This is a really good article about what makes any kind of graduate-level education quite unlike anything prior to it. There’s a level of rigor to it that can’t be understood unless one has been through it, but reading a lot of Google isn’t remotely close to the same.
If you’ve never learned how to do a literature review, for example, you really have no idea how to read, understand, compare, and critique a large body of research to know the good from the bad.
If you’ve never studied pharmacology and pharmacokinetics, you really can’t begin to grasp the complexity of medications, interactions, why some meds work for some people but not others or in different ways.
If you’ve never had to do a differential diagnosis to evaluate the relative similarities and differences of conditions that appear similar but are quite different in causation, and treatment, you have no clue about the range of things that can go wrong with the human body or how hard it is to figure them out.
If you’ve never had to decide which statistical analysis is correct for the research you’re doing, and why the others are wrong or less useful, you can’t begin to grasp why some studies might be stronger or weaker than others, simply based on how they were analyzed.
If you’ve never learned to identify possible confounding factors that must be controlled for or at least identified, it’s hard to understand why a result might not be due to the reason you think. And if you don’t have at least a minimal grasp of how many subjects need to be in a study to identify something with any confidence that only occurs once in 4,500 people, how do you know if the study has enough people to eliminate random chance?
Yeah, graduate level education is really damn hard.
Originally shared by Charles Younger
Many people seem to have some rather strange preconceptions about how higher education in science works. I often encounter people who insist that graduate school “indoctrinates” students, robs them of creativity, and “brainwashes” them to “blindly accept scientific dogma.” Further, others are under the delusion that training in the sciences just consists of lectures and reading, and they think that just spending some time on Google is sufficient to learn everything that they would get from actually earning an advanced degree. It probably shouldn’t be surprising that the people making these claims have never received any formal training in science and are, in fact, projecting their own biases onto a system that they know nothing about. Having said that, it’s not particularly surprising that so many people are so hopelessly wrong about how graduate school works, because it is a very unique system that is unlike most other forms of education. Therefore, I thought it would be a good idea to explain what advanced training in the sciences is actually like, and in so doing, I want to dispel common myths about “indoctrinations” as well as the notion that reading articles on Google is equivalent to receiving an advanced degree.