• witty_username@feddit.nl
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    8 months ago

    Spot the Brit?
    Not sure which other countries have 3y bachelor’s degrees and will let you do a PhD without a master’s degree and also have 3y doctorate degrees

    • Canopyflyer@lemmy.world
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      8 months ago

      Where do you need a Masters to attain a PhD? Honest question, I just never heard of it before.

      My wife attained her MD/PhD from the University of Chicago/Pritzker and does not have a Masters. She’s on the MD/PhD committee for her university and they do not require anything other than a BS in the field of study.

      With that said, it probably isn’t much of a stretch to just get a Masters in the way to a PhD.

      Me? I’m depriving some poor village of its idiot. I have a BS and that’s it.

      • beerclue@lemmy.world
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        8 months ago

        In the EU it’s usually like that. 3 years for a bachelor’s, 2 years for a master’s, only then you can start pursuing a phd.

        I graduated in 2005, and back then we had a different system, where I did a single 5 year program for a computer science degree (engineering), that today is the equivalent of a master’s (diplom engineer). I could have continued to go for a dedicated master’s, another 2 years, but I got lazy.

        • Amaltheamannen@lemmy.ml
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          8 months ago

          This is true in Sweden. Though by the 5 year program you might be Swedish too. // Got a civilingenjörsexamen

        • KISSmyOS@feddit.de
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          8 months ago

          In Germany you can officially start a phd program with a bachelor’s, and I assume it’s the same all over Europe, since the degrees are supposed to be compatible.
          No one does it without a master’s, and no prof will accept you into a phd program without one, but theoretically on paper it’s not needed.

      • Please_Do_Not@lemm.ee
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        8 months ago

        Definitely depends on the field. Most “humanities” studies require a masters first, although for that reason many PhD programs include the step of getting your masters so it can all be done as a single track. So still a standard ~6 year program but you get both, masters after the first 3 and then PhD after 3 more. I’ve only ever run with folks in humanities I’m realizing, so I didn’t even realize there were PhDs you could get without a masters

        • Dr. Bob@lemmy.ca
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          8 months ago

          But to his point the UK is the place I know that will take a three year undergrad for a PhD program.

        • Canopyflyer@lemmy.world
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          8 months ago

          I get that this is the Internet.

          But how about this one time, we all converse as adults.

          How does that sound?

          An adult response would have been:

          “Virtually all European universities require a Masters to attain a PhD.”

          This is Lemmy and not Reddit after all.

      • wandermind@sopuli.xyz
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        8 months ago

        There are roughly speaking two kinds of systems. The kind of system where Bachelor is the default degree you get from university, and you can go on to get a Masters and/or a doctorate. And the other kind of system where the default university degree is a combined Bachelor and Masters, and you can study further to get a doctorate. The latter kind is in use in a lot of continental Europe, at least.

      • Dr. Bob@lemmy.ca
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        8 months ago

        I came from a very large lab; 18 post-docs, and half a dozen grad students. The general observation about the PhD portion of the MD/PhD program is that it tends to be very programmatic research. Typically applying a known technique to a neglected but not novel area. The straight PhDs had much higher expectations for novelty and depth. The MD/PhDs were out in three and the PhDs were five to six.

        • Canopyflyer@lemmy.world
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          8 months ago

          Someone should have told my wife’s program that.

          But I can understand how that would happen.

          Today she’s looking to stress cells in a lab to promote a mis-folded protein response that mimics how it happens in the body. At least that’s how far my IT guy understanding goes. She’s found herself running a BSL 3 lab working with nasty micro organisms and that is not her field. It’s just the path her research lead he down.

      • neuropean@kbin.social
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        8 months ago

        Not usually for STEM in America, but we also don’t require a masters degree for PhD.

        Still for most people in my program, it was 4 years of undergrad, followed by 2-4 years in a lab, then 5-7 years for a PhD, then another 2-5 years for post-doc, then finally get hired.

        • OpenStars@startrek.website
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          8 months ago

          Assuming you get hired after “only” your first postdoc:-). Some people do two or even three of those (though two longer ones can take more time overall than three shorter ones). And yet you hear of people that manage it even then, especially if there is even a temporary upswing somewhere e.g. a “cluster hire”.

          These days it seems difficult to speak of what is “standard” b/c the rules seem to have changed radically since the Tea Party rose to power, and rather than things returning to “normal” after the various recessions semi-recently, they instead seem to be shifting to an entirely different state altogether.

          It is so bad that a huge fraction of people getting PhDs won’t find jobs in the same specialty area - e.g. physics has been notorious for this for decades already, even though someone trained in that rigorous discipline often has little trouble moving to another area where they are often in high demand:-).

          • Dr. Bob@lemmy.ca
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            8 months ago

            The length/number of post-docs scales directly with your start up costs.

            Need a computer and a desk? You can go on the market right after your PhD or one post-doc. Need seven figures of equipment plus animal space? Don’t expect to get a job until you’re pushing forty.

            Committees want to see a strong funding track record before they make that kind of investment

            • OpenStars@startrek.website
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              8 months ago

              Meh, would it not depend more on the saturation of the field? Like a physicist may literally only need a computer and desk (and a small salary, supported by teaching), while a biologist might need lets say contracting funds to do DNA sequencing, and yet even in that scenario the latter might still find a job more readily than the former? Though heavily influenced by factors such as willingness to move to elsewhere especially another country.

              Additionally which (sub-)field someone is in has implications for how readily available even small amounts of funds are, especially if the various committees are using the hiree to obtain funds from a known source?