Love Never Fails
1 Cor. 13:8
Love never fails....
If a young lad or lady were to inquire of me about whether he or she should pursue Ph.D. studies, I would try and ascertain their intellect, their will, and their heart.
To earn a Ph.D. obviously does take a modicum of smarts. It is not all that it takes but it is one solid log to throw on the fire.
The second attribute I would try to assess is how driven the person is; it takes a lot of discipline to earn a Ph.D. I sat in the chair of my study nearly every Saturday for eight long years for 8-10 hours doing school work associated with my doctoral studies. That was the least I would do, some weeks it was often a lot more, while working full-time for the better part of a decade.
When my students whine at school that a class is hard and takes a lot of work, that does not elicit much maternal compassion from me. My equation is hard=good. There is no need to make things harder than they need to be but our proclivity to dodge difficulties just makes us only good at shirking responsibilities. India, China, and other countries, are eating our intellectual lunch...not because they are intrinsically smarter than we are, but they are much hungrier.
The third trait, and most importantly, is that do they love the subject? The origin of the word 'Philosophy" is "lover of wisdom" (that is the "Ph." in Ph.D.). The subject, ontologically, should be in the end, God and man. If the studies do not lead to a betterment of God's world in some manner, then I would steer the person away from pursuing the doctorate. We have enough educated and malevolent people already. Knowledge divorced from love is a sword in a hand of a madman (as someone once said). Or, some studies are so esoteric and useless, the paper the doctorate is printed on would be better used to wrap fish.
Find a high impact topic that will do the most good. Then, prepare to work.
Love never fails....
If a young lad or lady were to inquire of me about whether he or she should pursue Ph.D. studies, I would try and ascertain their intellect, their will, and their heart.
To earn a Ph.D. obviously does take a modicum of smarts. It is not all that it takes but it is one solid log to throw on the fire.
The second attribute I would try to assess is how driven the person is; it takes a lot of discipline to earn a Ph.D. I sat in the chair of my study nearly every Saturday for eight long years for 8-10 hours doing school work associated with my doctoral studies. That was the least I would do, some weeks it was often a lot more, while working full-time for the better part of a decade.
When my students whine at school that a class is hard and takes a lot of work, that does not elicit much maternal compassion from me. My equation is hard=good. There is no need to make things harder than they need to be but our proclivity to dodge difficulties just makes us only good at shirking responsibilities. India, China, and other countries, are eating our intellectual lunch...not because they are intrinsically smarter than we are, but they are much hungrier.
The third trait, and most importantly, is that do they love the subject? The origin of the word 'Philosophy" is "lover of wisdom" (that is the "Ph." in Ph.D.). The subject, ontologically, should be in the end, God and man. If the studies do not lead to a betterment of God's world in some manner, then I would steer the person away from pursuing the doctorate. We have enough educated and malevolent people already. Knowledge divorced from love is a sword in a hand of a madman (as someone once said). Or, some studies are so esoteric and useless, the paper the doctorate is printed on would be better used to wrap fish.
Find a high impact topic that will do the most good. Then, prepare to work.
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