When I’m honest with myself, I’ll admit that there are two main reasons I got a PhD.

 The first was

the realization while earning my undergraduate degree that one doesn’t truly become a scientist
with only 4 years of college.  If I wanted to become an academician and researcher, I needed a PhD.  

The second reason was that I wanted to prove I was smart.  I wanted to prove it to myself, and I
wanted to prove it to others.  Once I’d completed a PhD, I’d forever have those three letters behind
my name that proved to everyone for all eternity that I was smart. During my last year of graduate
school, I decided that instead of pursuing the traditional career of a research professor, I’d launch
my career in industry.  My first job involved developing skin applications. I began to move out of the
lab into leadership roles that brought me more in contact with the business elements of the
company, I began to realize that not everyone in the real world thought I was smart just because I
had a PhD.  I realized that there were many stereotypes associated with a PhD, and I still had to
show people that I was smart.  Sure, they believed I could solve complicated scientific problems, and
that I could work for years to understand some complex aspect of how the universe works that most
people will never understand.  But to them, that wasn’t as important as understanding how business
works – how people create things of value for other people and make a living doing it.  

What is the PhD stereotype? Here are four main elements that I’ve discerned during my past decade
in industry:
1. They love to work on a problem just because it’s interesting.  You will find people in
management at many companies who think PhDs are life-long academic types who just want
to study a problem for the rest of their lives and never get to something they can ship as a
product.
2. They need to completely understand a problem before they can move on. Graduate school
trains us to do this, but I think the scientists’ innate curiosity makes it easy.  When we were
working on our dissertation projects, we knew damned well that we’d better have
investigated every aspect of our chosen problem, because our committee was going to grill
us when we defended.  In industry, projects have timelines that have to be met, and
complete understanding is usually a luxury.
3. They like to be the smartest person in the room. I suspect most of us who went to graduate
school regard our intelligence as one of our most valuable assets. Academia trains us to be
the experts – to pass the test, to complete the degree, to get tenure, or to win the Nobel
Prize, typically considered the pinnacle of an academic career.  Industry values expert teams
rather than experts. It’s much faster to find someone else who already knows it than to learn
it yourself.
4. They like to find fault with others’ ideas. To be fair, this is an important aspect of the
scientific method.  A hypothesis is proposed to explain an observed phenomena, and then
everyone tests the hell out of it to see if they can break it.  If no-one can find fault, the
theory survives.  This tends to train us scientists to value finding fault and pointing out why
something won’t work. People in industry are more focused on finding a solution than a
 fault.  Sure, testing for faults is important, but the primary focus is on finding a solution that
gets around the difficulties.

I know, I know, not all PhDs are like this. But all stereotypes are based in truth.  There is a hesitancy
to hire PhDs among many people in industry, specifically because they are aware of the stereotype.
Many managers have had bad experiences with PhDs who had technical skills the company needed,
but whose behaviour was too close to the stereotype to be effective. Don’t be that PhD.This was a
bit of a wake-up call for me, and caused me to re-evaluate some of my career choices.  In the end I
decided that both the PhD and the career in industry were great choices, but realized that I had a lot
to learn about how companies worked.  Academia had trained me in some very valuable technical
skills, but it had taught me very little about how things get done in the real world. To many people in
the private sector, I was just a stereotypical PhD.