any PhD's or professors out there?

[jefhatfield]

i know there is a DoctorQ poster here, and arn is a medical doctor...how many out there are professors and/or teachers of one kind or another in college?

i thought about a career change one day when i retire and have considered extending my education so i can teach at one of the local colleges

i have also found an interest in working with older adults and this has become a booming field in the retirement area where i live

[caveman_uk]

I've got a PhD in organic chemistry though I'm not a lecturer or anything. I work for a small Biotech.

[ejb190]

Well, I have thought about the PhD, but I'm not sure if I will. I do have my Masters.

I am an Agriculture & Natural Resources Extension Educator with Purdue University. I teach, but my classroom is an entire county and my audience is anyone who cares to listen to me. It's fun because I get to teach things that really matter to people.

I used to be one of those dreaded college TA's. I was assigned a Friday afternoon lab session. I had two guys who whenever I asked for questions would ask, "Can we go to the bar now?" That got old in a hurry. I don't think I could ever go back to a regular classroom.

[sonofslim]

i'm a licensed doctor of love.

[mactastic]

I earned my Post Hole Digger degree years ago. :D

[JesseJames]

Post Hole Digger degree. Hahahahahaha. Good one. :)

[OSUbuckeyefan]

I have a master's degree in biophysics. I teach chemistry at a community college and physics at Devry University.

I absolutely love teaching - there is nothing I would rather do. Of course, it's not for everyone. To enjoy teaching I believe you must enjoy a wide variety of people and possess tons of patience. If that describes you, then I would highly recommend pursuing a career as an educator.

Good luck,
Jeff

[jefhatfield]

Originally posted by JesseJames
Post Hole Digger degree. Hahahahahaha. Good one. :)

here i am starting a serious thread...but i have to add this to the fray

B.S. - ************ degree
M.S. - more ****
PhD - piled higher and deeper

;)

note: the term **** , which is censored here, refers to the fecal matter which a bull deposits in the field...i didn't make these terms up, my communications professor enlightened the class one day on his educational background...he talked about how he had eight years of college theory in his head and how he knew about every aspect of communications but he told an interesting story about his first job after his doctorate

being a good orator and possessing an amazing vocabulary, he got hired to be a radio announcer...live on the air...so when he arrived at the radio station, they gave him something to read and put him in this isolated glass booth and figured this man, with a doctorate degree, should have no problem expressing himself

so into the airwaves his voice goes, but there was this rattling sound in the background which was unlike any interference any of the sound engineers have ever heard before...he was so nervous it turned out to be his shaking so profusely in the booth...after the show was over, i think they had to carry him out of the radio station:p

[wdlove]

I have a father-in-law and a brother-in-law that both have an MD. My wife and I are both nurses. We enjoy helping others, it is a great source of satisfaction!

[ejb190]

Originally posted by JesseJames
Post Hole Digger degree. Hahahahahaha. Good one. :)
Don't laugh. The Post Hole Diggers are the key to any good college Fencing Team. If the posts aren't straight, assembling a Split Rail fence is a lot tougher! Of course my specality was High Tensile and Woven Wire Fencing.....

Edit-spelling

[cerid]

Well, I've got my PhD 24 years ago in the field of electronics, and I am teaching electronics and microprocessor technology since that day at Bogazici University, Istanbul, Turkey. I am a Mac user since 1986.:)

[Gus]

Finishing my DMA in Music as we speak. Just turned in the final revision of the dissertation (God, I HOPE it's the last friggin' version!) I am a music professor at Concordia University in Seward, NE, and at Union College in Lincoln, NE. Taught for a year at Western Kentucky University also. Absolutely love teaching college classes, but hate when people skip on nice Fridays like today. Not that I ever did that in college or anything. ;)

Regards,
Gus

[WinterMute]

I have a Masters degree in composition and I lecture in music and audio technology at under and post-grad level.

I'm going to attempt a PhD in a couple of years once I can fugure out something specific enough.

