So Doctorate What

When you work in a tech­ni­cal indus­try, there is often a pre­mium placed upon advanced degrees in a tech­ni­cal field of study. Being some­one upon whom a doc­tor­ate in the­o­ret­i­cal stud­ies of a phys­i­cal sci­ence has been con­ferred, I have ben­e­fit­ted from some of these pre­mi­ums. Although, the purely finan­cial cost-benefit analy­sis is not totally clear given the num­ber of years of lost earn­ing at the begin­ning of one’s career, the other rewards of com­plet­ing a Ph.D. are unde­ni­able for many (yours truly included). The com­pany I work for is very quick to refer to me as Dr. Is Still Here when intro­duc­ing me to a cus­tomer or includ­ing my cre­den­tials in a pro­posal. Things are much, much less for­mal when it is just the day-to-day gang; more often than not first name basis.

While I will be the first to admit that there are real ben­e­fits to the dis­ci­ple that is usu­ally learned while com­plet­ing a doc­tor­ate, there are other ways to hone skills that can in fact make a per­son extremely capa­ble. Over my years work­ing in indus­try I have met many tech­ni­cians who are as good at prob­lem solv­ing as some of the best Ph.D.-degreed sci­en­tist and engi­neers I have known. The only real dif­fer­ence is gen­er­ally the abil­ity to express their obser­va­tions in aca­d­e­mic terms.

What I have always been amazed and frus­trated by is that the tech­ni­cians have often had a pretty good idea what an issue really was but the sci­en­tist and engi­neers often did not lis­ten to the tech­ni­cians. Too often, the degreed “experts” do not take the time to try to make sure that they under­stood what the non-degreed real experts were try­ing to com­mu­ni­cate. They do not take the time to make sure that they under­stood, in the terms they would use. Instead, they assumed that they knew every­thing bet­ter. More often than not, the sci­en­tist and engi­neers over­com­pli­cated the inter­pre­ta­tion. They very often were look­ing for a chance to prove they knew some obscure tech­ni­cal fact and tried to apply it to the prob­lem. The tech­ni­cians tended to just try to observe what was not right based on what they had experienced.

When some­one has done an activ­ity for years and is obser­vant, they may not describe what they know the way it is taught in uni­ver­sity, but they just might know more about that par­tic­u­lar activ­ity than any­one. We would be wise to lis­ten to them. It might take a lit­tle more effort to make sure we under­stand what they are telling us, but it is absolutely worth our effort.

Is Still Here