<p>Why does it take so long to get your phd in physics in the United States?</p>
<p>4 years undergrad
5-6 years graduate (if I'm not incorrect)</p>
<p>That means you'll be 27-28 when you get your phd, assuming you graduated HS at 18 and didn't take breaks somewhere in between. </p>
<p>Is it the same in all countries?</p>
<p>It seems kind of long, Einstein had his phd when he was 25 (if I'm not incorrect), or was that because he was a genius? or because he started earlier? or is it because now there is more to learn? or because he got it in another country?</p>
<p>Is it the same for other fields?</p>
<p>Karl Marx got his phd in philosophy when he was 23, it seems he didn't even get an undergraduate degree. Is it because philosophy phd is easier? or because he was a genius?</p>
<p>Forgive my ignorance.</p>
<p>I do know however that in other countries you can get your Doctor of Medicine in like 6 years, straight out of high school, without wasting time or money getting an undergraduate degree which you'll most likely not use if you become a doctor.</p>
<p>Without wasting time AND mone. </p>
<p>There are a few factors in this. Start with High School first. In the U.S. there is typically one year less of secondary school than in many European countries. This means that the Bachelor’s degree includes a lot of general education courses that would not be present in the UK, Germany, or Italy, for example. In those countries, once you start university you are working on your physics degree exclusively. They expect you to have basic Calculus in hand already and that is not the case in the U.S. In those countries, the B.S. takes 3 years usually.</p>
<p>Now for the Ph.D. In many of these countries, there is an expectation that you have a Masters degree before the Ph.D. and then it makes sense that you can take only 3 years for a Ph.D. You don’t have to take any more courses. In the U.S., most physics Ph.D. programs will take a student with a B.S. and require up to 2 years of coursework before the student starts a research program.</p>
<p>The final thing is the research. In the U.S. the time to degree is variable because most universities have the notion that the thesis project is done when it is done and not on a fixed timeline. This may be different in the UK, where the expectation is that it takes 3 years.</p>
<p>What is better? I cannot say. I finished my Ph.D. in physics in 5 years from a B.S. and I was in a Assistant Professor position by the time I was 29 and tenured by 35. That does not seem too bad to me. On the other hand, I have seen graduate students take up to 7 years in their Ph.D. (from a B.S.) and the reasons vary from the student not working hard enough to the advisor not being very helpful. Personally, I try to get my students finished before 6 years whenever possible.</p>
<p>Finally, you say “wasting time and money”. Whose money are you thinking of? You should not be paying your own way for a Ph.D. in physics. Instead you should expect to be supported as a TA or RA over the course of the program.</p>
<p>By money wasted I mean the BS or BA (but mostly for MDs since if you are a medicine doctor you don’t really use your undergraduate degree), but honestly if I didn’t have to worry about money i would try to get multiple degrees, including multiple PhDs. </p>
<p>You say you have a PhD in physics, would you recommend someone who struggled in physics during high school to pursue such a degree? I only took honors physics and a course on quantum physics, but I struggled due to the math but i really like the science, I did get Bs but mostly As.</p>
<p>A physics bachelor’s degree requires substantial math. Even more may be recommended if you want to go on to a PhD program in physics.</p>
<p>Completing a PhD with original research may take longer than before because the frontiers of research have been pushed out. Liebniz and Newton made what were amazing discoveries in the 1600s, but those things are now routinely taught to college frosh or advanced high school students today. More recently, discoveries by Maxwell, Einstein, and Schroedinger are now routinely taught to college undergraduates today.</p>
<p>However, it is also the case that some fields have had credential prerequisite inflation. For example, law school did not used to require completing a bachelor’s degree first.</p>
<p>I was using the PhD in physics as an example I know a lot about and because you used it in your title. As @ucbalumnus says, getting a Ph.D. in physics requires a Bachelor’s in a hard science or engineering, preferably physics. If you are passionate about doing it, you will put in the time to improve your mathematics skills.</p>
<p>As for your other example, in the US, the MD is only started after a Bachelors degree. Usually it takes 3 years. In some countries, the MD is a stand alone degree that takes 6 years and the difference of 1 year is accounted for the the general education requirements that U.S. universities have in their curriculum (as I described in my first post). If you take that away, the time to MD is basically the same.</p>
<p>Ummm, isn’t an MD in the US normally a four year program, so a total of eight years including the bachelor’s degree before it? However, there are some accelerated six or seven year bachelor’s degree to MD programs in the US. Note that the pre-med course requirements do consume about 40% of the normal amount of course work for a bachelor’s degree (about one and a half years’ worth of courses), so if one wanted to strip down the requirements for an MD to the bare minimum, they would require about five and a half to six years starting from high school graduation.</p>
<p>You are also citing a few exceptional cases (Einstein and Marx) that are very old. If you look at most modern cases, if you compare the US and Europe you will not find much of an age difference in when people get their PhDs. And the amount of time to get a PhD is fairly consistent between fields. I would not call a philosophy PhD easier than physics; it’s just different.</p>