PhD Simulator

At least in the poor (and honestly mostly useless) parts of Mathematics. Maybe Physics is less poor.

(Fortunately I was in CS, where the research output is actually needed by society and usually not pure masturbation, so the attitude toward coursework was "do well at what you need, enjoy what you want, and ignore what you don't need or want"

The funny thing is that I had 1 conf paper, 1 major result, and 1 figure left over. That's a good year extra, so I assume a perfect game would be to get the 3x papers and GTFO (which is the second best outcome, after not enrolling). There were a couple folks I knew that made it out in 5 years, but more that took 7+. Our lab was notorious for taking over 10, which I skirted by.

Like others said, this was lacking outside events (social/political junk). Hopefully version 2 will take into account: at least 1 family death and 1 additional tragedy, at least two months lost to helping or waiting for help from another grad student or post doc (they did have the lab equipment breaking, which was good to see, but missed the lobbying for every little purchase), at least one scope change, a half dozen favors to gain some political cache, a few experiments and/or rewrites to satisfy faculty members that just read about a technical issue they should have known, but didn't so they're highly sensitive to it, at least 6 months of arranging the data/results in a way that faculty can understand, 3 months of arguing that the lab standard procedure for some basic component is a decade out of date, a few months worth of preparing premature data for unnecessary meetings, one (and it better be just one) instance of an offer to help getting waaaay out of control, the hope boost after your first big conference and subsequent conference hope drops, the drops with each thesis defense from folks a year younger, etc. There's more, but that's off the top of my head. Oh, and that slight boost in hope when you hear someone else has a worse problem than your current one. That's a fun one.

Tip for those interviewing - ignore all the year 1-3 folks. 1 and 2 are basically undergrads plus some extra classes. 3 probably hasn't hit the first pile of bullshit yet. Find a year 5 or 6 in your field and talk to them alone. There's a reason they generally don't have senior grad students at recruiting events, and it isn't because they're too busy. Talk to them long enough to get to their exhausted attempts to rationalize some aspect of the experience. If their demeanor doesn't change, you might be safe. If they start hemming and hawing, that's a problem. They haven't even gotten to a specific, non-personal problem and they're having trouble keeping up the facade. The layers are: 1) Hey, social event, I get to take my mind off lab problems. 2) Getting a little boost by talking to someone still excited. 3) The quiet whisper, "Let me give you some advice." 4) The realization that there's nothing but lab to talk about. That's the threshold. 5) The rationalization alpha - The view from 30,000 feet isn't terrible. 6) The rationalization beta - The rundown of broad problems they're having. This is the point where they will probably, as if by magic, remember that thing they were going to do needs to be done now. (I've got some analysis running I need to check, I need to feed some lab animals, I promised my parents I would call, I told a lab mate I'd help them with this thing and will be up all night, etc.) 7) The rationalization gamma - Specific cases of major problems they're seen other have. 8) The rationalization delta - Specific problems they're having.