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And the ultimate university degree, the PhD, is all about learning how to learn. It's unlikely that you will continue to work on the project you did your disser
by jhbadger 2y ago
And the ultimate university degree, the PhD, is all about learning how to learn. It's unlikely that you will continue to work on the project you did your dissertation on where you spent 3 to 6 years becoming an expert on in grad school. The point wasn't getting the knowledge, it was developing the skills to get up to speed on a new topic quickly.
- grugagag 2y agoDoes it really deliver on that though?
- marcosdumay 2y agoWell, you are required to learn about some largish thing that nobody could teach you because nobody knew. I don't know if it teaches self-learning, but it surely ensures you know it.
- jhbadger 2y agoYes. While movies often talk about people "with two PhDs" (and yes, there are a few people who do that for some strange reason), a PhD prepares you to change fields dramatically without any additional formal training. Much of molecular biology in the 1950s was created by physicists who decided to become biologists and who learned genetics and biochemistry and then created a new branch of biology. While not as dramatically, I myself have changed research topics several times since getting my PhD 25 years ago.
- squircle 2y ago> The point wasn't getting the knowledge, it was developing the skills to get up to speed on a new topic quickly. Well, then how do we qualify "this", and help future expert-generalists immediately find a niche and start pursuing meaningful work? (Not that "work" is the end-all, because we hopefully work-to-live and not the other way around.)