<p>Does UVA offer this?</p>
<p>You can do ANYTHING you put your mind to.</p>
<p>One of the bio professors I talked to said it’s a waste getting a masters in bio as you can skip it and directly get a PhD in 2-3 years after 4 years in UG. Consider that if you want.</p>
<p>@plue00 how would that work, if you dont mind going into detail?</p>
<p>[PhD</a> - Department of Biology at UVa](<a href=“http://dept.biology.virginia.edu/phd/]PhD”>http://dept.biology.virginia.edu/phd/)</p>
<p>“A Master’s degree is not required for application to the Ph.D. program in Biology. There are no general language requirements. Depending on a student’s area of Ph.D. research, the faculty dissertation committee could require proficiency in one or more foreign languages, or in auxiliary disciplines such as computer science or statistics.”</p>
<p>It’s not just UVA’s biology PhD program, but various other ones throughout the country. Professor said why pay to get your masters when research grants could potentially pay you to get a PhD and do research for them.</p>
<p>thanks! so say i did not go to UVA undergrad, i could potentially get my PhD there without getting a masters? that is great, considering many schools i love don’t offer the 5 year masters program, and i do not want to spend an insane amount of time in college.</p>
<p>i started reading about this, and a lot of people say it is worse to skip?</p>
<p>If your sources were not professors or higher ups in the field, I would ignore it. Professors have told me that it’s only the PhD that counts.</p>
<p>If you get your Ph.D. in 2-3 years then you go to a strange school. Ph.D.'s normally take a minimum of 5 years and can take up to 10 years. That being said there is no additional advantage to having a Master’s degree if you are planning to get a Ph.D. The only possible advantage would be that you have taken graduate courses already which could improve your application to high caliber graduate schools. The most important thing in looking at graduate schools is how much research you have done and the quality of that research.</p>
<p>A lot of people get their Master’s “en route” to their Ph.D. which is where the distinction between terminal and non-terminal Master’s degrees come from (MIT comes to mind). The Master’s degree essentially denotes that you have done the coursework part of the Ph.D. That’s a rough approximation though as programs will vary in their requirements for the degree.</p>