Second year, humanities adjacent, and every senior student I have asked is on some combination of teaching, adjuncting at another institution, or a partner's income after year five. None of this appears anywhere official and I only found out by asking people directly. I would rather plan for it now than discover it in the spring of year five with a dissertation to finish.
I finished in five and the only reason was that I scoped the dissertation down hard at the end of year three, with my advisor's agreement, from something that would have been a good book to something that was a defensible thesis. Nobody outside your committee will ever read the version that would have taken seven years, and you can write the book afterwards on a salary. The students I watched go to seven and eight were almost never lazy, they were ambitious, and the project kept growing because nobody ever told them to stop.
I took the year six adjunct route at a college forty minutes away and it worked financially and cost me the year academically. Two courses, both new preps, both with a lot of grading, and I wrote almost nothing between September and May. If you can possibly avoid teaching new material in your writing year, avoid it, and if you cannot, teach something you have taught before even if it pays slightly less. Repeat preps are worth an enormous amount of writing time.
Name the mechanisms now and start applying early, because most of them have deadlines a year ahead of the money. In roughly the order people use them: dissertation completion fellowships internal to the university, which are usually the best deal and the most competitive; external fellowships from foundations and societies in your field, which need a year of lead time; extra teaching lines, which pay but cost you writing time at exactly the moment you have none to spare; and summer funding pots that go unclaimed every year because nobody reads the emails. The students who get through year six comfortably are usually the ones who applied for four things in year four, not the ones who worked hardest.
By the time you run out, this year's competitions closed months ago. Put the deadlines in a calendar now, they repeat annually.
Applying in year four for money in year six is the bit I would have got wrong. I assumed you applied when you ran out.
Ask the graduate coordinator for the actual median time to degree for your programme. They have it, it is rarely published, and they will usually just tell you if you ask directly.
@pivot_pete · 5mo ago
The part nobody says out loud is that your timeline is set by your advisor more than by you. If they want another chapter, you write another chapter, and no financial planning survives that. So alongside the money question, ask senior students specifically how long your advisor's students take, not how long the department takes. That number varies more between advisors in the same department than it does between departments.
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