What exactly is a doctorate?

What exactly is a doctorate?

Print Friendly, PDF & Email

What getting a doctorate really means? Matt Might, professor of Computer Science at the University of Utah, offers these graphics to explain conceptually what specialization of knowledge means. The circle represents the totality of human knowledge. As students move through K-12 into university and graduate school, they become more and more specialized. At the end, they may push the boundaries of human knowledge a tiny bit forward. It seems that too many students don’t really start with a foundation in the totality of human knowledge, which is where Big History enters as an important corrective. We need more than specialization and division of labor. We need to actually understand how our various professions and expertise fit into a unified whole. Click here to see all of Matt Might’s graphics.