What do you think of those with PhD?

[whyyyyyisitmonddayy]

Particularly those in non-stem fields. Just curious!

Fair enough. I wasn’t criticising. The OP asked what we thought of people who had a non-stem PHD - I said I had never thought about it, but in answer to the OP I thought up some possible responses. You obviously come under the ‘very clever’ or ‘very interested in their subject’ options.

I have a PhD in a STEM field, gained at the turn of the millennium from a very prestigious university.

I'm not from a privileged background. My PhD was funded and gave me a good tax-free income not dissimilar to the take home pay of a graduate salary at the time. The fact I could do it and not be financially worse off than taking a graduate job was one of the reasons I decided to do it.

I work in education now and I do use my Dr title for work (though in my personal life I prefer to use no title, I'm just Jane Smith, not Ms Smith or Dr Smith, though if pushed I'll use Dr). However, in my work I think it's important to demonstrate to young women and girls that very high levels of education, especially in a typically "male" subject area are absolutely achievable by women. I think it's also important for them to see that not all PhDs are your typical brainy boffs, I'm no more intelligent than many of my students (and some are way more intelligent than me). Why, as a woman should I be defined by my marital status, rather than by something I worked hard to achieve? It's not boastful to use a title I earned. It took time and effort. I don't think I'm better than anyone else, but I do think it's important that young women and girls see these things as achievable.

I wonder will that change? I knew a professor, probably born ca 1920s, who was sniffy about PhDs because in his day they were a sign of someone who couldn't get a university job after graduating and did one to mark time.

His rather younger wife did have one, which might have rankled.

My claim that people with PhDs are interesting hit a wall when I remembered the summer when a visiting scholar and I stayed at the same rural guest house while we worked in a building that held things we needed, and meal times were enlivened (or something) by his descriptions of the prehistoric giant sea-crocodiles that he had become a world expert on. They were big. They ate big animals. I think I stopped listening at that stage.

Honestly, this thread is mad. You know when you go to university, the whole point being that you study whatever, whether it’s astrophysics or Arabic or history or genetics or Greek and Roman fureplaces, with experts in the field? Those people, unsurprisingly, all need doctorates as an absolute minimum to start academic careers.

And fossil sea crocodile man's PhD was in an unequivocally STEM subject.

This is a bit of an answer which shows, like other posters, that it’s not that well known about PhDs. Most PhD students are recent graduates, mine was in molecular biology/biochemistry, so am talking from a scientific viewpoint, but the research is often funding obtained from an academic who has a relevant question, peer reviewed, to answer. To do this it often comes with fees and stipend for a student, sometimes more than 1 student, to be able to do the work, under the supervision of the senior academic, it’s very much a teaching / learning exercise and as it’s often described in my field, more like an apprenticeship to research. There are others, for example, I’ve worked with lots of physicians / surgeons, who have that question they want to review and they will very much be more informed / already more knowledgable on the subject, but will always have a supervisor, professor or academic of some sort. So whilst it’s researching an unknown, it’s very much under a mentor … saying that my supervisor was offered the money on a field she knew precious little about so wasn’t a great deal of help! … it’s fine, it was 25 years ago, im
not bitter 😵‍💫

Some are funded, but I lived in York whilst my wife completed a PhD, and went to plenty of her events. Most people's were being funded by their parents (including my wife's!). Sure, some people had small grants from arts funds etc, but that was by no means enough to cover the whole thing. I'm very working class and felt exceptionally out of place at a lot of the networking type events. This was the arts though, so there's probably more funding for other areas, such as healthcare, I imagine.

York generally had a lot of people from privileged backgrounds. That is just the nature of a lot of universities 🤷 it's pretty factual to say that a lot of people with loads of academic qualifications come from a place of privilege. It's not meant as a judgemental statement. It's just how it is.

This will be influenced by subject area and type of university.
In my subject area most PhD students are not recent graduates but are professionals/practitioners who have either moved into academia after working in a profession or who are practitioners looking to develop policy and practice in their particualr area.

I supervise Phd students and none of them are recent graduates. In fact, most are in their 40's.

One thing people often overlook is the application process for a PhD. You can’t just sign up for it — there’s usually a lot of preparation required just to be considered, including research experience and a proposal.

Also, in many non-STEM fields the research can be particularly demanding because the work is often based on qualitative data rather than quantitative data, which brings its own challenges.

When I think of a person with or doing PhD I immediately jump to committed and hard working.

My PhD was actually on educational disadvantage so I'm well aware of the issues!
A lot of this will depend on the subject area and the university. Not one of my PhD student is being funded by wealthy parents! But we attract students from less privileged backgrounds and our specialist subject areas have strong links to professional practice so many of our students are or have been professionals and practitioners.

Whereas I’m working class and did my DPhil at Oxford (at Oxford it’s a DPhil rather than a PhD), funded by a European scholarship, and I can”t think of anyone in my cohort whose parents paid for their doctorate — how bizarre! I was 25 starting mine, and had been living independent since I left home at 18. People had (highly competitive) AHRC funding, Leverhulme, institution-specific funding, funding from a job that wanted them to do a doctorate, or overseas students sometimes had funding from their home countries. Almost everyone worked PT at everything from tutoring to Sainsbury’s to phone sex lines.

What a weird question. Do you actually know what a PhD is @whyyyyyisitmonddayy ?

It's the qualification that you get when instead of being taught pre-existing knowledge or understanding in a field by people who know more than you, you do a substantial piece of work that creates new knowledge or understanding that didn't previously exist, and end up knowing more about that new piece of knowledge than your mentors.