[Peyote]

My wife just got her MA in English this past spring, and is now teaching 4 classes as adjunct faculty for University of Texas at San Antonio. It only took her two months to find the job, and she turned down sever other offers because UTSA offered full benefits for adjunct. Then again, she's always been an over achiever (graduated Cum Laude with her BA and a earned a 4.0 for her masters).

I'll be graduating in December with my BFA. We might be looking for somewhere for her to get her PhD and for me to start working. Notre Dame has been sending her letters a lot lately offering scholarships, but no way I'm moving to Indiana or wherever that is. I was hoping the job market in the Bay Area (S.F.) would hold out so she could go to Stanford, but it doesn't look that way. L.A. is a possibility though, lots of jobs there, and UCLA is excellent for liberal arts. But then again it IS L.A. I don't know. We're just starting out so we'll see how it all pans out.

Incidentally, My wife just switched! On Wednesday we bought her an iMac G4 800 15". I've got an 800 Mhz Quicksilver, but I'm on it all the time and she needed an update from her old Pentium 233 Mhz Sony Vaio. She's loving the new iMac.

[bryanc]

I finished my Ph.D. in 2000, after 10 gruelling years of frustrating research on sea urchin developmental biology (I also did an M.Sc., so at least I got two degrees out of my extended tenure as a grad student).

I've been working as a postdoctoral research fellow (making about double what I did as a gradstudent, which is still about half what any reasonably developed tradesperson makes, let alone other professionals) since. I still love the research, but poverty sucks.

Cheers.

[jywv8]

I fall in the ABD category (all but dissertation). I got an MS in comp sci., got to the dissertation stage in the Ph.D. program, and then I dropped out. It just wasn't my bag. Maybe someday I'll finish it.

[Doctor Q]

Originally posted by jefhatfield
i know there is a DoctorQ poster here...Beware! I've heard (http://www.dontcryoutloud.com/archives/000058.html) that not all people who claim to be doctors are actually doctors. Maybe I have a Ph.D. (in bad jokes, perhaps?), maybe I have a medical degree, maybe I have an honorary degree, maybe my mother named me "Doctor", or maybe I simply have delusions of grandeur. I like leaving it for people to guess.

[jefhatfield]

Originally posted by Doctor Q
Beware! I've heard (http://www.dontcryoutloud.com/archives/000058.html) that not all people who claim to be doctors are actually doctors. Maybe I have a Ph.D. (in bad jokes, perhaps?), maybe I have a medical degree, maybe I have an honorary degree, maybe my mother named me "Doctor", or maybe I simply have delusions of grandeur. I like leaving it for people to guess.

"they call me dr love, i am the doctor of love, they call me dr love" gene simmons, kiss;)

[jefhatfield]

Originally posted by jywv8
I fall in the ABD category (all but dissertation). I got an MS in comp sci., got to the dissertation stage in the Ph.D. program, and then I dropped out. It just wasn't my bag. Maybe someday I'll finish it.

i met a lot of ABT (all but thesis) students who were bogged down at the master's degree thesis...so you did very well...a lot of people like the mba degree since it's one of the only master's degrees that has undergrad classes in the first year and usually doesn't require a thesis in the second

i fall into the ROOM category...(ran out of money) so i have one year of grad school floating in the universe

my friend didn't want to be a ROOM, so he is a MOOCCBIHMD which is the (maxed on on credit cards but i have master's degree) category ;)

[Doctor Q]

Originally posted by jefhatfield
"they call me dr love, i am the doctor of love, they call me dr love" gene simmons, kiss;) This web site (http://www.nothing-is-real.net/cali/celebscollege.html) claims that Gene Simmons majored in education and taught elementary school in New York. So maybe he's not a professor for your thread's purposes, but it's interesting to imagine finding him as your teacher on the first day of school!

[jefhatfield]

Originally posted by Doctor Q
This web site (http://www.nothing-is-real.net/cali/celebscollege.html) claims that Gene Simmons majored in education and taught elementary school in New York. So maybe he's not a professor for your thread's purposes, but it's interesting to imagine finding him as your teacher on the first day of school!

his mom thought forcing him to get a college degree would take him away from music and hanging out with all those long haired radicals toting electric guitars

even though he didn't pursue his degree and education for long after graduation, he managed to do quite well looking and acting very strange in public and got paid very well for his efforts

could you imagine??..."that's my son, the college graduate and the one with the demonic bat looking makeup spitting blood and breathing fire"

:p

[Doctor Q]

If Alice Cooper can turn out to be an avid golfer (http://espn.go.com/espy2003/s/coopergolf.html), I'll believe anything.

