I feel that the US PhD system is extremely bad not for students, but for human beings. Other countries like Australia or Germany have a much more stringent timeplan - maybe 4 years, usually 3 years. I often talk to researchers from the US and it&#x27;s always 7, 8 years spent, with maybe one publication, or even 0 - the time is spent interning, or drifting between departments, taking various university courses that really lead nowhere (like OP), or drifting along without a real project, or you&#x27;re the cheap work monkey of the supervisor (the last one seems to be extremely common in the US).<p>I think that&#x27;s the universities&#x27; fault - Australian unis force you to have a project proposal after the 6 or 12 months mark, and then you have about a year or two to do that project, then you have to write. There is very little time to do courses, and if you take a course, you lose one out of 3 possible time extensions. If you don&#x27;t make it in time your student visa will expire (I think maximum is 4 years?) and you have to leave the country. If you&#x27;re a citizen your scholarship will end at the same time. And these are good scholarships, usually about $500-700 per week.<p>My PhD experience was nothing like OP&#x27;s or yours, much more focused, much less time wasted, much more publications too! I think our bioinformatics group&#x27;s record was 12 papers in one PhD (3 first author). I had 2 first author and a few more middle author papers, one of them in Science.