The answer is 2

Recently, under some unusual circumstances, three important senior scientists berated me and a panel of 3 other students for not reflexively answering “two papers” to the question, “When do you know you’re ready to graduate?” As we went around giving answers like “after I publish the results of my current large-scale genetics project”, or “when my committee and I agree that I have finished my experiments”, I motionlessly nodded my head in agreement with the other students’ responses. So I was surprised when the committee came back with this rigid two-word culmination of a graduate career. They may have added “or their equivalent” but they certainly did not approve of the just one high profile paper my classmate aspired to. So, are we really here to produce two mediocre papers, three really bad papers, but definitely not just one great one? It seems to me that this discourages all the things people say is great about graduate school – the freedom to explore new scientific terrain and take some risks while under the wing of your well-funded adviser. In case those experiments never get published and you have to do your fall-back project, you still have a whole paper to go. What if they do get published but you can’t work on that second, thorough and less glamorous follow-up paper until you get to the awesome postdoc that first paper landed you? Or what if you’re uncomfortable in your lab environment and want to get that one paper and get the hell out? We are grad students, arguably adults, now. We took our required classes, can we just do science now please?