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A comment on Physics Student Earns PhD at Age 89. Parent comment

Re:Physics Student Earns PhD at Age 89 by tomrod on Tuesday November 02, 2021 @12:48AM (#29077211)
No. If you plan to be successful, there is little to no time outside of being a PhD student. If you want to be in the top 1%, and especially the top 0.01%, you should plan to spend your free time researching to become an expert in your field. But such numerical distinctions are typically meaningless since, by virtue of working towards a dissertation, you should be pushing the boundaries of your field of knowledge and thus have few exact comparables as peers.

Source: me (several years now complete w/ PhD), my cohort in my program, and my PhD-earning friends outside my field.

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Re:Physics Student Earns PhD at Age 89 by soheil on Tuesday November 02, 2021 @01:15AM (#29077356)
Take olympic athletes. There are differences not only in the level of work but also physiologically between those who win gold medals and those who can't be olympic athletes. If you're a would-be gold medalist why isn't it possible to settle for getting into the olympics and have a job on the side?
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Re:Physics Student Earns PhD at Age 89 by nopinsight on Tuesday November 02, 2021 @05:14AM (#29078800)
That's an interesting analogy. If you can find recorded examples of part-time Olympic athletes from a competitive country that would help your point. By a competitive country, I mean one with non-negligible chance of getting a medal in that sport.

I wonder if they exist and if so, how rare.

I suspect it's extremely rare or non-existent for an athlete who holds another full-time job up to the selection time to get selected into a US Olympic swimming team, for example.

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