How to Graduate from Duke Chemistry

I want to give a rough overview of what a PhD actually requires

since I figure most people who aren't planning to do one aren't familiar with it

It basically takes five years or more, so I'll go with five years and walk through the requirements/rules for each year

If you're thinking about doing a PhD, I think this post will give you plenty of ideas

Today I'll use the chemistry department as the example

[Year 1, fall]

Academic ethics lectures: you just attend six lectures that teach you not to plagiarize and so on.

3 lab rotations: new students have to spend two and a half weeks in each of three labs, so you can get a feel for each lab's atmosphere and learn what they work on and what their rules are. After all, every PI has their own style.

TA: unlike other departments, Duke chem makes you TA starting in your first year. The switch took me a while to get used to at first, but I was fine after the first semester

[Year 1, spring]

Officially join a lab

[Year 2, fall]

Finish six required chemistry courses: the department requires six courses within three semesters, so most people take two per semester, though some take three and three and finish within a year. International students also have to take extra English, so I took two chemistry courses and one English course each semester.

Form your oral exam committee: we take the qualifying exam in the middle of the spring of year 2. Qualifying exams in the US are all oral now: you prepare about a 30-minute presentation and a 40-minute defense. You have to find your committee members yourself. They usually won't turn you down unless they already have a lot of students, but ask around about who asks really hard questions and try to avoid them.

[Year 2, spring]

Submit the Prelim (qualifying exam) document for review

Revise the Prelim

Finalize the Prelim

A bit more about the Prelim: we have three defenses in total, and this is the first one. You only officially become a candidate once you pass it. It covers all your first-year research, but most people see it as a chemistry knowledge test. The professors' questions usually have nothing to do with your content, which is what makes it hard. The point is to test your understanding of the field, and even if you can't answer, you still need to offer a reasonable explanation

[Year 3, fall]

Oral presentation: you need to give at least two public presentations, international or regional

Propositional Exam: you propose a Proposal outside your own field, which we call the Prop for short. The point is also to get you to explore widely, but since it's not your specialty, the committee usually doesn't give you a hard time.

[Year 3, spring]

Annual Progress report

[Year 4]

Poster/Conference

[Year 5]

Annual Progress Report

Dissertation/Final Exam: the dissertation everyone knows about, plus a final public presentation.

[Other]

From the spring of year 2 on, you do research full time and don't take classes anymore. Graduation requirements depend entirely on your professor, but there's still the saying that you need at least two first-author papers to graduate, so years 3 and 4 are mostly about that, and in year 5 you look for a job, do your final defense and you're out.

As for TA, I only listed it under year 1 because one year of TA is usually a department requirement. Whether you need to TA after that depends on whether your lab has funding or your project got a grant, so it's hard to say. But if you can avoid TAing, do. It's an extra duty that doesn't help you graduate at all. You might have to vanish for two or three hours in the middle of an experiment and then come back, and getting interrupted all the time really puts you in a bad mood!