For some reason I stranded on a page where I could see the number of master’s students from Daimi. For kicks and giggles, I looked up myself and found I was number 1105 out of currently 1337 (heh).
Procrastinating, I also wanted to look up my PhD number, and found a page with all PhDs listen. Alas this list did not contain numbers, so I could not immediately look up my number.
No problem; I just downloaded the 4 pages of PhD students (wget or save as), filtered all names out (grep Name *.html) and reversed the result (tail -r) and cleaned up the results (sed). Loading the results into a text editor, I found my PhD number: 153.
A bit more processing (more sed and a bit of uniq -c) gave me the number of PhDs produced per year. I thought the results were interesting enough to share them (not really):
We see that the number of PhDs produced has increased, peaking in the mid 2000s (top left chart). The middle left chart shows the total number of PhDs produced as a function of the year.
The two top right charts shows the total number of PhDs as function of the number of years after the department started (approximately), using either a single-logaritmic (top) or double logarithmic (middle). This indicates that the growth can hardly be described as exponential, but fairly well as polynomial. We note, however, that the first 5 entries seem to have a disproportional large influence on the choice of trend (the points in the last half of the line doesn’t really fit well along the trend-line)
The three bottom charts shows the total number of PhDs, removing the first 5 entries (as the department was young) and the last year (which contains incomplete data). Now the data suddenly fits exponential growth fairly well. The points fit well along the trend-line in the middle chart (though it seems to be declining slightly) and not at all along the trend-line in the bottom right chart.
Wasn’t that a lot of useless information?
Since you haven’t published the pre-processed text file, I had to do a relative count from you in the list. I found out that we are 19 PhDs apart giving me a PhD-number of 134. I also noticed from your statistics that the PhD production at Daimi has decreased significant since I finished in 2006. What has gone wrong?
Good question.
We do notice, however that the two peaks (2003 and 2006) are both right next to very low years (2004/5), so likely they are just because some got delayed or finished before time, making the number for 2000/1-2006/7 around 12/13 pretty consistently.
Still, 2008 seems fairly low, especially considering there has been a focus on an increased production of PhDs in the latter years, though that may only show itself in the upcoming years.