What For Art Thou, Ph.D.?

WHAT FOR ART THOU, Ph.D. ? SCOTT FREEMAN* I just spent five years thinking about the question posed in the title of this essay.1 Verily, verily I say unto you: defining a research topic, passing a general exam, collecting data, and writing a dissertation were mere child's play compared to my struggles to come up with a decent metaphor for the doctoral process. The science was manageable, but the poetics were murder. What was really going on here? What was this Ph.D. program all about, in essence? What did it mean to be a scientist? My first hypothesis was that getting a Ph.D. would be a lot like learning how to drive a cab. Now not just any cab, mind you, but a London cab. The London Cab Driver Model was my leading metaphor for the Doctoral Process when I entered graduate school. You see, to be certified as a Cab Driver in London you have to acquire what London Cab Drivers call "The Knowledge." Having The Knowledge means that you know every nook and cranny in the London metropolitan area. You have to know every remote alley and apartment block, every irrational name change for streets. It takes most people a year or two to do this—to memorize London's geography. Then, to earn your license as a London Cab Driver, you take an exam in which a City of London Cab Examiner tells you where to take her all day. She can give any address that pops into her fiendish City of London Cab Examiner mind, no matter how obscure. You are expected to drive directly to that address, without hesitation, and by the most direct route. If you don't, you flunk. If you do, you're a London Cab Driver. This, I thought, was what becoming a Ph.D. scientist was all about. This paper was submitted to the 1991 DwightJ. Ingle Writing Award for young authors. *Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Princeton Univerity, Princeton, New Jersey 08544-1003. 'The title is translated from Playdo's classic philosphical query Cogitus est Doctoramus?, according to word-equivalencies given in Wilson's Phrasebook ofJive Latin. Some give "Why in God's name do you want to get a Ph.D.?" as the correct rendering; the literature also offers "Intrapersonal Dialoguing Within the Doctoral Paradigm: Potentialities of Conflict and Resolution." The reader is free to choose his or her own favorite.© 1993 by The University of Chicago. All rights reserved. 0031-5982/93/3602-0804$01.00 Perspectives in Biology and Medicine, 36, 2 ¦ Winter 1993 | 301 After all, I thought, science is about Knowledge. Once I was a Ph.D., I thought, young Students and members of the Lay Public and even perhaps Congresspersons and Policy-Makers would hail me at the University 's curb, ask me a scientific question in my field of expertise, and I, why, I would steer them directly to the answer, without hesitation, and by the most direct route possible. I would do this because I would have The Knowledge, the Scientific Facts. Or, so I thought. After only a year of graduate school, of watching how science is actually done and how scientists actually are, I knew this metaphor was in deep, deep doo-doo. First, I realized, getting The Knowledge takes most Cab Drivers a year or two, three at the outside. Getting a Ph.D. takes most scientists five to seven years, nine at the outside. Clearly, something qualitatively different from just getting knowledge was going on here. Second, I realized, there was a key flaw in the Cab Driver Metaphor. In my second year in graduate school, after I had started to actually do some science myself, I came to realize that the essence of the whole profession, of the whole pursuit, was just that: pursuit. Sure, scientists need to know a lot of stuff, but the thing that separated the great scientists from the mediocre ones wasn't how many answers they knew, but how good they were at asking questions (emphasis mine). Good scientists ask lots and lots of interesting questions. And, as everyone knows, there's nothing worse than a...