Bobby, I agree with your comment about specialisation during A-levels and undergraduate degrees. Although in some cases this would be advatageous, I think a research student should be have good grounding in more than just one area to perform worthy research.

Which institute is this then, BurgerKing?

Claudia, you dont have to have a Phd to know that this site is of an anonymous nature.

Gosh.. its not freakin Belford is it??

Hehe - fair enough

Lady P, I apologise for my mistake! I congratulated you for starting a Phd straight after your masters but I realised I shouldnt have because you didnt!

Sincere apologies.

Is your institute actually Burger King?

eh? i thought you had to take classes as a phd in canada? my friends at ubc do? or is that just a ubc thing?

another comment, i really didn't mean to start a argument about different institutions. More so, I am just discuraged that even in my own school I see people "relaxing" and having a "easy time" getting a phd.
But that is life, there will always be people getting handed things. Hard to get used to.

I believe it's pointless arguing about which is the "better" university or which country has a "higher" standard of education. It's human nature to think the system we are familiar with or are a product of is superior. If we didn't think our own education system/university/faculty/department/laboratory was good, we wouldn't have signed up there in the first place.

Nobody here is in a position to compare European education with North American education objectively - you are all looking at the comparison with great bias. We certainly cannot draw conclusions based on what Bobby's friend thinks or what Matthews82 read somewhere.

According to Braintrack, there are 3334 universities in Nth America and 2360 in Europe. It would have to be a bloody thorough study that draws a statistically-valid claim about which is the superior of those two populations!

I overheard asenior scientist say that scientists in US/Canada make themselves known in the science world during their PhD and in UK you tend to make a name for yourself during a Post doc.

US/Canada PhD courses can take longer due to the amount of teaching many of the students have to do as part fo their TA funding. So US/Canada PhD students can be more attractive for academic posts because they have, onaverage, far more (and far better!) teaching experience.

In UK you can concentrate on your research and not worry so much about courses and teaching. So you can still be comparably as productive as your US/Canada counterparts during a PhD.

In the research tables the US dominate, maybe they do produce more productive researchers?

Gremlin, don't forget that in the US, the population is five times as large, so there should be ten Oxbridge unis for our two. Also, I would presume more students take science that they do here.

Piglet speaks a lot of sense, and as for Tricky's 'light relief' ... it's true - it can get lonely and frustrating (especially at this time of night) and reading a variety of intelligent - and sometimes even witty - perspectives on life, the universe and everything is a welcome tonic.

Sugar_student I too wonder how people get any work done with all the chatting they do at uni, but you dont know how much work they do at home. Different people work at different times and I dont think anyone would be 'handed' a phd for nothing

Still intrigued by Burger King's excellent institute. Give us a clue!