It’s not especially uncommon for the contestants doing PhDs to do this. Some do it because they know that the topic will sound absurdly obscure. It was pretty obvious that Prance was one such case. Think of it as being ironically pretentious. Yet conversely it can also sound modest - his PhD is only on middle Byzantium eucharist objects. It’s not a bad attitude to take. One of the essential ways of remaining sane when doing any PhD is always remembering that your topic really is absurdly obscure.
You should also not forget that most of the people (or at least very many) that PhD candidates talk to about their research are fellow academics. When they ask what your PhD is about, they aren’t looking for “biology”.
I can’t remember exactly what I said back then, but I think I typically answered a question about the PhD with the topic of my dissertation. Also because where I did it, that is your whole PhD…no course work anymore, and I was more faculty than student (salary, office, faculty meetings etc). It was very clear to which departement I belonged.
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Requiring a degree in any field is a good bozo filter. All degrees from accredited institutions are difficult to get. Those that make fun of other degree programs it just shows that aren’t familiar with the skills and demands.
I have had two jobs for which a college degree was required, but they didn’t care whether it was in Folklore, Biomechanics or Street Performance, a real independent major Indiana University once granted to a guy who is currently making about 80k a year as a juggler-- that’s the same school that gave Will Shortz his independent major in Enigmatology.
I’ve also had three jobs where my starting pay was about 20% higher because I had a BA.
An HR person once explained to me that college graduates 1) can be depended on to read and write at at least a 10th grade level (yeah, I know, but I guess high school-only graduates are usually around a 6th grade level); 2) understand that everything you want has some part you don’t want, because no matter what your major was, you had “general requirements” you had to take and pass; and more importantly, 3) she looks for people who finished college in 5 years or less* because those are people who finish things. Not finishing in four years, she didn’t consider a red flag, just a sign of someone who needed to mature a little, or maybe someone who changed majors. Taking nine years to finish, needed explaining. A single mother who went part-time, and paid her own way, a great candidate. A guy who smelled like dope, and dropped out and went back twice, not a good candidate.
What interested me the most in that conversation was that the GED is written at a 9th grade level, and in her experience, people with a GED were more reliably literate than people with high school diplomas. Apparently, you can fake your way through high school, but not the GED.
Before that conversation, I used to sort of look down on the GED, but I don’t anymore.
*“Less” is correct, not “fewer,” because you can attend for part of a year.
In regard to what a person’s degree in actually “in”; you have a field, a specialty, and a topic. Also, sometimes, depending on your institution, you may have a department.
My mother has a PhD, and both her field, and the department where she studied were “Linguistics.” Her specialty is Dialectology. He thesis was on code-switching.
Depending on whom she was talking to, she might have given any of those things as answer to what her PhD was “in.” Or, she might have said “languages,” “foreign languages,” “Slavic languages,” or “Eastern European languages.”
If she was talking to someone, who no way in heck was going to understand the word “linguistics,” that’s when she would have said “languages.”
But to another linguist, she usually called herself a “dialectologist.” Still, if asked “What is your degree in?” exactly that way, she might have said “code-switching,” to someone who know what code-switching was.
Sure but usually only one of those is part of the formal name of your degree.
For example, my degree certificate states that the College of Liberal Arts at XYZ University grants me the degree of Bachelor of Arts in Mass Communication.
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