Sorry I haven't read all the post, just saw this thread therefore my first reaction is...at least a PhDer might be smarter than a D.O. doc who was an ass to me today and has a complex b/c he's not an MD...just say'n.
Sorry I haven't read all the post, just saw this thread therefore my first reaction is...at least a PhDer might be smarter than a D.O. doc who was an ass to me today and has a complex b/c he's not an MD...just say'n.
Face it. Most PhD candidates are comfortable in the bubble called "school" that which they've spent there whole lives in, currying favor (brown nosing) with their teachers (can i get extra credit for this?) and now, at 26 or so can't function anywhere else.
College town bookstores and food co-ops are full of them.
PIed wrote:
For example, one of the PhD students who was finishing up around the same time I was working at University #1 could not reliably take the pH of a solution despite spending thousands of hours in the lab over the course of his 5 years in graduate school
I have spent more than 5 years in graduate school, yet could not tell you what a pH level meant if it hit me in the face. Something about acids and bases.
Today I discovered that a former colleague had, er, gained a Phd. Her original alma mater was City Poly. She gained the Phd at Goldsmiths. The Phd. is in a Humanities type subject - this person had never heard of WH Auden and was generally ignorant of any form of literature above Jackie Collins. Jesus Christ Almighty!
Whiite Trash wrote:
I am a non-traditional student (read old) who returned to get a master's last year to start an "encore" career. As happy as I am to be making this transition as an oldish-timer, I have quite turned off by academia and modern campus culture.
First, the professors are not particularly impressive. I used to feel truly deferential toward PhDs, but now I find the ones I'm spending time with to be unbalanced, arrogant and unaware that they exist in a bizarro cloistered world separate from where the rest of us exist. I have concluded that tenure, while I understand its purpose, is not a great thing. People who are too comfortable, too confident and not beholden to someone else for performance, transform into the weirdos I see on campus every day now. To those who are either tenured or aspire to be, yuck is what I have to say to you.
Secondly, academia seems a world in which "researchers" feast on the dregs of what others have said, or accomplished, parsing it into endless lists, drawing distinctions without difference, writing endless pages of fluff that has minimal relevance in the real world. I'm in semester two of a 3 year program and can honestly say that most of what I've learned so far is simply fluff, detritus layered upon detritus. I'm put off by the $100+ dollar hardbound textbooks, 11th edition of course, the tens of thousands of annually published articles, many recycling the same ideas as the others, it's been a genuine experience in seeing the wizard behind the curtain. And there are how many thousands of universities in the US, sucking vast amounts of money out of the larger economy? This is not productivity.
Lastly, everything on campuses these days revolves around a dogmatic and political adherence to "diversity" and identity politics. I'm finding that for the most part, rigid "openness" to predefined diversity is demanded, but genuine diversity of thought is not tolerated in discourse. In summary, if I didn't need to complete this program to get started on career 2.0, I would keep my dollars and run as far as I could from academia. It's been disappointing to learn that academia really is the land of broken toys. This is an overgeneralization, but I have started to believe that universities these days are not good organizational citizens.
Classic post, worthy of an entry on Quora.
Ghost in China
Um, ever heard of rekrunner?
GSS wrote:
Today I discovered that a former colleague had, er, gained a Phd. Her original alma mater was City Poly. She gained the Phd at Goldsmiths. The Phd. is in a Humanities type subject - this person had never heard of WH Auden and was generally ignorant of any form of literature above Jackie Collins. Jesus Christ Almighty!
"Ph.D." by Langston Hughes
He never was a silly little boy
Who whispered in the class or threw spit balls,
Or pulled the hair of silly little girls,
Or disobeyed in any way the laws
That made the school a place of decent order
Where books were read and sums were proven true
And paper maps that showed the land and water
Were held up as the real wide world to you.
Always, he kept his eyes upon his books:
And now he has grown to be a man
He is surprised that everywhere he looks
Life rolls in waves he cannot understand,
And all the human world is vast and strange–
And quite beyond his Ph.D.’s small range.
It seems many of you don't understand wht Ph D is, which is telling.
I am in grad school right now for Mechanical Engineering PhD. I get paid to do it. Look I am not smart in the sense that I can't solve the worlds problems and sometimes I make real bad life decisions. But in the field I specialize in I am very very smart. That is what a PhD is...
He said he had a masters.
Challenged and did a dissertation wrote:
Um, ever heard of rekrunner?
Yes, you will probably find yourself disappointed with the intelligence of some people in academia until you check out other institutions and organizations outside academia.
Medical degrees have precipitously fallen to the equivalent of a masters.
Never let a M.D. (medical doctor) cut into you unless they have a
F.A.C.S (American Fellow of College of Surgeons certification (surgeon degree).
gloria wrote:
Medical degrees have precipitously fallen to the equivalent of a masters.
