To go over everything

After having been forgotten by the world for a number of years in the late 2000s, Internet quizzes have made a comeback, and are more or less constantly being circulated around Facebook. The general pattern is this: For about a week at a time, a dozen or more of your Facebook friends will suddenly post a stream of mostly identical quiz results, announcing that they're INFJ, or that they've been sorted into Hufflepuff, or that "y'all" is their most-used word on Facebook, or that they side 95% with Bernie and 98% with Hillary. Sometimes the results are the product of an actual, more or less rigorous quiz or survey; sometimes they're the product of an algorithm that spits out factoids about your friends or Facebook profile in exchange for your willingness to give an anonymous company access to your personal data.

A few months ago, the Quiz du Jour was something called "Can We Guess Your Level of Education?" Depending on the version you took, this quiz asked a series of 15-25 questions that test basic factual knowledge (What is H2O? Where is the Sahara Desert? Which Shakespeare play features Ophelia? What travels faster, light waves or sound waves? Who wrote Mein Kampf?). Do poorly and the quiz guesses you're a high school dropout. Do well and the quiz guesses you have a PhD.

It's a nakedly asinine quiz, easy enough that anyone with halfway decent retention from high school is guaranteed a result of "Master's degree" or higher. The transparent flattery of the exercise is, I assume, the point -- all of my Facebook friends who posted their results seemed charmed (in a fittingly tongue-and-cheek way) to have fooled a dumb quiz into thinking they have a PhD. But who cares? What's the harm of a fun diversion that comes with a silly ego boost? In any case, the quiz legitimately proves you're capable of dredging up trivia from your 10th grade geography class.

As someone pursuing a PhD, I appreciated the silliness, but I couldn't help stewing a bit over the irony of the quiz format. The quiz rewards people for correctly answering a variety of multiple-choice recognition problems covering a wide number of subjects, from math to history to literature. This is almost the literal antithesis to what it means to have a PhD, a process that requires you to spend several years pretending that nothing in the universe exists outside of your very specialized field of study. Now that I'm getting my doctorate in English literature, it really doesn't matter in the slightest if I no longer remember that Fe is the symbol for iron on the periodic table, but it's very important that I know the difference between the Vorticists and Bloomsbury modernists. Someone with a PhD in chemistry can still become a Nobel Laureate in their field even if an errant stroke were to make them forget they ever read a word of Shakespeare. If we want to be real about it, a proper "Can We Guess if You Have a PhD?" quiz would ask questions like, "Have you ever gotten into an intense and involved argument about citation style?" and "How many days are you willing to go without seeing or talking to anyone?"

I've mentioned this before, but as I've gotten older, my internal sense of what it means to be intelligent has both shifted and broadened, as has my understanding of what it means to be "educated" and what accredited degree programs actually signify. A PhD, like any other type of certification, is a means to a certain array of ends, one that proves that you're persistent and organized enough to investigate a single subject to exhaustive lengths. It's not likely you'll get a PhD without being intelligent, but a grand majority of intelligent people don't have PhDs, because most people don't need advanced degrees to achieve their goals. 

I've been in my PhD program for about five years now, and off and on throughout those five years I've asked myself why I'm doing it. There are a hundred ways of answering that question that would be more or less truthful, but I've only ever been able to come up with one consistent, honest, and satisfying answer: I'm getting a PhD so that I'll have a PhD. I want to prove that I can do it. That's my goal, and I need a PhD to reach it, so here I am.