lottery. Keeping those hours up, etc is the only way to get a ticket to the second postdoc lottery, which is in turn the only way to get a ticket to the professor lottery.

The real question is- why do people keep going into science? You spend a decade on education and the median career length is less than 6 years. For immigrants the answer is easy (ask them, the answer is usually "a visa"). For everyone else (who number fewer and fewer) its some combination of idealism and bad advice given by high school and undergraduate teachers.

 

[Mororvia]

I don't get why graduate school is different than any other job. What, they give you a degree at the end of it and so all of the sudden they can make you work 60+ hour weeks for half of minimum wage with no overtime?

Graduate school is just the start. What is also fun is after you graduate, get a 'real' job, and also put in many extra hours per week. Oh, and you're also a salaried employee so you don't get extra pay either. Sure, your take home salary is more (hopefully!) but that doesn't mean you enjoy it.

 

[Phyisab****]

Wow the last two comments made me feel great about my life. Now I understand why I live 3 hours away from my girlfriend so that I can work at least 12 hours a day so I can get a job that sucks.

 

[bromden]

Wow the last two comments made me feel great about my life. Now I understand why I live 3 hours away from my girlfriend so that I can work at least 12 hours a day so I can get a job that sucks.

No kidding. Those comments have kind of ruined my day.

I just moved 1700 miles from home. I knew that job prospects as a professor were bleak, but I was under the impression that industry jobs with a physics Ph.D. weren't that bad.

 

[ahsanxr]

So the average physics graduate doesn't even get a single month or two off from the year? I would also imagine that the workload is different for theorists, or for people in mathematics grad school. Why would someone like a string theorist, who doesn't have to do experiments nor spend his time writing code, need to have a 12 hour work day?

And the last few posts have been depressing...

 

[GregJ]

Great... reading some of these posts just made my day that much worse

 

[deRham]

I don't get why graduate school is different than any other job. What, they give you a degree at the end of it and so all of the sudden they can make you work 60+ hour weeks for half of minimum wage with no overtime?

It is more than just grad school - it's academia in general. Part of the point probably is that they want you to be put through that style of program so that when you come out of it and apply to academic jobs as they must hope you will, you will be ready to be a productive researcher.

Remember - in academia, you aren't producing what can be immediately sold - you are producing stuff that could become invaluable in the future; thus, they only need a few of the brightest AND most productive.

 

[Mororvia]

Haha, you're welcome! Now when you land a job that doesn't require too many extra long hours, you'll be relieved right?

Back to the topic of graduate school though. As with many things, you get out what you put in. For some things you don't need to work extra hours in a week. In some cases you'll find you will willingly work those hours and ENJOY it because you enjoy the work.

 

[Mike H]

It's important to break down what it means to spend, say, 60 hours a week in lab. It doesn't necessarily mean 60 hours a week at the bench/instrument.

Depending on the advisor and group culture, you might be in one of those groups where you have an individual/small sub-group meeting weekly with your advisor, a weekly group meeting involving the entire lab, a journal club/lit lunch, and your advisor strongly encourages you to go to one or two seminars a week. You might also end up being guilted into attending the occasional monthly "supergroup" meeting, student-run seminar series, or group meeting of a collaborator in another department, for example.

There's also the time you spend reading critical papers in your field, processing/analyzing/organizing your data, planning experiments, and fixing things that have catastrophically failed since the last time you used it.

There's also the time you might spend having to wait as part of an experiment - I used to do fairly extensive temperature-dependent studies during my graduate work in (bio)physical chemistry. I spent my fair share of time waiting for my instruments to equilibrate at a new temperature before starting in on things. And when I was doing protein production and purification, well, I was a slave to my bacteria (who even on a fast day would give me enough time to catch six hours of sleep without too much difficulty). But that was only after I figured all of those conditions out.

As noted above, deadlines of varying sorts - publication, grant submission, and so on - will almost assuredly kick up the number of hours you work. But they will usually peak and then drop off after said deadline. Until the next deadline, of course.

