I have a friend who is married to a guy she met in college. She has a PhD and he has a master’s degree. For a significant part of their marriage, they have maintained two separate households that are about a 2 hour drive apart. Each one drives to see the other every other weekend, most months. My friend listens to a LOT of audiobooks. They’ve made it work, but it definitely has been challenging. Neither of them can move their career easily to where the other is living. Their kids navigate among the households as well. It has been a journey and they both handle it as gracefully as they can.
As freshmen, they are very young and it will be many years before they are applying to any graduate school and a lot will undoubtably happen between now and then.
I met my husband freshman year. We got married after college. We both got PhDs at the same institution (different from undergrad.) Grad school was fun and we had a lot of friends. The harder part was finding two faculty jobs in the same city. We did. We got
tenure. We both work in industry now.
I started dating my now-H our sophomore year and am now in a PhD program. I decided really late in the game that I wanted a PhD so things change…
Several of my friends are dual-PhD people. Since most PhD programs are only two years of in-person classes, they’re usually only apart from each other from that time. Or they figure out some other way to figure it out.
It’s not that uncommon and people make it work all the time.
My sis in law and her hubby met their freshman year of college. They fell in love, lived together through their undergrad programs, and pursued PhDs. They took turns and made it work. They’re both educators.
Who knows? I’d say the chances are pretty slim…but you really never know.
@romanigypsyeyes what field are you in? In the biomedical sciences, one shows up on site every day for about 5-6 years, because you are in a lab, until maybe the last couple of months for putting the thesis together (usually assembled from already written publications). So a couple would look for being accepted to programs either at the same institution or same city.
Yes, it won’t work for every single field. I’m personally in history but my friends run the spectrum including ones in science fields. Their field work is done and they’re just writing now.
But I maintain it’s doable for most.
Or they have partners who are in different fields who can be more flexible.
And those are choices you have to make if you want to be in a dual phd couple.
@romanigypsyeyes Curious how funding works in history or similar fields. In the lab sciences, PhD students pay no tuition and have their stipend (~$30K/year?) covered either through teaching assistantships, fellowships awarded to the student (e.g. NSF), grants to the principal investigator (professor in whose lab they work), or training grants to the program. If a person is not on site for the last 3(?) years of the program, do they have to find outside work?
I’m sorry, but implying that it’s ok for a Ph.D. student to be off site for 3 years of their program falls into the category of spectacularly bad advice. I’m not talking about field work and the like of course. Could a non-lab student be off site for 2, 3 or even 4 months a year - sure, especially factoring in breaks and such. But doing most of your degree work remotely for 3 years is a pretty bad idea. Even if it’s technically “allowed”, you run the risk of losing your funding or delaying getting your degree by a year or two. Even if your advisor approves your dissertation, you won’t be in a position to establish yourself as a potential professional colleague and the faculty may basically write you off, making your degree useless as far as getting an academic job goes.
The other thing I’d add is this - the problems that dual Ph.D. couples have don’t end with graduate school if one or both of them are looking for a faculty position. It’s definitely not easy for two young Ph.Ds to find positions with the same university or in the same city. Hopefully one of the two is in high demand and can find a job in a big city or can ask that their university hire the other member of the couple during their recruitment.
Relying on anecdotal observation at a big, prestigious university is a good example of a sampling bias fallacy. I do agree though that many people manage to make it work.
Added in response to the post below: @LBowie - Didn’t mean to imply that you were the one giving the advice. I was just responding to the general idea in case any young innocents are reading this thread.
Wait! You quoted me but I never advocated not being on site! I actually have the same concerns as you! I have actually never heard of that in the sciences. And yes it is definitely not easy to find 2 faculty positions in the same city. A lot of my former colleagues had one spouse as a faculty member and the other in a non-faculty position, like a lab manager or tech in another lab. BUT, a PhD does not imply that you need a faculty position. I’ve done that, even got tenure, but am much much happier at a start-up. I teach on the side sometimes (and am doing so this semester).
Oy I’m not saying never come back. I’m saying that you are more flexible after actual coursework is over.
BTW, there ARE fields where you can certainly be away for years at a time and come back occasionally for in person advising or whatnot.
Less than half of the people in my program live in Michigan during the research and dissertation part. No, your funding isn’t at risk. Hell, I only live 20 minutes from campus and my advisor and I Skype as much as we meet in person- mostly because she travels extensively.
It is field dependent. Some are flexible. In fact, some require that you live off site for months and months at a time.
Eons ago when I was an undergrad my honors thesis adviser was the wife of my chemistry advisor. They both had Chemistry PhD’s but back when they came to UW in the 1960’s husband and wife couldn’t both be in the same department. She was an excellent pharmacology medical school prof and a great mentor to me. I asked her many years later how it was for women in science since my time was in a watershed era (I went the medical route) and she stated there were still problems. Among physician friends there were also compromises. btw- biology now is so much more chemistry and perhaps now I would have made different choices. Ancient history.
I’m with the posters who state not to worry- far too soon. See how things unfold. It will either work out or be a nonissue.
It is definitely the case that various forms of electronic communication have made it possible for a Ph.D. student in a non-lab field to work remotely, when the student is not taking lecture classes. The student can probably successfully complete a Ph.D. in that way. However, if the student is interested in an academic career eventually, it makes sense to look at what the people who have been successful in gaining a faculty position have done.
There are a lot of reasons why it might be an advantage to be on site frequently. While one’s Ph.D. adviser is generally the primary recommender for a student, many faculty positions require 3 to 5 letters of recommendation. The other faculty at your Ph.D. institution may recall a student from graduate classes, but they will not have an opportunity to observe the student’s emergence as a mature scholar, if the student is not around.
Does your university have any types of special honorary fellowships or prizes for grad students, romanigypsyeyes? Who gets those? Does your university have visiting lecturers from other universities, who give a single talk or two and then leave? (I’d guess the answer is yes.) Do grad students get to meet with the visiting lecturers? (Not sure about that.) Do the grad students have the opportunity to ask questions at the talks? (Probably, and that is a good way to make an impression on the other faculty, if thoughtfully done.) Does your university have sabbatical visitors, who may offer special, advanced graduate courses? It can be an advantage to take a course like that–a faculty member gets to know you when you have developed beyond the beginning graduate stages, and it makes a positive impression on the other faculty (if they know about it). There is also the “Oh, hey,” phenomenon that works in some departments–maybe not yours, though: A faculty member gets an email about a special opportunity for grad students, or hears about it in a faculty meeting, or hears about it at a conference. In the ideal world, the faculty member thinks carefully about the grad student he/she would most recommend for the opportunity. In the real world, often the faculty member does not actually think about it very much, but when seeing a grad student in the hall, says, "Oh, hey . . . "
If a student has a hot Ph.D. topic and something else to make her/him a star, this may matter less. But for a grad student who wants a faculty position, I think it would be really valuable to be on site.
[ quote] But for a grad student who wants a faculty position, I think it would be really valuable to be on site.
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Yes, what happens often is that someone from the hiring department calls the local director of grad studies to ask who the top PhD students are this year. The people who are around and are participating in the intellectual life of the department are in a better situation to make a good impression and to be considered among the top 1 or 2. However, there could always be grad student stars who are publishing up a storm from a remote location and they could appear to be the best students in the department from their CVs.