>>>>BTW... how do you pursue a PhD with no undergraduate degree? Universal life church will make you a minister for nothing....
>>>
>>>
>>>Getting grants can take a long time. Long enough to get the pre-reqs.
>>
>>Those pesky pre-reqs. Four years as an undergrad, two years of grad school....
>
>FWIW, the actual course requirements for a PhD vary with the school and the program. I needed about two year's worth of courses. Solomon's program calls for more coursework than that. My godson is doing a PhD in neurobiology at Harvard, which was only one year of coursework; he's in his second year of the program now and will present his thesis proposal this month, which I find incredibly quick.
>
>Similarly, whether or not there's a Masters before the PhD varies with the field. Some subjects seem to require it, others don't. In some fields, it appears that the Masters is what you get if you don't pass your PhD comps and wash out.
>
>I've actually been stunned by the amount of variation I've seen with the kids we know who are doing graduate work.
>

Thanks for the clarification. Now that you mention it, a good friend (best man's wife) got her master's and PhD in chemistry as a combined program. She said the master's degree was pretty much a non-event in the middle, since everyone was there for their doctorate.

And then some of them went on for their post-docs. Ouch. I was more than ready to exit academia after four years as an undergrad.