As I continue to cross off yet more days behind me in the great calendar of life, I am increasingly aware of just how truly strange and perhaps artificial my station in life is. Occasionally I detach my consciousness from the abstractions of my work and intellectual life and join those who live in the “eternal now” of daily life. It is the world of real estate, car repair, and weeds.
Having an advanced degree in anything marks a person as a kind of freak. Not automatically in a pathological sense, though that is possible. A freak in that to have gotten from freshman year through PhD is unusual in the statistical sense. Not a large fraction of the population even try to do it. To have done this is to be relegated to the far end of the bell curve by virtue of low frequency.
Many people seem to be overly impressed by someone with a PhD. To be sure, there are many PhD’s who are extraordinarily bright people. But it takes more than just smarts for most of us. It requires focus, tenacity, and endurance. It takes a willingness to absorb abuse as well. Getting through grad school has a large political component and a wise player learns how to negotiate with difficult people- advisors, post docs, and other faculty.
Speaking only for myself, I have become quite aware that my path on this adventure will not be followed by any family members. My love affair with the science of chemistry is my lone passion and the wonders and elegance of its form cannot be fully shared with loved ones. That is a shame.
This lurking sensation of strangeness is especially noticeable at parties. Say you spent the week trying to isolate a new product; noodled through numerous GCMS fragmentation patterns; or attempted to find meaning in the oddities of phosphorus NMR. Suddenly friday night you find yourself at a party nursing a Fat Tire in a crowd where most of the people are in construction or real estate. All of the conversations are about, well, construction or real estate. You find a friendly group and try to fit into the conversation.
But here is the hard part. You’re not running a construction site and you don’t deal with construction workers. The price of copper pipe or the vagaries of the uniform building code have no impact in your life. You’re just a freakish white collar worker who uses vocabulary that means almost nothing to nearly everyone on earth. You worry about selectivity, isomerization, and line broadening. It really is a bit odd.
So, after you’ve made a few wry comments and patiently listened to the conversation, someone asks the question “What do you do?”. This is where everything can fall apart. You want to be accurate, but concise. You can’t use obtuse language. If you are a synthetikker, you don’t want to say merely “I’m a chemist” because it is certain that the questioner will imagine that you wear a lab coat while you pour test tubes of “toxins” into the river to mutate the poor fishes. And, for the love of god, you can’t let them think you’re an … analyst. Good gravy, what would the neighbors think?
No, you say something to the effect that you make some product or other and it is used for ____. This is that fork in the road that someone will take to get another beer or suddenly recognize some lost associate across the room. Others will notice that something is wrong with their watch and pull out the cell phone to get the time, feigning discovery of a voicemail that they have to get. There many ways to eject from a conversation gone bad. I have seen many of them and invented a few myself.
What I hate to see is the person who wears their PhD degree on their sleeve. The blatant insertion of this status into the mix is like a turd in a swimming pool. Once it’s spotted, nobody wants to jump in. For myself, I only use the title of “Dr.” in official company correspondance where I have to establish some credibility to weigh in on a certain range of matters. Otherwise, I will admit that I have this degree only if people ask. The effect of title dropping on certain groups of people is that they shut down discussion when you walk into the room. This is bad if the goal is to brainstorm or do a debriefing and the result is that people clam up.
It’s best to let the strength of your arguments advance your cause. I don’t have a PhD in life- just a thin slice of chemistry. And that slice seems to get narrower all the time.
Lamentations on Chemistry 
“Ah, so your not a ‘REAL’ doctor…”
My favorite response from people in those situations. That and the faint head-nod from people trying to figure out which of the above mentioned escapes to use. Maybe this is why a lot of people with advanced degrees have some sort of personality disorder…
You hit this dead on. Dead on. Throw in a little bit of introversion and it gets to be a real challenge to do the cocktail party circuit.
Yeah, I’ve heard the “real doctor” thing too. On the odd occasion when I get to talk to a physician socially and it comes up that I used to teach organic chemistry, they invariably shake their heads and fade into the distant past when they studied orgo. For a glimmering moment of egalitarianism, we exchange memories and then it is gone.
Modesty is a chemist’s virtue. One never knows when a neighbor blasting Rap 24/7 might expire from natural causes.
Etiquette demands PhD defer to MD in biomedical and pharma. The easiest route is not to press the title, certainly not in the face of greater assholiness. Specialist or layman, they are always smaller if you sneak up from behind.
How ’bout that antioxidant package in Romex cable!
Antioxidant in Romex insulation? Where? How??
(Not that I have a PhD, but…)
I’ve noticed that about one in three or four people met randomly at bars will suddenly become much more friendly if you say you are working on solar cells. It’s nice. (At least they figure you are a tree-hugger and not out to mutate fishies. I wouldn’t want to get on the militant vegans’ bad side.)
I absolutely dread the “What do you do” question. It means you have to try and figure out how much chemical knowledge is there and adjust what you say accordingly, without losing the interest of the other (about 5 sec.) I always try the “it is fundamental research” approach first. That gives you time to think about what you will answer to the “What can I do with it” question. Usually I end up saying “for catalysis” “ah like in cars” is the answer and I can quietly slip away to get myself another drink. Unless of course someone is really interested, then they are my best buddy for the evening 😉
Being connected to the catalyst business, I ask the questioner if they have noticed that trash bags are getting thinner. When they answer in the affirmative, I tell them that we helped with that “improvement”. They’ll nod in recognition, but you can tell that they are wondering just how much of an improvement thinner trash bags really is.
Which is the ~real~ doctor? A PhD has a 3+ year research thesis behind him/her, and a contribution to academia.
An MD usually has (in Commonwealth) countries an MBChB, which is actually a dual bachelors in medicine and surgery. the “doctor” is merely an honorific.
I’ll be damned if I let my PhD thesis and MA thesis, a total of some 170,000 words of prose, plus four published articles, take a backseat to some body mechanic whose sole academic ability is memorising symptoms.
I hear ya. But as long as our society continues to heap praise at the shrine to the healing profession, we’ll just have to endure this.