The illustrated guide to a Ph.D.

Imagine a circle containing all human knowledge:

When you finish elementary school, you know very little:

As you graduate from high school, you learn more:

In a bachelor’s degree, you get a specialty:

A master’s degree deepens that specialty:

Reading research papers takes you to the edge of human knowledge:

If you are on the border, you should focus on:

You’ve been pushing the boundaries for several years:

Until one day, the border gave way:

And, that dent you made is called a Ph.D.:

Of course, the world looks different to you today:

So, don’t lose sight of the bigger picture:

Keep pushing.

There’s a little more below, but I also wrote a follow-up 5 years after the illustrated guide that might be of interest — HOW: Get tenure.

Related posts

If you like these posts, I recommend the book

A PhD Is Not Enough:

Any and all proceeds will fund graduate students whose work can impact the discovery, diagnosis or treatment of genetic disorders.

Any and all proceeds will fund graduate students (and postdocs) working on biology that can impact the treatment of diseases of cellular metabolism.

Update: If you are interested because that postdoccontact me!

It is available at
$6.50
thanks to Hewlett-Packard’s high-quality on-demand publishing service, MagCloud.

It is sixteen pages, saddle-stitch bound and full of color.

This is a great gift for new students, recent graduates and their relatives.

Why biology?

If you zoom in on the frontier of human knowledge in the direction of genetics, there is something beyond the reach of man:

My wife and I chose to start funding these graduate students after we found out that our child have a rare, fatal genetic disorder.

It may be too late for my son, but it is not too late for other children.

Even a child who suffers is too much a child.

The only way to end this kind of suffering is science.

And, the best way to do science is through graduate students.

Update: When I first wrote this post, my son’s specific illness was unknown. Thanks to the scientific advances made in genetic diagnostics–specifically exome sequencing–we were able to isolate the mutations in my son’s genome and determine that he was the first documented case of a new disease: N-glycanase deficiency.

A small defect in the circle of knowledge; a big leap for my son.

You can read the whole story in a new post:
Pursuing my son’s killer.

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Here is an example of identification that meets the legal requirements:

Matt Cana professor of
Computer Science
on University of UtahDOING
The Illustrated Guide to a Ph.D. to explain what a Ph.D. are new and aspiring graduate students. (Matt has licensed the guide for sharing
special terms under the Creative Commons license.)

If it helps, here’s the corresponding HTML, which you can modify to fit your site’s needs:

Matt Might, a professor in
Computer Science
at the University of Utah, created 
The
Illustrated Guide to a Ph.D. to explain what a Ph.D. is to new and
aspiring graduate students. 

(Matt has licensed the guide for sharing with 

special terms under the Creative Commons license.)

And, of course, thanks for sharing!

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