From QUORA: Why does it take so long to get a Ph.D.?

**stagename** · 08-01-2012, 01:47 AM

I'll copy paste, the original post is here, not from me but I thought it was pretty well explained: Academia: Why does it take so long to get a Ph.D.? - Quora

Vadim Zaytsev, postdoctoral researcher45 votes by Ian C. Grieve, Tatiana Estévez, Pooja Luthra, (more)

Mainly because the process of getting a doctoral degree means much more to you than the degree itself. In the beginning, you are basically a student — a good student who has finished all his or her studies, completed all necessary courses with sufficiently high grades, wrote a thesis that was approved by the supervisor and possibly a committee, and defended it by answering some questions. You have some general idea about your area of expertise, you have read some books and possibly some papers, centred mostly around the mainstream studybooks and sources that your MSc supervisor recommended. What you also probably have, is a couple of hobbies: subtopics or niches that seemed interesting for you, which you investigated and in which you invested some of your private time and effort.

When your finish your PhD:

You know how to write papers. This is a skill which requires a lot of time and a lot of tries to acquire. I'm not talking here about “selling your results” in a marketing sense, but rather about packaging, narrating and successfully propagating your ideas and results to the readers. Even understanding that strong research results do not convince the readers by themselves unless you position them correctly, is a painful and nontrivial process.
You know how to present. Giving a good presentation is a skill on its own, and frankly, it is not as uncommon among even younger students as it is believed to be. (Personally, I entertain the idea that I was a decent presenter since the early days of my BSc and have not improved much on the scale of things they teach you at “Presentation Skills” courses). However, repositioning your contributions and renarrating your story towards a specific audience, is a more subtle skill: you acquire it by going to different conferences — some are more formal, others more industry-oriented, some look for specific topics in anything you do, others seek interdisciplinary bridges. Aptly reacting to questions from the audience and coming up with answers that make sense and are to the point, is also not something you learn overnight.
You know what constitutes a good scientific result. During your PhD, you probably have co-reviewed some papers with your supervisor, and you have read a lot of published ones. You can quickly spot faults and basically write a decent “threats to validity” section for any paper that you have read, be it your own or someone else's. You also can distinguish venues and know in general what to expect of a paper just by looking at the abbreviation of the conference where it has been presented. You can realistically judge your own achievements and to decide whether more work is required or if there is enough “meat” to be accepted.
You know how to organise your research. The truth that nobody tells you when you are a doctoral student, is that after you're done, you're on your own. This is kinda implied, but only after sweating for several years you can successfully and suddenly realise that yes, actually you don't need daily/weekly supervision to know what to do. Some (few) BSc/MSc research also goes so smoothly that the need for the supervisor is not terribly apparent. However, in your PhD time, there will surely be quite some moments when you will feel irreparably stuck and you'll need someone to pull you out. By the end of it, you find yourself capable of lone survival.
You have valid ideas. Don't get me wrong, some students can generate very cool ideas like crazy. Some of those ideas are really, really good, and can provide research objectives for many years. However, there is a difference between a cool idea and a cool publishable idea. The latter can be tested, validated, proven, prototyped, and otherwise formally argued to be correct and relevant, argued that it can solve someone's problem. The same idea can lead to very different chain of experiments and publications if different people work on it — and knowing your way does not just hit you one morning when you wake up.
You are experienced. This item comprises some of the above, but I still want to list it explicitly. You know your field, and even if you have bad memory (like yours truly), you know approximately where to look if you need a paper on this and that. If your PhD topic was practical in any way, you have also gained practical skills of building stuff (for computer science, you learn programming in different languages and paradigms), of collaborating with others, of time management, of long term planning, of other things.

In other words, spending a long time doing your PhD prepares you very well for the things to come. One of the valid outcomes, by the way, is realising that academia is not for you, and that you need something else (more teaching, more practice, less stress, etc)

**rsaylors** · 08-01-2012, 07:01 PM

You have valid ideas.

I think socialization into the social-construction of the "truth" of what a valid idea is, is the main-part of the time it takes to get through a Ph.D. program.