More specifically, in chemistry, I've anecdotally noticed a correlation that the synthetic chemists tend to work the crazier hours. Physical chemists and other non-synthetic chemists (aka people more interested in, say, mechanistic organic/inorganic or analytical) tend to work more sustainable schedules (50 or so hours a week, plus/minus barring deadline crunches). I want to say that theorists have the least demanding schedules, but I know that my theorist friends would say that they just have the most flexible schedules since they're not tied to a lab. ;)

As a postdoc, I've noticed that while I will come in on the weekend, it's almost inevitably meant to maximize my efficiency. If I can come in for two hours on Sunday, let's say, I can set things up such that my week starts off on a Monday and I won't have to do anything that following weekend at all (outside of maybe some writing or reading to prepare for a meeting that following week).

Most of the physics grad students I knew were experimentalists, and worked fairly similar hours to mine. One observation I can confirm is that if you are the sort to need very in-demand research facilities (e.g., synchrotron x-ray sources or neutron sources), the time leading up to your allotted beamtime and the time at said facility are extremely busy. I tried my hand at SANS a while back, and I spent the month and a half prior to that beamtime preparing sample and establishing sample conditions for SANS, and the weekend at the neutron source was quite busy.

 

[Angry Citizen]

If anyone here can seriously say their job 'sucks', regardless of the hours or pay, then you probably shouldn't have gone into science in the first place. You guys get to advance human knowledge, much like I get to advance human ingenuity. If the world was such that aerospace engineers had to pay in order to do their jobs (rather than receive pay), I'd still sign up for it. Anyone here who can't say the same about their chosen profession is probably in it for the wrong reasons.

 

[twofish-quant]

I'm doing chemistry undergrad research right now, and I'm pretty shocked at the hours that grad students are required to work.

Then don't go to graduate school. :-) :-) :-)

The reason that they work people so hard for so little money is because they can find people willing to do this. One factor to consider is that graduate school is one of the few ways that you can easily legally enter the United States, so that lots of people are willing to work long and hard hours to get out of whatever country they were in.

I don't get why graduate school is different than any other job. What, they give you a degree at the end of it and so all of the sudden they can make you work 60+ hour weeks for half of minimum wage with no overtime?

One thing that you should be aware of it that your typical high technology job has you put in 60 hour weeks with no overtime. The only thing that is different is the salaries.

It just seems like the whole graduate school complex is built on exploitation of cheap labor

Yup. If you don't like it, don't go to graduate school. :-) :-) :-)

Personally, I got a good deal, but YMMV. I'm an intellectual masochist when it comes to things sorts of things, and there are enough "masochistic suckers" like me to keep the system going.

Sure, the more you work the faster you get out, but shouldn't they pay you more if you are working more? Everyone just accepts the whole "zomg it's grad school suck it up, this is special" and moves on without questioning anything.

Not everyone. A lot of people (most people in fact) would prefer to do something with their lives other than being academic serfs for close to a decade. However, if you do go into graduate school, you should know what you are in for.

 

[phoenix:\\]

Honestly, I think that is the best part of life. Working long hours, experimenting, thinking, etc..., on stuff you want to do and like to do in life. If you don't like putting in that type of work for that, then you probably don't like it as much as other people. It definitely beats working a menial drone-based job filing reports for a comparable salary to the benefits plus stipend you get from research.

 

[twofish-quant]

Working 60-80 hours a week for several years, keeping your head down and focusing on research to the exclusion of every other aspect of your life is the ONLY way to get a ticket to the postdoc lottery. Keeping those hours up, etc is the only way to get a ticket to the second postdoc lottery, which is in turn the only way to get a ticket to the professor lottery.

And then you have crazy masochists like me that leave to system in order to work at a job in which you have to be at the office 60-80 hours a week so that we can make enough money to keep spending 60-80 hours a week doing science until we are dead.

I think it's cool.

The real question is- why do people keep going into science?

