A PhD is not the only way to expand human knowledge. This is disregarding a lot of work done by a lot of hard working people.
Yes but how will I feel good that I spent 140k on a piece of paper if I don’t brag about it?
I’ve been making six figures while getting my PhD. There are plenty of opportunities to get your PhD funded if you are a US citizen. There are plenty more valid places to poke fun at pursuing a PhD but it is very common to have funding and thus no debt.
As their specialised knowledge reaches the edge of the circle, their general knowledge updating should retract.
Everyone has met a PhD that is almost entirely clueless in other areas. Not their fault though, don’t get me wrong.
Edit: The person that downvoted must be Dr. Climate Change Denier. Dr. Covid Denier has joined the fray.
It’s funny but you see the same thing in sports, or I see it specifically in hockey. Phenom kid gets drafted and at 18 has the social skills of the hockey puck he’s playing with. By the time he’s 36 he’s not the player he once was but is a more well rounded individual with age and experience. When you focus all your energy to become the best at something, like a PhD, athlete, musician, whatever, you sacrifice some things along the way for sure.
Like the guy who found this somehow important new shape not to long ago? I don’t think he has a PhD. But he did contribute. Not saying that it’s easy though.
I have no idea what you’re talking about, but I expected someone to bring up some shit like that. My point still stands.
Presumably you could meet the boundary with “a dollah fifty in late fees at the public library” and find a way to push through from there. You’d have to find a way to publish or share your new knowledge. Studying at uni gives you access to experts in their own thing that likely have knowledge that could help you with your thing as well as a system designed to churn out these papers when you eventually find your thing.
Every day people discover new things but it takes attention, effort, and will to PROVE it’s a new thing and more yet to share that with the world. Too bad you can’t get an honorary PhD for doing that, at least not reliably.
Wait, how bad are bachelors’ degrees in the US/anglosphere? I was contirbuting to research projects and had a specialization by the time I was done with my five year bachelors’ equivalent.
In fairness, I think the system has since been reformatted so that the fifth year is now a (paid for) master’s, but still. That graph makes it seem like it’s high school with benefits.
College is what you put into it. A lot of people don’t get into the networking side of it because it’s never really introduced to them. Mostly professors look for those who are “turned on” to bring onto projects like that, that is, those that are engaged and asking questions and curious.
Youngins, lpt: talk to your professors and let them know you are interested and ask questions. It’s what you are there for- access to brains.
Well, not really over here. You do have to do a bunch of hands-on stuff for credits. Can’t even replace those with more standard subjects.
You can absolutely wing it past all five years, depending on your degree, but between mandatory projects and internships you have to try really hard to not get some level of expertise in the field.
Plus, university curriculums have specializations here, so you get mandatory courses on pretty narrow subjects whether you like it or not. So… I guess there are some differences, maybe? I was pissed when they announced they’d do that masters’ thing here because the price of tuition for that year goes from being a couple hundred to a few thousand for basically the same curriculum, but this is definitely not the first time I notice that the anglosphere assumes there’s a huge difference between the two things.
The UK system is a bit better about those kinds of things, courses tend to be modular with required internships etc. The American system is a lot different and scheduled like high school, but that may have changed since I was in it. It really was dependent on the course, though. I like the UK setup much better.
You can do a bachelor’s in college? Not here. College is typically only two year programs.
It depends on the course. For my course, the bachelor’s year included a project that was more design based, while the master’s year had a project that was research based, however I ended up working with a PhD student assisting in his research project for my bachelor’s.
five year bachelors’ equivalent
In Germany (and Europe, I believe, since the Bologna reforms), a bachelor’s is (usually) 3 years and a master’s is 5 years. That might be why you got to do research and I didn’t. How long are your master’s courses?
One year, typically. Some could be two or have a big chunk of on-the-job training/internship.
We used to have a more prominent 3 year degree, but it went semi-extinct in favor of other intermediate education, leaving our Bachelor’s equivalent being 4-5 years, depending on which degree you’re going for. And yeah, I think now they made them all 4 year and have more of a master’s offering.
The thing is that internationally those 4-5 year degrees are still the thing immediately under a masters’ degree, so there is a bit of a mismatch there. That goes some ways towards clarifying that, thanks.
I kind of hate this image. Its like a way to discredit all the learning done in the formative elementary/high school years. If I would guess, 60-70% of everything I have learned was in high school and thats with me having several published papers.
To be fair, most of “all human knowledge” is stuff like when the last time was that each person on the planet pooped.
Nobody knows when I pooped last. It was some time today, but I don’t remember when, and no one else ever knew.
This is the exact same concept that hentai artists use because they don’t know how women’s anatomy works
Frustrating to say the least. I feel my PhD accelerated learning in all directions. Not from the program content itself, but the skills involved in the ingestion of high volumes of dense information. This idea that the borders of my world don’t extend past some yadda yadda about some tiny subclass of a field is some silly goosery.
Can those “skills involved” be learned elsewhere? Sure, this is just the path I took. Can phDoctors be single minded or general idiots? Sure, I’m an idiot. Do we need some single minded people? Sure, amazing things can be accomplished by singular focus.
But it isn’t a mandatory condition or experience of a floppy hat assed (sword in some countries) recipient of this degree.
