Is a Part Time Engineering PhD at a good CA school available?

[jack63]

Others can chime in, but writing a dissertation for me at least was in and of itself a full-time (and exhausting) job - when I was in the deep writing phase I was routinely writing all day from 10 am-6 pm and sometimes doing a little more writing in the evening after dinner. I did work a part-time job that was about 10 hours a week when I was writing, and I can’t imagine doing more unless it was directly related to my dissertation work.

@juillet …ideally it should totally be like this, but in reality I’ve seen students have to put in 20 hours on TAs, 20 - 30 hours on GRAs barely related or not related to their research or part-time jobs. If I remember right, you got an NSF fellowship…I think…which is great. Most students make due with less. Ideally grant work is directly related to student’s research…no they’re not suppose to be mutually exclusive…and they’re not. A grant that is 50% related to a student’s research is the usual from what I’ve seen. My experience was to see students basically “go rogue” often because prof’s grant pressure could be a major distraction.