Never let a M.D. (medical doctor) cut into you unless they have a
F.A.C.S (American Fellow of College of Surgeons certification (surgeon degree).
What do you call a person who gets their answers 50% wrong in their Medical finals?
Yeah, this basically sums up my feeling. I'm an academic with a Ph.D. and I've done a lot of introspective thought into what the whole point of the academic game is. Eventually I realized that you can make broad, cynical generalizations about just about any other field: law, politics, medicine, sports (including our running), religion, lower education all of plenty of room for criticism---basically anything that isn't driven purely by market forces. (The same criticisms apply to the business world to the extent that it depends on environmental exploitation, monopolizing resources, political lobbying, etc.)
At the end of the day, your "field" is just that: it's a field, a place where you play your game. The field itself is completely neutral. It's up to you to make it meaningful, or you can make it a waste of time. What matters is how you approach it.
The funny thing is, despite my awareness of higher-level criticisms of academia, I look at my own experience and it's been very positive. I'm interested by what I study, I have meaningful relationships with students and colleagues, I associate with intelligent people from all across the world, I've traveled to more places than I had ever expected to. Academia is just one cog of modern society---I don't see it as bigger than it is--but it has its role.
I've got a PhD in a subject related to my work, and I happen to work among a high proportion of other PhDs. Probably the "average" qualification in my company is a masters degree, with maybe a few more bachelors grads than PhDs, but still a very high number, much higher than the average proportion in other companies in our field (professional consulting).
In my line of work, the most accomplished people often have PhDs or almost certainly have a masters and a very long career of diverse experience. A very small proportion of those at the highest levels of practice (recognized by peers and clients as being the most accomplished) get there with only a bachelors degree. It can happen, but rarely, with exceptional individuals.
I won't say that a PhD necessarily makes somebody smarter or dumber, than average, but it does make them more knowledgeable in some specific field. Knowledge is power, and this often converts to value (and higher compensation). Not always of course.
In school, some of my PhD colleagues were clueless in one way or another. I don't think any "dumb" ones managed to graduate, but probably a high proportion of them (including myself) have some significant social impairment, which may come across to some as stupidity.
You left out the problem with all the brown people on campus.
PIed wrote:
I worked in academia for awhile at one university and earned a master's of science at another, and something that really surprised me at both schools were how non-rare it was for there to be people with PhDs who were total morons. For example, one of the PhD students who was finishing up around the same time I was working at University #1 could not reliably take the pH of a solution despite spending thousands of hours in the lab over the course of his 5 years in graduate school, and his thought processes were such that he once tried to convince me his experiment failed because the solution inside one of his test tubes had MAGICALLY teleported inside another one of his test tubes and mixed with the contents. He genuinely believed that was the explanation. He now has a PhD.
Another person I know who will be defending her PhD soon is an old coworker of mine who thought I was a genius because I knew how to get back to our vehicle after we had walked one mile in a straight line directly south from it (we were using a compass). She was 23 and did not know north and south were opposite directions. She also had no idea what a 90 degree angle looked like and gave up sunscreen after deciding it was more cancerous than sunshine. I've known several other PhD holders and PhD candidates like comparable to her.
What is the deal with these people and their advisors? How do people like this earn PhDs? And why do universities allow students like this to be pushed through?
There are tons of people with PhDs that believe in God. You can't assume an education implies basic common sense.
Speaking my mind wrote:
Sorry I haven't read all the post, just saw this thread therefore my first reaction is...at least a PhDer might be smarter than a D.O. doc who was an ass to me today and has a complex b/c he's not an MD...just say'n.
The real jerks are the DDS holders. They charge too much and pretend to be special.
Throughout my college career I felt that the overall grading structure for my courses discouraged actual learning. Getting a bad grade on an assignment permanently changes the max you can get in a course for the semester, which in turn affects scholarships, honor societies, first jobs, etc., via GPA. Why think critically and experiment a little if it ultimately screws you over? While this is mitigated as you progress in your career, there are massive short-term benefits throughout your undergrad to take the path that gets you the highest grade with the least amount of work.
That being said I was in a competitive engineering program and you actually had to grasp the theories being applied to pass. I went back to school to get an MBA for improved credentials a short while ago and I was shocked. I had viewed Masters as a step to aspire to but so far I feel like a freshman in high school with how much babying is going on. I feel like the MBA I'm working towards will have no meaning since the exact same status can be accomplished by a lazy student who doesn't understand what's going on in or out of the classroom.
Particularly those that cheat at races
don't do it wrote:
The real jerks are the DDS holders. They charge too much and pretend to be special.
Polo wrote:
gloria wrote:
Medical degrees have precipitously fallen to the equivalent of a masters.
Never let a M.D. (medical doctor) cut into you unless they have a
F.A.C.S (American Fellow of College of Surgeons certification (surgeon degree).
What do you call a person who gets their answers 50% wrong in their Medical finals?
You call him DOCTOR! Sorry, you all fail.