Most people don't. There is a reason why the US graduates 100x more MBA's than physics Ph.D.'s each year. One problem with graduate school is that it's a totalizing experience. When you are in a situation where your entire live revolves around a university, it's not obvious that most people's lives don't.

For immigrants the answer is easy (ask them, the answer is usually "a visa").

The other thing is that in most countries intellectuals are held in higher regard than in the United States. In my family, being a sharp physicist is like being a star football player in West Texas.

For everyone else (who number fewer and fewer) its some combination of idealism and bad advice given by high school and undergraduate teachers.

For me it goes a lot deeper. I was going over some old letters from my father and it was obvious that he wanted me to get a Ph.D. in something because he couldn't. When I talked to my uncle it turns out that he wanted a Ph.D. because *his* father was in some sort of conflict with someone he knew in the 1920's. His rival was able to send his kids to Japan for education, so my grandfather felt the need to make sure that his son did something better.

Tracing back even further, it all started in 1644 when a general at the Great Wall switched sides and opened the gates to invading horsemen. Stuff happens. Three hundred years later, I get my Ph.D.

 

[twofish-quant]

Part of the point probably is that they want you to be put through that style of program so that when you come out of it and apply to academic jobs as they must hope you will, you will be ready to be a productive researcher.

Nope.

One thing that helped me a lot is cynicism. People that you do not personally know don't care about you. The system doesn't care about you. The purpose of the academic system is to grind you up and spit you out, and no one cares what happens to you once you get spit out. That's why you have to care what happens to you once you get out.

Remember - in academia, you aren't producing what can be immediately sold - you are producing stuff that could become invaluable in the future; thus, they only need a few of the brightest AND most productive.

Not true.

A university cannot survive without a ton of people doing grunt work. Much of research is just grunt work. Also even the parts that aren't grunt work need to be funded, so the university needs a ton of people to teach low level classes because that brings in the $$$$ to pay the salaries of tenured faculty.

One way of seeing this is by looking at other fields within academia. The way that the graduate school system works in physics is *vastly* different from the way that it works in business, or the way that it works in education, or the way that it works in petroleum engineering.

 

[atyy]

A university cannot survive without a ton of people doing grunt work. Much of research is just grunt work. Also even the parts that aren't grunt work need to be funded, so the university needs a ton of people to teach low level classes because that brings in the $$$$ to pay the salaries of tenured faculty.

I often wonder whether it's poorly organized grunt work. If it is grunt work, why not organize it properly and get it done on regular hours?

 

[Pythagorean]

I often wonder whether it's poorly organized grunt work. If it is grunt work, why not organize it properly and get it done on regular hours?

Lab meetings and a lab coordinator (can be a technician or a master's student)

 

[twofish-quant]

I often wonder whether it's poorly organized grunt work. If it is grunt work, why not organize it properly and get it done on regular hours?

Because research is messy. Inspiration doesn't hit 9-5. Also it's not like a job in which you can tell people to put item A into box B. If you could issue clear instructions on what to do, you wouldn't have to do it.

Curiously one of the things that I liked about graduate school is that there were no regular hours. You could get whatever you needed done during the day, and come into the lab at 1 a.m. if that's what you felt like doing.

 

[edgepflow]

Graduate school in a physical science or engineering is usually a savage life style. It is a take-it-or-leave it culture and you have to pay the price. But after it is over, most are glad they did it.

 

[deRham]

Nope.

One thing that helped me a lot is cynicism. People that you do not personally know don't care about you. The system doesn't care about you. The purpose of the academic system is to grind you up and spit you out, and no one cares what happens to you once you get spit out. That's why you have to care what happens to you once you get out.

The system doesn't care about you, sure, but a university / good adviser have standards for you, and I don't think it's so straightforward to graduate if you don't have something that people in academia care about. I've heard some grad students not being able to graduate for a while because their advisers expect more of them. I'm sure the advisers don't care about them as people, but there is some intrinsic standard they seem to set that requires insane work to meet or come close to meeting.

