Do you really think that, in general, people that are working for minimum wage are as intelligent as those working in more 'professional' occupations Dunham? Do you think that people enjoy cleaning toilets, working in restaurants and manning shop floors? I think they would be rather doing something else.

This has nothing to do with the fact that I have a PhD. I have always been able to recognise people that have more intelligence than others - just like anyone else. I don't think you could necessarily tell from a crowd of people who works in science either, but I do think you could tell who had a higher IQ. I don't think a PhD equals intelligence, but I do think it makes it more likely. I also agree many people could do my work with a bit of training, like you said, it's just biology. It's not difficult to pick up - hence why I do it rather than maths or physics. But not everyone could do it - maybe you grew up in an area where everyone was intelligent; I grew up in a village where I knew one person older than me that went to university and most people worked in factories. I certainly wouldn't say most people that I know are highly intelligent. Far from it. Also, most of them didn't go to university, hence why I think you and I live in different worlds Dunham, and that's the reason for the difference in perspective.

Also, don't you think I know better than you who I would be bored with? It's not all about academic intelligence, but some intelligence is a prerequisite for me. And, yes someone needs to have the same social status as me. I don't care how the professors make their choices, that's got nothing to do with me.

Intelligence is education :)

No it's not, people can be intelligent but not educated and vice versa...

Do you really think that career is solely based on intelligence? There are tons of other factors that are influencing how sucessfull you are. How many people who pursued a PhD in humanities are now working in minimum wage jobs ? They are maybe not cleaning toilets, but they are definitely working way lower than their academic background would suggest. There's not a nice position waiting for everyone.

Of course it is more likely that you find intelligent people among Post Docs compared to factory workers but there are literally millions that are working between minimum wage jobs and academia. This is the majority of our societies. The people I grew up with, the people I went to university with. Nowadays, up to 50% of people enter university. Do you really want to tell me that it is hard to find an intelligent person among so many people? So I don't see why it should be harder for PhD students compared to any other graduate. I don't know you, so I can't tell how intelligent and educated you are. Maybe you are the kind of person that really needs an extraordinarily bright partner. However, with all my friends who started working after there undergrad studies, you can talk about topics ranging from Higgs Boson particle to refugees, Gaza conflict and GMOs. The rest is just personal preference. Some topics they enjoy more than others. Some people like to go to a museum, others hate it. Some people enjoy to discuss astronomy, other well educated people prefer to gossip. I am not saying that you should look for your future husband in the next factory or at the harbor but there are literally millions of people who went to university and are educated. I don't see why that should be hard. It might be hard, if you are biased and subconsciously think that this person is probably not equal to you on an intellectual level ;)

It has of course nothing to do with you in particular but it is one of the reasons why it is hard to find a partner as a highly educated woman and it is also one of the reasons why many women in sciences stay childless. There are studies that investigated this. A high amount of highly educated women don't have problems to manage family and job but rather state that it is hard to find a partner who matches their social expectations. If a key criterium is that he has at least the same status as you and you are professor or CEO of a company, then the search for a partner will be tough.

I just don't believe that there is such a huge intelligence gap between normal graduates and PhD students. If we agree on that, then there are literally millions of potential partners and finding a partner is for a PhD student basically as hard as it is for every graduate.

I'm well aware of the employment issues, however I think that there's still a difference in careers between university educated people and people without a degree.

I don't see much distinction between people with undergraduate degrees and people with PhDs. I never said I did. I'm talking about people that never went to university - which is the majority of people that I know. If I listed what you have, 'Higgs Boson particle to refugees, Gaza conflict and GMOs' - half of my friends wouldn't even know what those words meant. Even though I work with GMOs, I bet they don't know the abbreviation. Some of them don't even watch the news or read a paper and obviously don't have the ability to engage with conversations about these topics because of that. It's not even about education sometimes, it's just about being interested in what's going on in the world, or more interested in sports/soap operas/reality tv shows/getting pissed at the weekend. If I said to them, 'let's discuss the refugee crisis in Europe', I'm honestly not sure of what some of them would say. Maybe I will try it next time I'm home.

