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PhD experiences vary much much more than bachelor's and master's programs that cover a fairly standard set of topics worldwide. PhD depends a lot on your specific topic, the specific supervisor, their other time commitments, their funding situation, how similar the other PhD students' topics are to yours, how hot the topic is or how the hotness changes over your PhD duration, how much teaching you have to do, how hands off the supervisor is (it is extremely common to have extremely disengaged supervisors, even famous ones, likely engagement and fame are anticorrelated), the expected publication venue tiers etc. In most of Europe, the PhD contains no formal training. It's just what you informally pick up while working with other PhD students, if you do collaborations (depends on whether the supervisor likes that), or from postdocs (if there are postdocs), or from your rare meetings with the supervisor (which are often about updating the supervisor on new developments, not getting much actionable insight from them), but many many are simply left to their own devices and just do stuff and cope with the inevitable rejections, etc. At other places the supervisor organizes things like retreats, internal poster sessions, lots of internal presentations, discussions among the group etc. While in other places there is none of that, in some places many PhD students simply work from home and don't even meet much. The winning strategy for prolific professors is to get a good early-career reputation, then hire really smart and conscientious applicants (proven through already published papers) and let them carry out the research. It's nothing about training them in any practical way. There are some who do that but it doesn't scale. You have to hire 20 PhD students and they will deliver enough papers for you to preserve your status and be able to hire the smartest applicants again and again. But again, there's huge variation. Even at good universities. |