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PhD study hyper-specializes people... I'm not sure about that. By way of anecdata, there are several PhDs at my workplace, myself included. The PhDs are the most likely to be doing multi-disciplinary work, and to quickly move into new areas. At least by tradition, the doctoral education was supposed to be about "learning how to learn," and though the research topic was specialized, you had to pick up a lot of breadth in order to make it work. In my case, though I studied some arcane properties of atoms, in order to conduct my project, I had to learn electronics, programming, and a variety of other things. Now, another thing about the PhD education is that no two PhDs are alike, which makes it hard to talk about having a PhD as a sort of symbol -- of what? Take two PhDs in nearly the same area, and they will have remarkably different sets of knowledge and approaches to problems. A PhD project is a series of disasters, not a smooth trajectory towards mastery of a narrow field. And as you move up the academic ladder, you are given more freedom to forge your own education, including an education that makes you more employable, or less so. Perhaps how you get yourself through your PhD amplifies the small things that make you unique as a person and problem solver. (Note that there's some hidden advice here. If the degree itself won't make you desirable, you have to make yourself desirable by what you add to your abilities). |