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.
