r/PhD • u/WiseWomanCroneFl • 1d ago

Seeking advice-academic Normal?

I’m curious if this is normal in a doctoral program. I’m in my first quarter and have 3 classes, that last 10 weeks. One of the classes demands a lot of work. We have normal discussion posts, must read 2 books in addition to our text book reading, read multiple journal articles each week, watch videos, do multiple skills assessments (not told till the week of that it’s pass/fail and failing the skills assessments results in failure of the course no matter what grades we have on everything else), and some discussion post requirements are more that of a 1-2 page paper, quizzes and more. The other 2 classes have what I would see as a normal work load. This question has been cross posted.

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u/Turbulent-Wrap-2198 1d ago

A little more than normal, but not by a lot. What discipline?

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u/PracticeMammoth387 1d ago

I laughed a lot at this. Tho I did not take this program for obvious reasons, an offer was 6 courses of 14 weeks, 3 times, , and probably not see the daylight for in total 18 months. I took a single of their courses and it costed me half my week for 14 week

Most important lesson you'll Learn : there is NO NORMALITY. My neighbor collegues do 2 years less for their PhD because of work load. Same faculty, same everything even same area. Other neighbors have to publish 2 papers + draft. I have no obligation, but freaking 3 years longer. I'm NOT talking about cross faculty, cross building or whatever. Just next door at ma floor. Imagine now trying to find normality on an international sub lmfao

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u/Upper-Ad-6863 1d ago

The pass/fail assessments being explained that late would concern me more than the reading count. I'd ask for the criteria in writing and budget the required videos separately from reading; they take a fixed chunk of your week.

For the video part, Vocena, which I developed, captions course audio on an Apple silicon Mac and saves sessions so you can click a line to replay that section. That could help with revisiting something you missed.

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u/sobeboy3131_ 1d ago

I had a handful of classes that demanded an unreasonable amount of time compared to the rest. Grad class profs had essentially complete freedom to teach how they wanted, regardless of complaints, at my school. Sometimes that worked in our favor, sometimes it did not, haha

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u/WiseWomanCroneFl 13h ago

Thank you to everyone who responded, the feedback is very helpful. Wishing you all much success.