[Gus]

Having now gone throught all of the mess involved with a doctorate, I can tell you that I truly believe that 90% of it is whether or not you're willing to put up with enough crap to make it through the degree. Yes, there is a lot of work, and yes you learn a great deal about whatever field you are in, but most of it is being humble, doing what you're told and filling out the right paperwork. It's like hazing of a sort. Your committee memmbers had to do certain things to get their degree, and so you have to do them too. Don't get me wrong, there's a lot of intense study and learning on your way to the degree, but the end just seems like a whole lot of useless formality. I think there are much better ways to prove you are an expert in your field than to research other people's work and include it in some miniscule thing that very few people will ever know about in order to prove that you can research other people's work and prove someting that no one cares about.

Your mileage may vary though. Maybe it's just a music thing too. I find it very frustrating. I just think that a person should be rewarded for developing new ideas that haven't been explored rather than just regurgitating someone else's findings. If you can't tell, I didn't have a very good time, ;) My Dissertation was something new that no one had done before, and because of that, there was little to no previous research to find. I has to rewrite the whole paper with a new angle in order to be able to include quotes from other people in the field, even though their research had nothing to do with the original topic. Oh well. As long as it is done, I can go do my own thing now.

Regards,
Gus

[madforrit]

Currently applying to MD/PhD programs... yay! :D

[Doctor Q]

Sorry about your experience, Gus. A dissertation is normally supposed to be a demonstration of original research. If you invent something new out of thin air, that's original (and maybe really useful) but not necessarily research. I guess they held you to the research requirement more than you expected.

[jefhatfield]

Originally posted by Doctor Q
Sorry about your experience, Gus. A dissertation is normally supposed to be a demonstration of original research. If you invent something new out of thin air, that's original (and maybe really useful) but not necessarily research. I guess they held you to the research requirement more than you expected.

leonardo da vinci did not like academics because he felt that they just rehashed each other's works and called it original thinking and walked around like puffed up professors

he was much more interested in ideas way outside of the box that would help the human race...ideas that no academic in his time thought that conformed to academic research...da vinci was a practical man and did not care about whether his peers liked what he did or not

...hundreds of years later, we remember him even though he probably had some lonely and alienating experiences

[Doctor Q]

Originally posted by jefhatfield
leonardo da vinci did not like academics because he felt that they just rehashed each other's works and called it original thinking and walked around like puffed up professorsL. Frank Baum did not think much of academicians either. He made fun of them in his Oz books, especially with his character H. M. Wogglebug, T.E. (http://www.halcyon.com/piglet/ozites/oz0380.htm), a pompous "thoroughly educated" insect.

A person's mastery of a specialized field, value to society, and possession of an advanced degree do not equate to each other. But it's not clear to me that there would be a better way to run a Ph.D. program than to examine the candidates abilities to solve problems, pass exams, convince a committee of his/her skill, do research in the field, and write effectively.

Oddly, the goal of an advanced degree program is not to create advances in the field, but to credit those who will be able to do so. Knowing how to build on the work of others is the most likely, not only, way to create advances in a field. Thus, demonstration of research skills has value to society (at least statistically, not always individually), which the degree recognizes.

On another topic: My best friend's father is a college professor, and he told of a talented student who was so boastfully overconfident about passing his doctoral oral exams that the committee, this professor among them, gave him the toughest questions they could to cut him down to size. Sure enough, he thought he hadn't passed, but then they told him he did. I don't think this was fair or nice, but it's not the only time I've heard that a committee knew ahead of time whether a candidate should/would pass. At first, I thought this was a bad sign, that it was a torture session rather than a fair evaluation, but I think many times the exam becomes a formality because the professors already know the student's work and skill level, i.e., he/she has already proven himself/herself.