LittleWizard ( @LittleWizard@feddit.de ) English60•8 months agoA 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.
Daxtron2 ( @Daxtron2@lemmy.ml ) English57•8 months agoNo one says it was the only way? But one of the requirements of getting that PhD is to expand knowledge so it’s 100% applicable
Treevan 🇦🇺 ( @Treevan@aussie.zone ) English9•8 months agoAs 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.
ShustOne ( @ShustOne@lemmy.one ) English6•8 months agoI don’t think it’s meant to do that. Also if we substitute PhD for learning both will be true.
Pulptastic ( @Pulptastic@midwest.social ) English4•8 months agoPresumably 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.
dreamer ( @dreamer@lemm.ee ) English2•8 months agoGood luck expanding the fields of math and science without a PhD.
LittleWizard ( @LittleWizard@feddit.de ) English1•8 months agoLike 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.
dreamer ( @dreamer@lemm.ee ) English1•8 months agoI have no idea what you’re talking about, but I expected someone to bring up some shit like that. My point still stands.
LittleWizard ( @LittleWizard@feddit.de ) English1•8 months agoLookup the Einstein problem. I’m talking about the aperiodic monotile discovered by David Smith.
rimjob_rainer ( @rimjob_rainer@discuss.tchncs.de ) English35•8 months agoThe ratio is off. You learn a lot more from high school and bachelor’s degree and you learn way less with your master. PhD is just expanding a little bit more on master.
oce 🐆 ( @oce@jlai.lu ) English13•8 months agoThe visual is more about highlighting specialization and its distance from the limit of human knowledge. You often can’t represent every aspect of a complex subject at the same time on a single visual. Kinda like how you can’t represent the solar system distances and planet sizes to scale on a single page, you have to pick one.
ezchili ( @ezchili@iusearchlinux.fyi ) English18•8 months agoEuler giving the circle two big balls and an erection:
O3–
MudMan ( @MudMan@kbin.social ) 16•8 months agoWait, 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.
MudMan ( @MudMan@kbin.social ) 5•8 months agoWell, 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.
bleistift2 ( @bleistift2@feddit.de ) English10•8 months agofive 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?
MudMan ( @MudMan@kbin.social ) 3•8 months agoOne 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.
TWeaK ( @TWeaK@lemm.ee ) English1•8 months agoIt 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.
MudMan ( @MudMan@kbin.social ) 1•8 months agoIt definitely sounds that our system was a bit more standardized than that, which checks out and is both a strenght and a weakness depending on how you look at it.
oce 🐆 ( @oce@jlai.lu ) English12•8 months agoAnyone knows the origin of this representation? I’ve seen a professor use it years ago and I thought it was his, but I guess not.
MelodicMischief ( @MelodicMischief@lemmy.ca ) English5•8 months agoIt is from Matt Might, here.
Matt Might, a professor in Computer Science at the University of Utah, created The Illustrated Guide to a Ph.D. to explain what a Ph.D. is to new and aspiring graduate students.
oce 🐆 ( @oce@jlai.lu ) English2•8 months agoGreat, thank you! This post was not respecting the CC-BY ;)
Damaskox ( @Damaskox@kbin.social ) 11•8 months agoI appreciate this picture!
TWeaK ( @TWeaK@lemm.ee ) English10•8 months agoLast cell:
What is this, a PhD for ants?
0xebfe ( @0xebfe@lemm.ee ) English7•8 months ago taanegl ( @taanegl@beehaw.org ) English2•8 months agoI would use the definition of Dr Kanye West, but that might not be appropriate.
Draconic NEO ( @Draconic_NEO@mander.xyz ) English1•7 months agoPeople can make dents in the outer shell of human knowledge without having PhDs though. As in to discover something new and revolutionary, plenty of great scientists have and likely many more will continue to.
🇰 🔵 🇱 🇦 🇳 🇦 🇰 ℹ️ ( @Kolanaki@yiffit.net ) English1•8 months agoPretty Hot Doctor