[cyrksoft]

> I put "rapidly" in quotes up there because if I have one piece of advice to PhD students, it's to get the hell out of grad school as soon as you can. Like the parent, I had fun exploring my interests, and it was a period of intellectual freedom that most people never get. I relish that time, but I also regret the costs. I was idealistic and unwilling to compromise my personal goals, which ended up delaying everything. If I could go back and do it over, I'd be more mercenary about finding an already successful collaborative project, contributing a little bit, and getting out. Grad school is a job -- a particularly abusive, low-reward job -- and the only goal is to finish. You get no trophies for knowing more stuff at the end, and spending time gratifying your curiosity or being a perfectionist might seem appealing ("why would I be putting myself through this if I weren't going to indulge my intellect?"), but it's ultimately a trap.

I feel the same in many ways. I went into the PhD without a specific project and it was extremely complex. I was fortunate enough work in a theory heavy field, but had friends with more data-related interests. They had a really hard time finding data. Unless you are in top places in the US, data is almost impossible to get.

I highly recommend project PhDs (if you want to choose the PhD route), which are the norm in Europe/UK. You can choose very good universities in cheap cities and have some great 3/4 years. Travelling in Europe is quite cheap, food is cheap enough.

[timr]

Yeah, anecdotally, all of my European/UK friends with PhDs had a much shorter experience. The UK system, in particular, seems far more sane: 3 years is a pretty common duration, vs the 5-7 that's typical in the US.