Women in the sciences and in many high flying careers are childless because work is inflexible. What I should do, therefore, is forget that I have a PhD, and be grateful for any old Tom, Dick or Harry that looks in my direction. Yes, let's get rid of highly educated women and get them back in the kitchen where they belong. Which, incidentally, is where I am going now because I'm hungry and I've finally finished writing my manuscript.

Well, I did not want to deny that people like this exist, but more that there is a huge amount of people out there who are familiar with these topics, so finding a partner shoud not be that hard.

Yeah, men....the root of all evil :D

Asking highly educated women showed that many of them are childless because they can't find the appropriate partner and NOT because work is inflexible. That is what the women asked in the questionnaire stated. It just takes two to get pregnant, if we limit it to the natural process. So flexible working hours and women won't receive a child together. Nobody says that you have to take the next guy hanging around but don't you think it is strange that it is perfectly okay for a man to have a wife that is lower educated on paper, while this seems to be undeniably a huge deal for women? Why is that, when we assume that men also want a partner that is capable of an intelligent conversation? I don't believe that it is because all men are scared of woman with a career, even though a lot of people seem to like to put it that way. My dad has a PhD in engineering and my mom didn't went to university. I highly doubt that this exists the other way around, even though it has been over 25 years since they married. There are certainly some things that have to change in the heads of women, which does NOT mean that women shouldn't aim for the same career as everyone else who wants to..

but probably that is also not true and somebody will tell me soon that women would love that constellation but that it is actually men who can't accept a woman that is making more money or making a better career ;)

even a toilet cleaner has the right to judge other people's intelligence without having the same educational status. If he is paying taxes and has a job, then how does that make his social status any different than ours? If he can earn his dignity through labour without depending on someone else to feed him, then he has earned his worth and demonstrated his intelligence. He does not need a PhD. Being intelligent does not imply freedom from paying taxes to the government or utmost freedom to live life as one would wish to. There are rules you have to follow in every aspect of life.

Phd in mainland Europe is announced as a job vacancy precisely for this reason. It is not treated as a previlege and helps to maintain equality in all spheres of their society. If you are toilet cleaner in Switzerland, it's not the same as being a toilet cleaner in England. Social status comes with responsibility to fulfill towards law and respecting the rule of the land and rules do not distinguish based on educational status and certainly not on relationship status. All they care is taxes.

The point Dunkham is trying to make is :work and education do not predict your ability to love and clearly, do not predict intelligence . Love is not bounded and cannot be defined. But, every vocation requires intelligence, Including the vocation of love. Every vocation has rules. Some rules are written down in books (PhD regulations in universities) and some are unwritten rules as in love. In that sense, PhD is a previlege as it has a a definite outcome and is predictable unlike relationships/love in which there is no gurantee of how long it will last unless that is what you can communicate to right at the outset and you can commit.

Dunkham is also right when he says the longer you delay in the vocation of love, the difficult it gets to compromise your standards and requirements you want the person to meet and very difficult to lower down your standards before committing. But, not everybody can choose when's and what's in love life.

It's not about finding someone uninteresting because they are 'boring' but more because it is about 'perfection' which just does not exist. Hence, the longer one waits, the more you want a perfect relationship which does not exist. One has to put an effort and it is hard work just like PhD is. There aren't any short cuts.

Never said they didn't.



Well there's different social classes in the UK; using the traditional ones, this is working class, middle class and upper class. Social class depends on many things such as state of mind, home ownership, type of employment, education and money.



Not quite sure intelligence is measured in that way.



Really? Doing a PhD is an immense privilege anywhere. In general, it means one has had a decent upbringing to enable them to achieve academically, they probably have a bit of financial stability, probably got some emotional support coming in from somewhere. It's definitely not about equality - if it was, everyone who wanted to do could do it - and that's not the case.



I love it how if someone mentions they've been single for a while, other people seem to think they have all the answers.

