**Brynda, ** are you a researcher? Practitioner? Consultant? Instructor? Something entirely unrelated?
The average time to PhD in the biological sciences is now over eight years, or twice as long as an MD. Do, I get to be “Doctor doctor Fiveyearlurker”? 
I started out in experiment, but it turns out I suck at it. I soldiered on stubbornly for about a year, until finally my advisor gently suggested that perhaps I should consider doing something I was actually good at. (I’m still grateful to him for that.) So I got my PhD in theoretical condensed matter physics.
I have a Ph.D. in psychology. My dissertation was a social psychology one correlating attitudes towards gays and lesbians and withholding rewards. I was trained clinically and practice, though.
Congrats,** Sattua**! I don’t know what golf course you’re talking about; that’s the line to make your first student loan payment 
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Good luck, **Angua ** .
Psychologists can either be Psy.D.'s (Doctor of Psychology) which is considered more of a professional degree or Ph.D. (Doctor of Philosophy in Psychology) which is considered more of an academic degree. Psychology Ph.D.'s traditionally have to be trained in scientific methods and do a dissertation that involves original research using statistical analyses. Psy.D.'s can do a phenomenological analysis of a case study, say. IANAL (obviously) but I see a J.D. as a Doctor of Jurisprudence but could also see that someone could get a Ph.D. in Law. I’ll bet the Ph.D. in Law has to write a long ass paper and that most J.D.'s don’t. It seems like splitting hairs to me, though. Just my $0.02.
Ph.D. in English, with a concentration in Interdisciplinary Medieval Studies (because it wasn’t enough to study one impractical discipline).
My dissertation was on the framing devices in Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales.
All of which, of course, just thrilled my parents.
Ph.D. in Computer Science, specializing in Computer Architecture. At the time I graduated I figured out my sub-specialty was going to disappear in a few years (I was right) so I moved fields.
As a former horse owner, I know vets sometimes have to stick their arms up even worse places than a horse’s ass. Hint - they do it only for stallions.
Nope, I dropped out of my PhD (Chemistry) when my advisor stole what would have been my second article. Got an MS instead.
My crazy uncle has 4 PhD’s and a JD, kind of makes one lose respect for the whole thing… although I’d actually lost it when I started meeting college profs dumber than doorposts.
Ph.D. in Physics. It was supposed to be in Optics, but that’s another story.
I tell people I’m a Doctor of Philosophy. “Tell me what you believe, and I’ll tell you if it’s sick.”
Soon to be PhD in marine biology. Just have to get three more papers out before christmas and Bob’s you’re uncle!
It’s funny you should mention this because my good friend from undergrad always manages to passively-aggressively indicate to me that she doesn’t consider my law degree a real doctorate (she is finishing hers up), but something as little better than a masters. Although, science ph.ds do actually take much longer than an M.D. degree (I’m not counting the residency)-most people I know take 6 to 7 years to finish them. Anyway, getting back to the passive-aggressiveness…I can’t put a finger on why they get so irritated over JDs but I think it has a lot to do with the fact that they slave away for years with very little in the way of salary and then go on to careers that take significantly longer to reach financial stability so they have to take it out on the lawyers.
I will say that I would never ever put the title “Dr.” in front of my name and I even eschew personally labelling stuff as “Esq.” though when people write to me they put that after my name even though I haven’t asked them to address me in that manner.
PhD in Aeronautics, with a focus on experimental fluid mechanics. My thesis dealt with turbulent shear flows in water close to a boundary with air - the sorts of things you see in ship wakes, for example.
Got it a little over a year ago, after taking waaay too long to finish (my “uninspired” period came at an inopportune time). Now I’ve taken the leap out of academia and am doing/learning signal processing & stuff, although my fluids background is still proving useful.
