Meteorology student submits Masters thesis, gets PhD | Hacker News Reader

Meteorology student submits Masters thesis, gets PhD

news24.com

47 pointsherodoturtle15 comments

To people rushing to criticize the decision: a) He has already published major papers. It is stated in the article in the end. The article probably should make that a bit clearer. You can also google him. b) He received acknowledgement and praise for his thesis contribution. The article states about praise from an examiner from the university of Oxford. Not my field so I can not evaluate his work, but I would be surprised from what I see if it was trivial contribution.

A PhD means you know and can push the frontier and do rigorous research. Are people worried the individual skipped a few extra course credits or he skipped quals? I doubt the faculty felt he did not deserved it. And this is clearly not a one off.

P.S. I think this is his scholar profile. https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=baVVmaoAAAAJ&hl=el...

Have a lot of friends that adid their PhDs just for credentialism. Yes, they put a lot of effort and time, but the knowledge they created was frankly not that important. I am favor of valuing results, relevance, not effort.

I don't understand how that is possible, and I quite frankly end up losing respect for the university system in the countries where I read about stuff like that. To get a phd you have to be accepted into a doctorate program, which means your master thesis should be delivered with good grades. To get your phd you should do your work requirements (publishing 3 papers and taking some subjects at phd level - where I am from). His master thesis might be wonderfull, but it is one body of work, not a position in a doctorate program, not published papers and not phd subjects. Is the student to skip the whole phd experience now and aim straight for tenure? He will miss out on a lot.

Not taking a position one way or the other here, but I'll point out that he has published three papers as primary author and coauthored five others.

And from the article: "Barnes said he already had published papers in renowned journals by the time he submitted his dissertation - one of the reasons why he earned a PhD."

In that case it is truely astonishing, however I cant see why he wouldn't benefit from working as a phd under the best professors in his field, continuing his work.

Depending on his circumstance why would he stop working with professors or as a PhD in the research community? It feels like others on this comment thread are making an assumption he enrolled as an ordinary student and 'skipped' to PhD, and now is about to jettison from academia entirely. The article sounds like he has been working in his scientific field for some time and is just as likely that the master's program was sponsored by his work at that site in his field. If you had someone who was working FT and stopping/starting through a master's program and at the end was more a junior research peer with clear expertise than just someone who 'finished a program' and the work had enough merit why wouldn't you upgrade it?

Again, from the article (it's not a long one):

> Barnes, a meteorologist at the SA Weather Service in Cape Town, graduated in September.

> [...]

> "Work is good here in Cape Town. I wasn't expecting a doctorate. So at this point, I am not about what lies ahead in my career. I will look into opportunities should they present themselves in the future."

Sounds to me like he's not especially interested in academia.

Personally, as a phd candidate in STEM I think this is awesome. I do not care that he “skipped steps” in getting a PhD. His contribution to the body of scientific knowledge was deserving of a doctorate as determined by experts in the field, no? Who cares if you publish 3+ papers if each of those never got cited more than 10 times in 10 years and they never had any real scientific impact? I know PhDs who simply went through the motions at some of the best doctoral STEM programs in the US and never made a real scientific contribution despite checking off all the boxes.

I guess determining if he “deserves” a PhD depends on what you think a PhD is for. If it’s for checking off boxes, sitting in a room for N years, publishing K papers, taking M number of classes etc, then yes, he doesn’t deserve it. If you think it’s about learning how to be an independent researcher and making significant scientific contributions, it seems to me like he’s done quite a bit.

>His contribution to the body of scientific knowledge was deserving of a doctorate as determined by experts in the field, no?

This is what I dont agree on. A doctorate is not a prize for the best scientific work from a student that year.

Indeed, degree programs as we know them have a shady history where they were often just nonsense credentials the general public was too ignorant to invalidate, but they were secular, and gained popularity as religions has faded.

There’s a long history of payola in university. IMO our entire accreditation and credentialing system has so much corruption, anything but reproducible STEM education should be treated as being of suspect value.

The credential is earned due to social hoop jumping, and very specific. It doesn’t really say much about general intelligence or worker skill. I’ve worked with PhDs that were so obtuse nothing was accomplished.

It’s like trying to make a simple knife by first bootstrapping a universe to mine engineered carbon steel of the purest quality.

In the end political network effects dictate reality. And that realm is clearly rife with delusions of grandeur.

> ... anything but reproducible STEM education should be treated as being of suspect value.

I'm not sure I disagree, or at least not by much. But your statement seems rather odd for an account named (I presume) after Chomsky, since he isn't exactly STEM.

You should familiarize yourself with his actual research career and not just his popular political commentary.

He also advocates for science based social policy all the time.

The guy as noted had/has already published papers in renowned journals, and that was a reason for the PhD (see last few sentences). I don't think this guy skipped any fundamental steps. He probably should have been admitted/applied to a PhD to begin with.

You can look him up on Google scholar: https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=baVVmaoAAAAJ&hl=en In 2020/2021 he has at least 3 first author papers and a number of co-authored papers and apparently he wrote an impressive thesis. Even if he wanted to continue in academia, in a number of STEM fields, it would be sufficient for a degree. It's not a question of putting in time, it's about output.

An enlightening excerpt from a related article: "The decision by the Durban University of Technology to require a Master’s degree as a minimum requirement for a lecture position has been welcomed by education experts."

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