Hi guys, talk abt phD and relationship. I feel so depressed :( Me and my bf suffers from long distance for years. He lives in Netherland and i am in Korea. I am sick of crying everytime I have to leave him to come back and finish my PhD. I feel so depressed right now cuz All I want is settle down but it is so hard for both. He is doing phD and trying to get a job in a company and gets rejected by almost. His resume looks so good but yeah he lacks of skills which cant have if they dont give him a job. THen I am worried for myself. I want to be a professor or a lecturer, work in university but I have to get a job near his place. I want to have a postdoc but postdoc means moving around after 2 or 3 years. THen what next? but in this job market, high possibility to get another postdoc and over and over again.... then I have to move again, then we cant have a family :( My research field is so difficult to get job in company. I have applied for many internship programs but got rejected by all without any reasons. Probably lack of skills. I plan to register two lab courses to improve myself. but I am so sad, I dont know how you guys can work it out. I dont want to live alone anymore :(

Interesting discussion..... One thing that struck me is that we all judge other people - it's not just about people with a PhD being perfectionists or whatever - I grew up in a working class area much like TreeofLife describes and I was judged to be a 'snob' because I was quiet and academic, and was excluded from pretty much everything. Over the years I have become friends with people in all sorts of jobs, but they have been imaginative, intelligent people and not narrow-minded like the people I grew up with - and thinking about it, they have all moved away from where they started and had different life experiences and education over the years.

I met my partner when I was 38, which was the right time for me as I'd figured out who I was and what was important to me, and I was in the right place to have a good relationship. Everyone's different in this respect, so I don't agree that waiting too long makes you a perfectionist or makes it more difficult to meet someone.

It has been an immense privilege in the past. Nowadays, with a myriad of PhD students, it is not that much of a big deal as it was 50 years ago and it is also differently perceived by society. It is often just seen as an additional qualification like an MBA or sometimes just like a normal degree that consists of 3 instead of the usual 2 (bachelor + master) parts. People don't associate it with an exceptionally bright person anymore. This becomes especially clear if you compare the reactions of younger generations and elderly. While people like my grandma are still incredibly impressed by a PhD and see it as a huge accomplishment, most people in industry and almost all younger people with an academic degree value it far lower. "You are a chemist and have a PhD? Well, who hasn't?" Somehow like this, of course a bit dramatized ;) It is just not that special anymore and in many subjects like chemistry or physics you can pursue a PhD without having exceptional grades or outstanding merit. In many subjects like chemistry or biology it became a standard part of the education with far over 80% of graduates pursuing a PhD.

On the one hand, if you compare it to working class people that never saw a university from inside, it is of course still a privilege. On the other hand there is such a huge amount of people who have the ability to pursue a PhD after their master (if they would want to) that I am it is not more of a privilege than doing a masters or go to university at all. As I said, exceptionally good performance with distinction is only needed in a few competitive fields. Everyone else maybe needs to make a compromise in terms of project preferences and institution but could get a PhD in general. I am of course just talking about the chance to start one. If you are able to finish it successfully is a whole other story :)

Thank you chickpea.

Yes, if you surround yourself with academics obviously it seems like no big deal to have a PhD as everyone has one, but that's what happens when one occupies that part of society. It becomes normalised. Reality is different. Less than 1% of the US population has a PhD and it's probably a similar figure elsewhere.

PhD candidature = reading more books

:)

What do you mean with surround yourself by academics? That sounds a bit as if I would talk about a circle of chosen scholars in my ivory tower....You are writing as if the majority of our countries are uneducated workers. I don't know the british school system but in Germany over 50% of the same age group are getting the permission to study at a university and if you include the people who are allowed to study at universities of applied sciences, this percentage even increases. That is not a minority of super educated people but a majority of our society I am talking about. That is not some extraordinary education that is limited to a few. If this is something normal for over 60% of our society how can it be so privileged?? If you always compare it to the least educated people in our society it might be, but not for the average of people in their mid 20s to mid 30s. For them it is not a privilege but one valid option out of many that you consider in terms of career goals. There is even a significant amount of people in humanities who mainly pursue a PhD because of a lack of job opportunities in industry, as companies are not really begging for social scientists or history graduates. They simply hope that the title will enhance job opportunities. I could link some articles but they would be in German ;)

In the end, education in general is of course a privilege, but not the PhD in particular. You don't need to belong to the 1% with a PhD to see it that way. That is not really an indicator of a privilege.