<p>A friend has a D who is in grad school. She is currently working 60 hrs per week as a TA and in the lab. Her stipend is around $25K and the school is located in a very high cost of living area. My friend thought this was an excessive amount of hours for her D to be working. Is this typical in grad school?</p>
<p>Logic and common sense says yes, that is way too many hours for grad school.</p>
<p>Almost all of the positions I’ve seen cap it at 20 hours.</p>
<p>60 hours a week doing her graduate research and teaching combined isn’t uncommon. 60 hours of teaching alone is impossible. There are plenty of graduate students in science who don’t have teaching assignments and still put in 60 hours a week. Typical, though, is closer to 45 or 50.</p>
<p>The key here is “in the lab”. And yes, that is entirely within reason. It gets worse once she reaches the post-doc stage.</p>
<p>I know bio grad students that work 50-60+ a week in the lab and go home and read papers. Postdocs have it even worse and the Profs seem to barely sleep at all. I think academia is very, very busy and stressful.</p>
<p>Her D is in her 2nd year of grad school. D had no idea it was going to be this time consuming.</p>
<p>Is this work “in the lab” on research that he/she will use for papers and possibly a dissertation, or is it work done purely for money with the assumption that the student will also do their own research on their own time?</p>
<p>My grad school was in education. I spent about 20 hours a week student teaching, and 40 hours working an outside job to pay tuition and keep a roof over my head. That plus classes and homework made for a challenging but not impossible schedule.</p>
<p>This may be a clue that the D wants to whip through an M.S. and get out into the working world, instead of hanging in there through a Ph.D. My suggestion would be that your friend encourage her daughter to pay a visit to the career center on campus, and find out about her options. Some departments aren’t very helpful with M.S. placement because they are only really geared up to place their Ph.D. graduates.</p>
<p>No, those hours are not unusual at all. I do not recommend getting out with a master’s if you intend to work in a company directly related to your skills (i.e., pharmaceutical company if you are a chemist). It will be near impossible to be promoted without a PhD, even if you switch to the business side. (If people are recruited for their business acumen, then the rules are different.)</p>
<p>There are other high-level opportunities out there for people with PhDs.</p>
<p>As a PhD student I worked around 70 hours a week. While officially we were paid only for 20 as teaching assistants, most of us worked many more hours in your own research (such as writing the dissertation), as research assistants for professors, or simply studying. </p>
<p>I don’t think I was the hardest working person in the program, but i wasn’t the most lazy either.</p>
<p>My apologies- I misread the OP. I thought she was TAing for 60 hours. Ignore my first post :)</p>
<p>Just to clarify, friend’s D is spending 60 hrs per week as a research assistant and TA. This doesn’t include studying or writing a dissertation. When her D graduated, she couldn’t find a job, so after a year living at home, she decided to go back to grad school.</p>
<p>D’s boyfriend is a grad student. He works a lot of hours, many of them after “normal” business hours. Indentured servitude, I think. Grad school seems so different than undergrad, complete with politicking, long hours and sometimes uncertain outcomes.</p>
<p>I agree, deb922. Indentured servitude.</p>
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<p>In the graduate program from which my H graduated–you were either a teaching assistant or a research assistant. It would have been unusual for a student to do both. Another benefit of getting a teaching or research assistant position was that you didn’t have to pay tuition. Granted these grad students are working long hours, but they are getting a stipend as well as free tuition in most cases. I don’t think that’s servitude. Most successful professionals often work 60-hour weeks. If that includes teaching courses, grading papers, taking grad classes and then doing research and writing a thesis, I think it’s not unusual to work 60-hour weeks. If it’s simply 60-hours as a TA–that doesn’t seem reasonable.</p>
<p>When H and I were in grad school (chemistry), we worked in the lab (or TAing a class) 12-13 hours a day Monday through Saturday and probably another 10 hours on Sunday. If you weren’t in lab at 10 PM every night, you got chewed out the next day.</p>
<p>yes, it was a LOT of work, but it was the norm for that school. It didn’t feel weird because everyone else put in the same hours.</p>
<p>For my program, it depended on the mentor–mine demanded 40-50/hrs week + classes + reading papers + prep (=ing about 60-80 hrs/week) and would chew us out if we took days off or went home for holidays. She even was upset we left for spring break. For the mentor that shared the lab with us? 20-30 hrs/week if that’s all it took and encouraged as little weekend/break work as possible</p>
<p>My son’s undergrad apartment had a number of grad students living there. What I observed is that they typically arrived back at the apartment around midnight. The impression that I got was that they worked a lot of hours. I have a friend with a son that’s in a funded Phd program and he tells me that his son is surprised at the amount of work involved.</p>
<p>They’re giving you tuition and housing and food and they ask a lot in return. Of course you may pick up invaluable skills along the way.</p>
<p>Thanks for all of your replies. I’ll pass them along to my friend.</p>