Fabio has posted another of his Grad Skool Rulz over at Orgtheory, regarding the mythical end of graduate school:
Before moving on, I should note that staying too long can have dire consequences. Students can become unmarketable, dissertations are out of date, departments may cut funding. Students who have spent too much time in graduate school will be seen as folks who can’t get stuff done, which makes it hard to get a job. If you knew some was in grad school for 12 years with one modest publication, wouldn’t you be a little suspicious? It behooves you to figure out the norm in your field and stick to it.
He also distinguishes between “short clock” and “long clock” disciplines, with sociology somewhere in the middle. This also seems to vary by program, as some students in sociology unfortunately find themselves somewhere that they are “allowed to drift indefiinitely. If you don’t finish your dissertation, no one will remind you. If you dedicate all your time to teaching, no one will care. Even if you do finish your dissertation, people will sit on it for semesters and nothing will happen. To blunt, the graduate school system is not designed to help you graduate in a reasonable amount of time. It’s designed to waste your time.”
The key is to figure out how your program fits into all of this and take the necessary steps to get out. Trust me, it’s better out here.
Memoirs of a SLACer 