The question in the OP will only reveal useful information about the person who answers, in that if their answer isn't generally one of respect then that person is an ignorant idiot who should be ignored, so asking it as a sole question in a new thread in a public forum gives you no useful information at all.

Having been to watch a presentation of someone’s ethnographic study the other day (part of a multimillion pound funded research centre that churns out these things), I will no longer automatically assume that those with PhDs are clever. Or ‘real world’ clever anyway.
Then what do I know, as a lowly mature student undergrad?

Dd is doing one - no one in our family has done this before

she has a stipend ( grant for that research topic ) and does additional teaching work to fully pay her way

her Research could help find better treatment for ADHD so I think it’s kind of important too

inquiring mind, able to hold and process complex information and to make creative leaps and jumps , intensive focus and determination, and in her case a clear desire to help others snd using her unique skills and strengths to improve the world

Regardless of what it is in I think it demonstrates strong work ethic, commitment, ability to research, ability to identify an area of study that has not been explored before, ability to work independently, strong oral and written communication skills and critical thinking skills

Hats off to anyone that does it. I completed a masters a few years ago and I was approached by my supervisor to continue with a PHD I was spent I had nothing left in me to keep going so fair play to them

That they studied for an awfully long time.

A couple of our friends have them and I don’t think they’re necessarily any more intelligent than the ones without, and I’m including those who don’t even have a degree - it’s just a different type of intelligence.

I don't recognise anything of what you've written from my experience of my husband doing a PhD.

A lot of people who think they are clever feel threatened by PhDs because they have a level of qualification they do not have. So they rubbish the qualification to make themselves feel better about themselves.

PhDs don't have narrow knowledge in specific areas. Or at least the ones I know (STEM) don't. In order to get to a PhD you have to pass A levels, graduate and maybe a post grad qualification. Someone doing a PhD will often have to have a thorough grounding in several academic areas.

A PhD is not just about the detail of the work you do, but the whole process of managing a research project, project planning, which frequently due to bad supervision is often performed with very little input from anyone else. In addition to be successful as a PhD and complete quickly you have to be self motivated, well organised and capable of a high standard of reporting of your work, all things that are useful qualities to have in the workplace.

So there is much more value to having/doing a PhD than the technical detail of the work that is done.

i suspect it’s part of the “bash the educated knowledgable elite” in their “ivory towers “ probably because they are the biggest threat to populist political parties - this thread is to test the waters. People who ca think and analyse data for themselves are much less likely to vote reform

Yes I think it really depends on which uni/subject you're doing. I think in particular PhDs with links to things like professional practice and vastly different to people studying a PhD in the arts. I'm a MH nurse, so a PhD for me would look very different. Historically academia was entrenched with elitism and that still remains in a lot of ways.

I like Rachel but I wouldn't be using her as a role model in this instance.

Many many medical doctors also respect people who have PhDs.

And that's okay, because people have different experiences.

I don't know why people seem offended though when you mention academia has historically been a very elitist institution. It's odd to pretend some of that history hasn't remained in modern times.

Historically academia was entrenched with elitism and that still remains in a lot of ways.

As i said, my PhD ( and my entire career) has been focussed on educational disadvantage. I have worked on widening participation projects and have worked in HE for 20 years. I fully aware of the issues related to elitism and HE.

I'm not offended by someone acknowledging this but it is important to also acknowledge how much progress has been made and that HE is not just for the wealthy and elite anymore.

But you seem to have a vested interest in proclaiming that this situation continues. I mean, I personally find it barely credible that, based on you attending your wife's functions at York while she was doing her doctorate, you discovered that most of her cohort were having their doctorates funded by their parents. I mean, did you trot around the wine and cheese receptions with a clipboard doing a survey? Were you trying to normalise that your wife was being funded by her parents because you found it infantilising?

If anywhere was going to be elitist, it's likely to have been Oxford, and that wasn't my experience in the late 1990s. I could not be more working class (parents are a retired binman and a retired cleaner, both left school at 13) and I literally just applied for funding and got it. DH (also WC) did his doctorate in London at the same time and also just applied for funding and got it. I was also offered funded places at two other universities. I funded my way through my previous degrees entirely on grants and scholarships too. I was absolutely brought up to think that 'universities were for rich people' and that staying in school past 15 was 'not for the likes of us', but it turned out not to be true.

I've worked as an academic at four universities in two countries since my doctorate and only a tiny minority of any doctoral students at those institutions didn't have funding. Mostly those were older mature students working on a passion project, often PT around job, or after retirement.

I have a biological sciences DPhil and I just checked how much my MRC stipend is these days. It's £20,780, but you don't pay NI or tax so that's equivalent to earning £24K. I didn't do any additional paid work, I was in the lab 40h a week so didn't have time and could easily live on my income of £6K a year (!) back in the late 90s.

My DPhil was needed for every job I've done since (which is why I did it). Post docs obviously but also now as a senior scientist in the pharmacentical industry running multidiciplinary teams of scientists (many of whom also have PhDs) developing drugs. Half the R&D dept at work have a PhD and we all use them in the 'real world' because in a high tech world having that high level analytical training is quite useful and not having it can hold you back in a lot of companies.

I do get quite annoyed at all the nonsense that is spouted about people who have PhDs. Research is hard and competitive and you need people skills as well as being smart to succeed. In my experience a PhD is a pretty good sign that someone is likely to be resilient, tenacious, hard working, intelligent, creative and with good team working skills as well.