[kiwih]

In my experience in computer engineering in the academic systems of the USA, New Zealand, and Australia, a very large proportion of students will write their first paper in their first year. It is field dependent, but when I was a postdoc at a top US R1, 100% of the students I interacted with had their first paper in their first year. These even included students working on LLMs :-)

Also, top non-US universities often graduate their engineering students within 3-4 years of commencing, with 3-4 papers being a very common international expectation as well.

If you want to finish a PhD in 3 years and are interested in academia, in addition to following the path the OP has laid out you may also look to good international universities and then get your next 3-4 papers as a postdoc.

[hervature]

I appreciate adding data for the crowd but "a very large proportion of students will write their first paper in their first year" is simply not true when talking about the whole population. My department, albeit not CS but stats/ML, the first year is dedicated to doing courses and preparing for the qualifying exams. Some students would publish a paper. A few more might be coauthors with an upper year student (read, very little involvement). Pretty close to half would not even have an advisor until the summer. I studied at, supposedly to US News, a top 10 in the US for CS.

Typically, non-US universities have 3 year undergrads and 2 year masters prior to PhD. End-to-end, you are looking at the same time. There are, of course, exceptions. UK I think shaves off a year by integrating undergrad and masters.

Hiding the years or a PhD by doing an extended postdoc is barely the point of the exercise. The median time for a CS PhD in the US is 7 years [1]. Subtract 2 years for good students but add a year postdoc and I think you have a realistic 5-6 years from start of PhD to first academic position for the top decile.

[1] - https://ncses.nsf.gov/pubs/nsf22300/report/path-to-the-docto...