- #1
holly
- 184
- 0
Physics PhD "Worthless"?
Could it be true that a physics PhD, from a respected university, and held by someone who has published mightily in the past, has been offered tenure (and turned it down) at a very large university, and who was in on one of the big, big discoveries of the past 20 years, can really turn out to be "worthless"? How can that be?
My son's dad says that there are only two places in the entire world he could work, because he is so, so, so specialized and so high up, that he could never work anywhere else...so he's moving to Australia without a job (he has enough points to get in), get on the dole, and play his saxophone for tips while learning to program. So no more child support...
He does things with lasers, things with spectrometers, finding out with lasers what is in smoke or breath, for example, and looks at things in frozen aragon matrices. That's all I can recall.
Is a PhD really of so little value? Are grad students being led to study things that they can't use in the real world to support themselves? I'm appalled.
Could he be mistaken? He IS the one in the field. I'm left out of it all now...but it seems so strange...then again, no one we went thru grad school with is working in the field now...
Could it be true that a physics PhD, from a respected university, and held by someone who has published mightily in the past, has been offered tenure (and turned it down) at a very large university, and who was in on one of the big, big discoveries of the past 20 years, can really turn out to be "worthless"? How can that be?
My son's dad says that there are only two places in the entire world he could work, because he is so, so, so specialized and so high up, that he could never work anywhere else...so he's moving to Australia without a job (he has enough points to get in), get on the dole, and play his saxophone for tips while learning to program. So no more child support...
He does things with lasers, things with spectrometers, finding out with lasers what is in smoke or breath, for example, and looks at things in frozen aragon matrices. That's all I can recall.
Is a PhD really of so little value? Are grad students being led to study things that they can't use in the real world to support themselves? I'm appalled.
Could he be mistaken? He IS the one in the field. I'm left out of it all now...but it seems so strange...then again, no one we went thru grad school with is working in the field now...