Same here… about a year from now, if all goes according to plan, I’ll have a doctorate in education (crosses fingers about data collection)…
The whole J.D. thing has to do, I think, with writing a dissertation and conducting original research. If a degree doesn’t require this, I think most people don’t consider it a terminal degree… and of course, if a Ph.D. in law is available, it seems disingenuous to say that the J.D. and Ph.D. are equal. Similar to some Ed.D. programs that don’t require a diss. If a J.D. requires a diss and defense I stand corrected, but even the institution in Cambridge that gives out fancy J.D.s doesn’t…
I agree with all of this, including the parts about eschewing Dr. and Esq, and that some PhD’s (and especially PhD students) seem to have a bug up their butts about the J.D. degree.
People who insist on academic titles often strike me as pretentious, especially if they do it in social situations. Medical doctors get a pass, although (even there) excessive use in a social situation is odd.
I think I’ve only mentioned the D part of my degree once, and that was to shut up an annoying family member that was going on and on about the elevated status of her (not yet granted) PhD at a family gathering that included several relatives that hadn’t gone to college.
My sister is in medical school and she doesn’t do any of this either. From what I’ve seen she only did two years of courses and now she’s finishing up rotations, which seem to be brief introductions to different types of clinical practice. In contrast, I had an extra year of schooling as compared to her. I guess she’s not going to be a doctor either.
Ph.ds in law are extremely rare. I think the year I graduated there was 1 awarded and I don’t know anyone who gets one. Some people go on to get LL.Ms after their JDs but mostly the LL.M contingent seems to be made up of people who earned law degrees in foreign countries and are required to get an LL.M in the US prior to sitting for the CA or NY bar.
I’ve heard the research/thesis argument over and over again and I keep my mouth shut because ultimately I have a well-respected degree from a well-respected educational institution and I made more on my clerkship salary than an average associate professor makes the first year teaching so if someone wants to lord it over me for their own personal insecurity reasons I don’t really care. What does irritate, however, is that people don’t necessarily understand what goes into actually getting a law degree. If you are under the impression law degrees are easy to acquire or that we do nothing for that time period, I invite you to sit through six semesters and 30 tests in which you are required to memorise an entire body of law and apply it to a method of examination for 3 hours with your grades being dependant on a single exam and an extremely difficult curve all the while surrounded by similarly competitive individuals, after which you will sit for a 2 to 3 day exam where you are expected to memorise (at minimum) approximately 15 different subject areas (and I’m barred in a minority jurisdiction that tests across about 22) on which you are tested prior to being awarded your license to practice. It’s easy to act like we just sail through and claim doctoral status but we have our own trials and tribulations.
Whoa, easy, anu-la1979. I’m certainly not demeaning your experience, salary, or preparation. You sound a little defensive there. This is not just my opinion - it’s virutally universally held across academia. I have never heard a J.D. holder refer to themselves as a doctor. My law professors (yep, I’ve actually taken law classes) were Dr. So-and-So because they held Ph.D.s. Yes, the Ph.D. in law is quite rare.
Furthermore, I’ve never heard of any organization, ABA or otherwise, who wants to claim the doctor label for J.D.s. Medical doctors, I presume, come from a different tradition altogether (though I can assure you there are Ph.D. students in medicine). The doctoral-granting tradition that features the formulation of a research question and original research written in a dissertation is based on the German research university model, which we pretty much replicated here in the U.S. and in most countries in the world.
Hippy Hollow, if you read my post you’d see that I stated that I would never use the “Dr.” and that I even eschew my actual title (my cards just say Attorney-Advisor). I’m well aware that you can a Ph.d in medicine-I was responding to the statement that it’s the research-thesis model that justifies Ph.ds labelling themselves doctor or the status of a degree as “doctoral”. The average M.D., from what I’ve noticed with my sister, does neither, and yet I doubt you’d get very far contesting that they don’t have a doctoral degree. JDs and MDs are professional doctorates, not academic, and it happens that the JD honorary title by tradition ended up different.
My entire point was that Ph.d students never contest the status of a medical professional degree but are all over contesting whether or not a J.D. qualifies as a professional doctorate though quite a few I’ve met really don’t understand what even goes into acquiring one.
So you’re a Doctor of Density?
PhD in Biochemistry. Never worked in that field from the day I finished my PhD.
Dense, maybe.
Pauli would have called me a Doctor of Dirt Physics, which I think has a nice ring to it.