<p>buummmmppppp?</p>
<p>Collecting a bunch of master’s degrees doesn’t make you an academic stud. If anything most of the time it shows that you really don’t know what you want to do. For many or most master’s degrees all you have to do is to take classes.</p>
<p>The guy in the OP started out in electrical engineering, floundered around in graduate schools for seven years and then got a doctorate in media studies. James Franco is getting into all of these programs because he is a celebrity and thus brings publicity to the graduate programs. </p>
<p>The NASA guy seems legit, it seems like he is just enrolling in master’s programs while working in order to learn new things so that when he manages engineers in different areas, he knows a little bit about what they do.</p>
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<p>The guy that you are referring to, Randal Pinkett, earned one master’s degree at Oxford through a Rhodes Scholarship, then earned 2 master’s degree (and MS in EECS and an MBA) through the special dual-degree, 2-year Leaders for Global Operations (formerly the Leaders for Manufacturing) program at MIT. He then chose to stay at MIT for I believe another 3 years to finish a PhD at MIT, hence spending a total of 5 years at MIT - which is the median time to finish one PhD - while finishing his PhD and 2 master’s degrees. {Heck, plenty of PhD students have yet to even earn an interim master’s by the 5-year mark). While I can’t speak for Oxford, I can tell you that the LGO program requires that every student write a joint thesis that is dually acceptable to both the Sloan School and the School of Engineering, and a PhD obviously requires writing yet another thesis. </p>
<p>Now, if you insist that Randal Pinkett is still not really an academic stud despite his myriad academic accomplishments and doesn’t really know what he wants to do, that is your prerogative. All I would then say is that plenty of other people surely wish they could be as ‘confused’ as he is.</p>
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<p>Well, reading his Wikipedia page, he seems to be doing pretty well for himself now to say the least, but I think that it is pretty clear that he didn’t really know what he wanted to do when he was at school. He earned both a master’s degree in EECS and computer science (why would you do that unless you had no idea what you wanted to do?) and went into a media studies doctorate program after spending four years in graduate school studying electrical engineering and computer science.</p>
<p>Now, a guy like [Terence</a> Tao - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia](<a href=“http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terence_Tao]Terence”>Terence Tao - Wikipedia) is an academic stud.</p>
<p>Actually, reading more about the MIT programs, it looks like you could make the case that he just decided to do business-y things after returning from his Rhodes scholarship. Eh. In my mind, collecting a bunch of business-y graduate degrees isn’t even in the same league as being impressive academically as winning a Fields Medal and becoming full faculty by your mid-twenties. Notice that he only has three degrees.</p>
<p>We used Tao’s book on Analysis in my math analysis class.</p>
<p>Quite a few Jesuit priests (like Suarez, above) spend a lot of time at really good colleges racking up multiple graduate degrees.</p>
<p>bump ten characters</p>
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<p>Actually, it seems to be more accurate to say that Pinkett realized that he wanted to become a social entrepreneurship/community-development/political consultant and activist, and, whether we like it or not, those professions place heavy weight upon credentials (especially, truth be told, if you’re not white). Hence, Pinkett probably realized quickly in the game that he needed to establish unimpeachable academic bonafides. </p>
<p>Pinkett’s educational career path after the undergrad degree therefore is quite clear, as each degree he earned provided an easy pathway towards another elite educational program. For example, his undergraduate EECS success (coupled with his athletic prowess) earned him a Rhodes Scholarship with an opportunity to pursue an MSCS from Oxford. But the Rhodes Scholarship doesn’t generally allow you to pursue a degree program far removed from your undergraduate studies, so his choice was to complete that MSCS or receive no degree at all. </p>
<p>After that, he probably realized that his stellar engineering credentials provided him with relatively easy entree into the MIT LFM/LGO program with which he could, in conjunction with a MS in EECS from MIT, also earn an MBA from an elite business school through relatively relaxed admissions criteria. LGO applicants nominate as their ‘primary’ admissions committee either the MIT School of Engineering or the Sloan School, with the other school then merely serving as a perfunctory checkoff. Pinkett applied through the School of Engineering. Granted, his credentials were likely to have been impressive enough to have won admission through the Sloan School, but at the time, his engineering credentials were far better established than his business credentials, so why take unnecessary chances? Once in the LGO program, he probably met faculty at the MIT Media Lab and learned how to tailor a strong admissions packet for the Media Lab’s PhD program where he completed a dissertation on technology-mediated community development - something that he clearly cares about. {Yes, I realize that that the Media Lab’s ‘Media Arts & Sciences’ PhD program is a misnomer, but who cares what your PhD program is called, what should matter is whether you are allowed to do the research that you like.} </p>
<p>Hence, Pinkett’s academic career seems to be a perfectly understandable progression of initial opportunities which lead to other opportunities which then leads to still other opportunities. The only possibly questionable step he took was his initial one in earned a BS in EECS. One could argue that since he doesn’t currently really seem to be interested in EECS, why did he choose to major in it as an undergraduate? But hey, come on, let’s not excoriate the man for behaving like most people. Let’s face it - most undergraduates do not really know what they want to do. Furthermore, most undergraduates complete majors that they won’t directly use in their careers anyway. How many history majors actually become historians? How many poli-sci majors actually become politically scientists? How many sociology majors actually become sociologists? Many undergrads choose engineering not for any intrinsic interest in the subject matter but just because they want a marketable degree that provides a high starting salary and established career path.</p>
