PhD = Patience, Humiliation, Distress
You know the old joke that a PhD is an academic who has learned more and more about less and less, until they know everything about nothing? I used to think that doing a doctorate degree would mean working within a very specialized field and topic until you know about it more than anyone else in the world. While that might hold true in some disciplines, the past three years working on my Doctor of Education (EdD) at OISE, University of Toronto, have taught me something else. Yes, we are reading countless research papers on our chosen topic but you don’t get your doctorate done only by reading. There are a lot of other skills and abilities you need to develop to get the job done.
I recently saw a nice drawing showing what people think is learned in a PhD program, versus the reality. The credit for the visual goes to Elena Hoffer, who founded the company Alma.me to help students and recent graduates navigate their career paths from academia to "the real world." All that in addition to working on her PhD in medicine at Karolinska Institutet in Sweden. So one thing pursuing a PhD clearly teaches you is multitasking.
