My New Mind Map
by Asmaa Mohamed Ali
1. What the PhD shows is not so much that you know a lot of stuff that you can repeat. It shows that you know how to add to humanity’s store of knowledge. It shows that you can follow the standards of your academic field and produce something that nobody thought of before. It shows that you know how new knowledge is arrived at. And hopefully, you’ll be able to keep on doing that for the rest of your career, adding to the sum of our knowledge, and knowing how to add to it in a valid way. That’s why a PhD is required, at least for tenure-track employment, at most universities in most departments. Being a professor means not just that you repeat memorized facts to anyone who doesn’t run away fast enough. You’re expected to do research, or other scholarship, that advances the state of knowledge in your field—just as our medieval sculptor was expected to produce new sculptures and statues, not just copies of older ones. (Note: In some fields, like creative writing and studio art, the Master of Fine Arts or MFA degree is usually the highest degree a professor has—this is normal. The idea is still the same: to get the MFA, you have to write and publish creative writings, create a sizable portfolio of art and show it in galleries, etc. At some universities, people may be hired without PhDs because there may be other considerations: at the Baptist college in my town, at least as of a few years ago, you had to be a Baptist of a particular sect in order to be hired as a professor, and the science department mostly consisted of people who hadn’t finished their PhD—but who were staunch Baptists of the correct variety. And at my university, we do have people on the faculty who have Master’s degrees but not the PhD—however, they teach lower-division courses, they’re not expected to do research, they don’t get paid as much, and while some have pretty stable positions, others might teach for a couple of years and then go on to do something else.)
2. New Topic
3. New Topic
3.1. Principles
3.1.1. New Topic