Not true.

A university cannot survive without a ton of people doing grunt work. Much of research is just grunt work. Also even the parts that aren't grunt work need to be funded, so the university needs a ton of people to teach low level classes because that brings in the $$$$ to pay the salaries of tenured faculty.

But those people become gypsies, meaning they wander from place to place and don't really have any long term job. The university certainly doesn't need you specifically, even if of course it needs someone; the point is that there is no shortage of people willing to work for low pay and nonexistent job security.

I hardly qualify that as the university *needing you*, any more than I'd say I needed a classmate's help if I asked him what the latest assignment was (since I almost certainly could have asked someone else).

Further, a lot of the "grunt work" involving teaching lower level courses needn't even be done by someone with a PhD; after all, a lot of universities seem to hire some lecturers who aren't PhDs. As for the concept of "grunt work" in research, that isn't practical in all fields. In a field such as mathematics, it's not extremely practical for someone to hand off "grunt work" to their postdocs - it's quite common for postdocs to work on stuff completely unrelated to what any faculty are doing. The university isn't complaining, because they get plenty of other work out of that postdoc (like teaching courses for less pay than they'd need to give a professor).

 

[dkotschessaa]

Can't wait.

 

[streeters]

Academia has succumbed to Neo-Liberalism, like almost every other industry. The influx of aspiring serfs drives down the value of their labour whilst insecure job prospects drives up the quantity of their out-put.

Blame Thatcher. Blame Reagan.

 

[gbeagle]

Academia has succumbed to Neo-Liberalism, like almost every other industry. The influx of aspiring serfs drives down the value of their labour whilst insecure job prospects drives up the quantity of their out-put.

Blame Thatcher. Blame Reagan.

Thing is though, in physics at least, it has been like this since before Reagan or Thatcher were ever in power. Sure physics PhDs that graduated before about 1970 or so had better odds for landing a faculty position, but even then the experience in graduate school was not that different. Not that I am saying your description of things is wrong per-say its just that this state of affairs is something much older than the "Reagan Revolution". Also I am not sure how this is specifically Neo-Liberalism seems to the simple classical supply-demand paradigm...

 

[ParticleGrl]

Thing is though, in physics at least, it has been like this since before Reagan or Thatcher were ever in power. Sure physics PhDs that graduated before about 1970 or so had better odds for landing a faculty position, but even then the experience in graduate school was not that different

From my anecdotal information (talking to older professors and older phds), graduate school WAS quite a bit different before the big crunch happened in the 70s. It might not have been friendlier, but it was a shorter experience with less of a focus of cranking out X papers in Y impact level journals. You did some original work, and moved on, you didn't have to have 3 papers in top journals or whatever your advisors standards are.

Also, because grants were easier to get, professors had substantially more time in the lab/at the computer, which means that grad students weren't simply a source of cheap labor to implement the professors ideas.

 

[twofish-quant]

Blame Thatcher. Blame Reagan.

Doesn't work. US physics is very heavily dependent on military funding, and Ronald Reagan by massively increasing defense spending helped physics a lot in the 1980's.

The other thing is that academics tend to lean Democratic rather than Republican so you'd think that if Reagan and Thatcher were responsible then the universities would be somewhat immune.

Finally, OK we blame Thatcher and Reagan, now what?

 

[twofish-quant]

From my anecdotal information (talking to older professors and older phds), graduate school WAS quite a bit different before the big crunch happened in the 70s. It might not have been friendlier, but it was a shorter experience with less of a focus of cranking out X papers in Y impact level journals.

This may be adviser dependent since I didn't get this huge pressure from my adviser to publish. Also, one thing that I've noticed is that the people that tend to be most "hardcore" are the people that end up in positions of authority so that there is this attitude of "well if I did, so should you."

Getting this to physics models. One thing that I've found to be useful in looking at non-linear system is to identify places where there are positive feedback loops (i.e. advisers go hardcore, become professors, who then demand that their students get even more hardcore). Once you see a positive feedback loop, the next question is to extrapolate the loop at ask where does it stop. For example, if you increase the number of hours in a week that people work at, you hit the limits of human exhaustion.