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<p>But this thread is not talking about who is most academically impressive. We’re just talking about who has 5+ degrees. </p>
<p>If you really want to talk about impressiveness, then instead of Terence Tao, we could instead talk about Lawrence Bragg. As impressive as it may be to be promoted to Full Professor by your mid-20’s as Tao was, what is surely even more impressive is actually winning the Nobel Prize by your mid-20’s. No, I’m not talking about completing the work by your mid-20’s that would eventually merit a Nobel Prize, I’m talking about actually winning the Nobel Prize, as Bragg did. Furthermore, Bragg had *only a single degree - his bachelor’s<a href=“although%20to%20be%20fair,%20the%20University%20of%20Cambridge,%20which%20is%20where%20Bragg%20was,%20did%20not%20offer%20established%20PhD%20programs%20at%20the%20time”>/i</a>.</p>
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<p>That was ~100 years ago. Things are different nowadays. It was easier to do great work as a young physicist back then because the field was less mature. In one of my classes, I learned a little bit about x-ray diffraction, and the professor commented that Bragg’s original explanation wasn’t that great. It was just a phenomenological model for what happened in his experiments. It wasn’t a compelling explanation other than it explained the data. </p>
<p>Tao also won the Fields Medal, which is equivalent to the Nobel for math and may be even a little more impressive, since it is awarded only once every two years. Although it is more usual for mathematicians to earn a Fields medal when they are young than for physicists to win a Nobel when they are young.</p>
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<p>His path actually makes a lot of sense. He got his degree in physics from Hopkins. Then he realized that he wanted aerospace, so he got a masters and then a phD in aerospace. Not sure why he got the EE degree from USC, but after that he worked at the JHU APL and got a masters in applied physics. The JHUAPL has an excellent graduate program offered on the campus, so it makes sense that he did it. Than he got an MBA, which fits with rise into management. </p>
<p>His newest degrees in civil engineering and his planned degree in CS were probably based on curiosity more than anything else. Or maybe it was related to what he was doing at the APL Space Department.</p>
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<p>You have this backwards. In fact, the Rhodes Trust encourages the exploration of other academic fields. For instance, I know of one Rhodes Scholar who was an undergrad majoring in immunology, and did a DPhil in anthropology, with the Rhodes trust paying for all four years of grad study.</p>
<p>There’s a guy named Michael Nicholson who has something like 27 degrees total, mostly from regional public universities. </p>
<p>There’s another guy named Benjamin Bolger who has an associates, an undergrad from Michigan, 10 master’s degrees (Oxford, Cambridge, Stanford, Columbia, Harvard, Brown, Dartmouth, Brandeis, and Skidmore), and a doctorate from Harvard, so that’s 13 total.</p>
<p>Ben Bolger is pretty impressive.</p>
<p>I did not attend any prestigeous schools but I do have four academic degrees from accredited universites in the US.</p>
<ol>
<li>University of Oregon BA, Japanese Language</li>
<li>University of Maryland College Park, BS, Astronomy and Astrophysics</li>
<li>University of Oregon, MBA, Quantitative Methods</li>
<li>MCP Hahnemann School of Medicine (now Drexel University school of Medicine), MD</li>
</ol>
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<p>Here they are:</p>
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<p>He must have designed his own PhD program!</p>
<p>I really hope Ben Bolger does something with all of his knowledge.</p>
<p>bumppppppp</p>
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<p>Maybe that’s why he looked stoned on the Academy Awards ceremony.</p>
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<p>Come on. I hope that you didn’t mean to insult the work of physicists from a century ago, but that is what you in fact did. By that same logic, the work of Max Planck and even Albert Einstein was relatively unimpressive because they performed their work at a time when physics was supposedly easier. </p>
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<p>Yet the inescapable fact remains that not only did Bragg win the Nobel Prize in Physics - a feat that only a few hundred people in world history can ever lay claim - but more impressively, was able to lay claim to a eponymous physical law (Bragg’s Law) that is taught in many high school physics classes. Most of us - including almost surely your professor - can only dream of ever making such a profound discovery and hence becoming immortalized. </p>
<p>Besides, think of it this way. If Bragg’s discovery was really so basic, then why didn’t other scientists make the discovery? </p>
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<p>Actually, mathematicians earning Fields Medals when they are young are not only ‘usual’, but actually by design and speaks to the core reason why the Fields Medal is not as impressive as the Nobel. The Fields Medal is specifically reserved only to mathematicians who are 40 years old or less. Imagine how much easier it would be to win a Nobel Prize if you were not competing against anybody over the age of 40, even if the Nobel was awarded only every 4 years (not every 2 years as you stated the Fields Medal was). </p>
<p>The far closer analogue to the Nobel would be the Abel Prize of mathematics, as that prize is awarded not only annually, but crucially, regardless of age. But the overlap between Abel Prize and Fields Medal winners is relatively small. </p>
<p>But, like I said, this thread was never supposed to have diverged into the topic of who is the most intellectually impressive person, but rather who simply has 5 or more degrees. Einstein, after all, had only perhaps 2 degrees (the equivalent of an undergraduate degree and a PhD), yet nobody disputes his intellectual capabilities.</p>