Character has a PhD: they’re really smart and knowledgable about their field!
Character has 2 PhDs: either they did a dual degree program and are braggy about it, had a life-changing experience after their first degree and pivoted their whole career, or they find the structure of being a PhD student, despite all its stress, more comfortable and familiar than the stress of finding a Real Job and have a very indulgent advisor.
Character has 3 PhDs: who keeps accepting them to PhD programs. Either this person needs psychological help or their department needs to be investigated for its academic standards. Probably both
Character has 4+ PhDs: if they aren’t an undercover vampire or something then no they don’t lol
#this is why martin dubois weirds me out #who let him get phds in physics chemistry AND biology #does he have any industry experience at all
Funny enough this post was prompted by learning this fact about book!DuBois. Looking at Andy Weir saying “Dr. DuBois has three PhDs” straight in the face and going. Dude. No He Doesn’t.
The favorites people are tagging here include Bruce Banner (7 PhDs), Engineer Team Fortress 2 (11 PhDs), and Stanford Pines (12 PhDs), and like, of course that is not how it works, that is not how anything works, but they come from cartoony universes that operate on cartoon logic. Looking at TF2 and going “that’s not how that works” is not the point of it.
Andy Weir is supposedly trying really hard to make everything in his books realistic, or at least plausible. That’s his whole schtick! This is a world meant to be taken seriously! But his aversion to learning/acknowledging how human social institutions work in the name of Not Being Political™ produces some real howlers that are impossible to take seriously. Eva Stratt’s “I can do what I want” permit is the famous one, and the idea that Grace got a personal attack paper petty enough to end his career through peer review really strains credulity to me, but DuBois’s three PhDs in very closely related fields is another. That’s just not how PhD programs work. This is not about any given character’s capability, this is about how PhD programs are not things you just keep adding to like that—once you have one, you go on to do research, write research papers and monographs, not more PhDs. Your PhD already proves you know how to do research! That’s the point of it, you don’t go prove it again, and any subsequent PhD program you apply to will seriously question why exactly you want to! Weir presumably wants to convey that DuBois is both very smart and very accomplished, that Project Hail Mary recruited the best of the best. Instead I look at this and go “this is a fake character and Andy Weir does not know what he’s talking about” and it breaks my suspension of disbelief.
If I was inventing this character and wanted to immediately convey that he was incredibly smart, accomplished, and the best of the best, I’d say DuBois has a dual PhD in biology and chemistry, and Grace recognizes him as the guy who got a MacArthur fellowship after winning the Nobel Prize for Chemistry two years ago. A dual degree, a MacArthur Fellowship, a Nobel Prize, several dozen published papers (or even better, a paper that Grace has cited at some point!), these are the kinds of markers anyone serious would give DuBois that actually convey what I assume Weir was going for, that “three PhDs” does not.
I want to make a tiny point on the "Grace got a personal attack paper petty enough to end his career through peer review". This is entirely possible, not sure the career ending has happened before but its definitely happened enough to ruin people's credibility in their field. I recently got an archaeology degree and there would be papers written back and forth to discredit, disparage, and refute other people's theories and findings, especially in the early 1900s. I can't find the people we went over in my theories class but it got nasty.
I’m not 100% on how the process works, but his peer reviewers were probably colleagues who were just as annoyed with the field but were scared to voice their opinions. He could have essentially been their sacrifice.
It’s not impossible, yeah. Real-life papers criticizing each other’s theories can get pretty strident, and it’s always possible for people to decide they are sick of this dude. The thing is, having a weird idea that disagrees with everyone else in your field—and even getting snarky about it—is not on its own a career-killer. Nobody believes in the Chaco Meridian theory, but Steve Lekson is still a professor and still allowed to write things. Yeah he had 20 years of much more normal work under his belt before he hit everyone with that, which I’m sure helped a lot, but being snarky and prodding the Established Theories is his whole deal and it hasn’t hurt his career. Paulette Steeves has a bunch of academic awards. When Todd Surovell et al. published a bombshell paper claiming Dillehay did everything wrong at Monte Verde and it’s actually not pre-Clovis at all, they weren’t blackballed from academia, they mostly got eyerolls and a lot of annoyed response papers. They still have jobs. Every field has eccentrics and disagreements and people who are frustrated with The Establishment, it wouldn’t be academia if it didn’t. And trust me, “life doesn’t have to be water-based, nor confined to specific temperature ranges” is WAY less controversial in real-life astrobiology than “Monte Verde is only 6,000 years old” or “Chaco Canyon was a state level society whose rulers founded Paquimé” is in archaeology.
So what could possibly have been in that paper that pissed everyone off SO bad they never wanted to work with Grace again, but the journal was still willing to publish it? The most recent big infamous career-killing take in archaeology was “NAGPRA is basically the same as creationism, and handling Indigenous ancestors’ skulls is this white woman’s right”! It’s hard for me to come up with something believable Grace could publish that’s on that level.
(Also, scientists in the first half of the 1900s could do basically whatever the hell they wanted in a way that does not fly today. Grace meanwhile got his PhD in the 2010s. Which is not to say that academic beefs where people go You’re Stupid And Wrong at each other don’t still happen—Surovell vs. Dillehay’s beef got published this year—but you do have to hew to certain standards of professionalism while doing so. Otherwise your peer reviewers will most likely be like dude you can’t say that in an academic article, revise and resubmit.)
This is why I actually do prefer the version where Grace goes “everyone thinks I’m crazy just because I don’t believe there’s anything special about hydrogen and oxygen” and Stratt responds, paraphrased, “no, everyone thinks you’re an asshole because you insulted your colleague at a conference in front of everyone.” Like yeah that’d do it.
(It’s also why I keep beating the drum that the whole backstory feels way more real and resonant if Grace were a woman—or, as @gaudebo has been writing about, Black! Like yeah the same eccentricities and uncollaborative behaviors that tend to get forgiven in white men do not tend to offer women or people of color the same second chances.)
Anyway TL;DR there are ways it could be possible—sympathetic peer reviewers, unprofessional insults against more established colleagues, a journal editor who either got complacent or is courting controversy for attention, everyone deciding this is the last straw regarding a guy they already found annoying—but it’s just… kind of an absurd thing to happen the way Weir seems to describe it happening.
