The perils of graduate education
18th June 2008
This post grows out of a conversation I had recently with someone who deals regularly with graduate students. I was relating an exchange I’d had with an interviewer, a PhD economist, who’d asked me about my MBA. “Well, while I was getting it, I thought I knew everything,” I told him. “Sadly, that turned out not to be the case.”
The interviewer laughed. “Everyone thinks they know everything when they’re in graduate school.” He paused. “You’re lucky you got over it. A lot of people never do.”
To judge from the number of people who think that their PhD makes them an expert in, well, everything, he’s absolutely right.
Remember that next time you think that someone with an advanced degree is thereby entitled to some special deference. If they know more than you, then can demonstrated it; if they can’t demonstrate it, then they don’t know more than you.
And that goes double for people who try to pretend to expertise outside of the field of their training.