Looking for positive feedback systems and barriers to positive feedback is something that Karl Marx did in Das Kapital. Once you see where the feedback systems are, then you can true to figure out where to change them, and how long you have.

The thing that was very different in the 1970's was that in the 1970's, people didn't do two postdocs. They usually did one. In the 1960's, postdocs were rather unknown. It's something that you can use queuing theory to look at.

Also, because grants were easier to get, professors had substantially more time in the lab/at the computer, which means that grad students weren't simply a source of cheap labor to implement the professors ideas.

One other difference that I'd like to explore is that looking at the papers of David Kaiser, one thing that strikes me is that the average Ph.D. student in 1955 *didn't* seem to expect to go into academia. Something else that strikes me is that there seems to be this idea that people that go into industry are somehow "lesser Ph.D.'s", but in the papers that I've seen of Kaiser, that didn't seem to be true in 1955.

Also one big problem was that the 1950's physics infrastructure was built for an industrial economy, whereas we are living in a post-industrial one. Talking about physicists "going into industry" is an interesting example of how out of touch the system is. Something that has happened is that as the general economy has moved from manufacturing to services, it makes sense that the employers should also shift. One thing that strikes me about looking at the 1950's is how Rayethon and Westinghouse look like Goldman-Sachs and Morgan-Stanley today.

Finally, one of my projects is to recreate Bell Labs. Bell Labs existed because you had a government regulated quasi-monopoly perform essential services and partly in exchange for government regulation, you had the need for Bell Labs to work on basic research. That ended when the telephone system changed in the 1980's. But then you look at to see what other government regulated quasi-monopolies are out there, and I think I found one.

 

[johng23]

Curiously one of the things that I liked about graduate school is that there were no regular hours. You could get whatever you needed done during the day, and come into the lab at 1 a.m. if that's what you felt like doing.

Yeah that's awesome. Sitting in the lab at 3 am, choosing which scan to try next, feeling like you can work until you drop and then just not come in until 3 pm the next day. It feels impulsive, inspired - the polar opposite of being a 9-5 drone for somebody else. The closer my days get to 9-5, the more apathetic and lazy I feel.

Think about what you're being asked to do in graduate school: find interesting problems and address them however you see fit. Develop your own approach to being a scientist. It's a tall order but it's also one of the most intellectually stimulating things you could ever be asked to do.

(Disclaimer - I'm going into my third year, so maybe I just haven't become jaded yet).

 

[gravenewworld]

Grad school is hardcore because there aren't many jobs in science, and there is a large crowd of people that want to work in it. When you have a glut of labor, people are willing to work excessive hours at low pay for the "privilege" of having any job at all.

Working 60-80 hours a week for several years, keeping your head down and focusing on research to the exclusion of every other aspect of your life is the ONLY way to get a ticket to the postdoc lottery. Keeping those hours up, etc is the only way to get a ticket to the second postdoc lottery, which is in turn the only way to get a ticket to the professor lottery.

The real question is- why do people keep going into science? You spend a decade on education and the median career length is less than 6 years. For immigrants the answer is easy (ask them, the answer is usually "a visa"). For everyone else (who number fewer and fewer) its some combination of idealism and bad advice given by high school and undergraduate teachers.

^

Pretty much this.


Academia is highly exploitative at many levels, I don't know why people think it is some sort of ivory tower.

 

[atyy]

Lab meetings and a lab coordinator (can be a technician or a master's student)

Because research is messy. Inspiration doesn't hit 9-5. Also it's not like a job in which you can tell people to put item A into box B. If you could issue clear instructions on what to do, you wouldn't have to do it.

Curiously one of the things that I liked about graduate school is that there were no regular hours. You could get whatever you needed done during the day, and come into the lab at 1 a.m. if that's what you felt like doing.

Experiment versus theory?