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This Professor only has a PhD degree

earthsciences.hku.hk

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Re: This Professor only has a PhD degree

#31

Post by seanmcdirmid »

noelwelsh wrote: post #21
seanmcdirmid wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are many many more than that, but we don't typically bother with those details; if the guy/gal knows their stuff, who cares what their degree level is?

Sssh, you don't want the grad students to hear! Without grad students who's gonna do all the prof's grunt work?

The PhD gives us time and resources to become a researcher; it is actually a quite useful experience. If we can get the time/resources another way, great! I personally would have been lost on my own; I met people in my program who really set my path.

If you are young and inexperienced, it is also getting more difficult to get your foot in the door of a research institution without a PhD from a TOP program. Sure, there are other ways up, but getting the PhD is probably a reasonable way to approach things.

Re: This Professor only has a PhD degree

#33

Post by ot »

siglesias wrote: post #18
derrida wrote: post #15

As did Wittgenstein http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wittgenstein who was an engineering drop out and wrote the Tractatus whilst a WW1 PoW in Italy, only to be given a PhD as an afterthought by Russell. I have known of an academic in a teaching and research position at a major university who did not complete high-school & was hired based on the merit of their published papers. These are of course the very small minority…

And not just any PhD, a Cambridge PhD, using said Tractatus as the dissertation. Astonishing.

At that time the Ph.D. was something new in European universities; it was basically imported from the US.

Many professors didn't welcome the novelty, including one of Wittgenstein's examiners, who wrote in his report:

"The Tractatus is a work of genius, but it otherwise satisfies the requirements for a Ph.D."

EDIT: I should have said "British" instead of "European", see comments below.

Re: This Professor only has a PhD degree

#34

Post by zmmz »

siglesias wrote: post #18
derrida wrote: post #15

As did Wittgenstein http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wittgenstein who was an engineering drop out and wrote the Tractatus whilst a WW1 PoW in Italy, only to be given a PhD as an afterthought by Russell. I have known of an academic in a teaching and research position at a major university who did not complete high-school & was hired based on the merit of their published papers. These are of course the very small minority…

And not just any PhD, a Cambridge PhD, using said Tractatus as the dissertation. Astonishing.

At the time, the PhD was not seen very highly in the department, and in the report on the defence of the PhD Moore famously said:

"It is my personal opinion that Mr. Wittgenstein’s thesis is a work of genius; but, be that as it may, it is certainly well up to the standard required for the Cambridge degree of Doctor of Philosophy’

So, it was not seen as an achievement at all!

Re: This Professor only has a PhD degree

#35

Post by shubb »

malcolmmcc wrote: post #9

I get that this reads funny, but I think it's fairly clear what he means...like, reworded it might say: "I essentially have a BSc and MSc, through self-studying, but the only degree I got from an academic institution was my PhD."

The term 'self study' is strange here. He was trained to MSc level by his employer. The army do this all the time. The Chinese government do it very often.

Re: This Professor only has a PhD degree

#36

Post by buro9 »

I have an MSc in Computer Science but lack a BSc or A-levels.

I was homeless and sleeping rough when my peers were in secondary education, I was living in squats and hitch-hiking around the UK when they were in university.

Being self-taught, I applied for the MSc after 15 years experience as it was a source of personal anxiety for me to lead large technical projects in which almost every other person was highly educated (MSc or PhD) and those that were not had a BSc. I felt a constant career vertigo in my position, due to not feeling sure in my abilities.

During the MSc I struggled with revision technique and exam skills, having never sat any before. But where I was weak at exams I frequently scored above 95% for coursework, research projects and coding tests.

Mostly I felt that the MSc taught me the language with which to communicate and argue the things I already knew.

When I completed the MSc I reflected that I would've been more competent at a PhD than the MSc. But I didn't know in advance how I would fare at the MSc and that a PhD might interest me. Mostly I was just 'checking boxes' to improve confidence in my existing work, but I found myself very seriously debating whether I wanted to pursue a PhD when I got to the end of the MSc. I really enjoyed the research work in the MSc.

Re: This Professor only has a PhD degree

#37

Post by Van_av_Ordning »

ot wrote: post #33
siglesias wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And not just any PhD, a Cambridge PhD, using said Tractatus as the dissertation. Astonishing.

At that time the Ph.D. was something new in European universities; it was basically imported from the US. Many professors didn't welcome the novelty, including one of Wittgenstein's examiners, who wrote in his report: "The Tractatus is a work of genius, but it otherwise satisfies the requirements for a Ph.D." EDIT: I should have said "British" instead of "European", see comments below.

You have things the wrong way round. The Ph.D. degree originated in Germany.

Re: This Professor only has a PhD degree

#38

Post by lkozma »

noelwelsh wrote: post #10

I know a few cases of researchers who don't have PhDs, but I've never seen this before. Probably the best known researcher in CS who doesn't hold a PhD is Simon Peyton Jones. He is very well known in the field of programming languages and one of the main implementors of the main Haskell implementation GHC. I think he might have started a PhD in the last few years, but he was appointed a professor at Glasgow without o…

Another well known CS researcher without PhD was Robert (Bob) Floyd, of graph algorithms fame:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_W._Floyd

Re: This Professor only has a PhD degree

#40

Post by noelwelsh »

seanmcdirmid wrote: post #31
noelwelsh wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sssh, you don't want the grad students to hear! Without grad students who's gonna do all the prof's grunt work?

The PhD gives us time and resources to become a researcher; it is actually a quite useful experience. If we can get the time/resources another way, great! I personally would have been lost on my own; I met people in my program who really set my path. If you are young and inexperienced, it is also getting more difficult to get your foot in the door of a research institution without a PhD from a TOP program. Sure, ther…

I agree. I have a PhD. While the process wasn't 100% sunshine and rainbows I enjoyed most of it, learned a heck of a lot, and I understand the utility of doing a PhD for most people who are interested in doing further research.
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