The Best Real-Life Examples Of 'You Can Have A PhD And Still Be An Idiot'

Chemical Engineer

"I had an intern with a PhD once. She was trying to be a chemical process engineer. VERY book smart."

"I spent the Summer teaching her how to use basic tools like screwdrivers and wrenches for simple tasks like opening containers and adjusting clamps. She had zero practical skills and couldn’t figure anything whatsoever out on her own."

"She’d get lost in a building and call me and I’d tell her to find the exit, but she’d get lost inside and we’d have to go in and get her. This routinely happened, and she would just find somewhere random and sit until we collected her."

"When her car’s GPS lost signal once she didn’t know what to do so she stopped in the middle of the road and texted me where she was and that there was something wrong with her car and to come help. I figured there was a breakdown or something based on the text and drove out to check on it because she wasn’t responding."

"She was crying sitting on the side of the road and a cop was yelling at her to move her car which was still in the lane."

"If you told her to pick something up from a store she’d ask where it was and if you didn’t know, she would never find it "She refused to ask an employee because she knew they weren’t as smart as she was."

"She’d just walk in random directions looking for things. For example if you said 'go to Walmart and find some work boots because you lost yours' she would send me pictures of random aisles in Walmart with 'is this close? which way from here?'.”

"Book smart but utterly dim."

~ captainofpizza

It's The Milk That Makes Them Healthy

"My wife once had a roommate who was working on her PhD."

"At one point she went on an Oreo diet because they're vegan."

"She was later surprised to find her health wasn't improving."

~ educational_palmeira

Squirrel!

"I am a graduate student at the University of Oxford."

"I recently had to explain to another grad student the concept of animals hibernating. She's British and English is her first language, so it wasn't a vocabulary issue. She just didn't know that animals did that."

"When I explained it she said 'Oh! like squirrels!' Squirrels actually don't hibernate, but I just nodded."

~ slider501

Have You Tried Turning It Off...

"Ask literally anyone who's ever worked for a university's IT department. I've never met a group of people more unwilling to learn anything new—outside of their small specialization—than university professors."

"These people would rather argue with you for 10 minutes that 'I did restart my computer' than just spend the 2 minutes to restart the computer when the logistics software is showing the machine with a 45 day uptime and all of us can see that sh*t."

"Department heads do this."

~ Mammoth_Clue_5871

It's One Banana, Michael

"My roommate in college was/is an academic genius, 35 ACT in med school right now."

"I brought him to Walmart with me because he wanted to buy an 8-pack of Gatorade. At the self checkout he scanned one, saw the price was 7 bucks, and decided that must have been the price for EACH Gatorade."

"He ended up scanning the pack 7 more times and paid 56 bucks for some Gatorade, all while thinking that was a fair price."

~ Royal-Character-2035

And Vampirism!

"The nurse I used to work with during the pandemic was constantly bragging about how rich and important and highly educated she was.

"Only for her to suggest to our director of nursing that the kitchen start putting extra garlic in everyone's meals because garlic cures COVID."

~ GlassPeepo

History ≠ Geography

"I know someone with a PhD in History who went to the Caribbean with only long trousers and jumpers/sweaters to wear."

"He was so hot he had to cut his jeans down to shorts."

"Then, as part of the same trip, he went to Washington DC, and had to wear jean shorts the whole time because he cut up all his trousers."

~ RexEverything_

And On The 7th Day...

"I met a PhD molecular biologist who was an evolution denier. I found out years later that he was somewhat infamous."

~ whittlingcanbefatal

"I’ve met two PhD students who worked on bacterial evolution and one who worked in biochemistry."

"All three believed that human evolution was not a thing, all three were religious."

~ D-g-tal-s_purpurea

Nobel Disease

"Nobel Disease."

"There are a ton of laureates that go conspiratorial batsh*t later in life."

~ hacktheself

"Kary Mullis is the worst one and he really emboldens other conspiracy theorists."

"He won the Nobel prize for helping invent the PCR test... then he denied AIDS existed while in a government position leading to 330,000 deaths and said climate change wasn't real because his astrologer told him so."

"Oh, and ghosts."

"Anti-vaxxers love him."

~ AstonVanilla

Members Around The World

"Heard about a mechanical engineer who is a flat earther."

"So yeah, him, or any engineer, physicist, or astronomer that believes in that."

"The fact that a single one can get their degree and then turn around years later and believe in something fundamentally incompatible with the BASIC physics required to make sense of their degree is baffling."

~ QuanticWizard

What Did They Do With The Couch?

"Helped some mates move house. One was a Uni Student doing a double degree in Computer Science and something else very challenging."

"While we were packing boxes he asked if he could could borrow a saw. When I asked why, it was so he could shorten the legs on the dining table so it would fit out the door."

"The look on his face when I grabbed one of the legs and started unscrewing it was priceless. As was the look when I asked him how he thought they got it in the room in the first place."

~ cruiserman_80

New-Fangled Gadgets

"In my old university in Germany in the early 2000s. The university was old, really old."

"And when I started they just began modernising the lecture halls etc... The German department got a new, fancy, state of the art lecture hall with any kind of technology you could wish for."

"The professors got extensive training on how to use it."

"There were some of them who after three months still didn’t know how to switch on the lights. Don’t even talk about the microphone or how to open and close the blinds on the skylight."

They didn’t originally plan on having an old-fashioned overhead projector there, but after a few weeks they relented and provided one because the professors didn’t know any other way."

"In their defence, the other lecture halls were so old that they still had the hole for the ink well in the tables."

~ moosmutzel81

Do No Harm

"I work in mental health and have known sooo many healthcare professionals with advanced degrees who I wouldn’t trust to take care of a goldfish and can’t believe counsel people on a regular basis."

~ DeadSharkEyes

What's That Burning Smell?

"My MIT PhD. friend complained his dryer was taking forever to dry his clothes."

"I asked him if he was cleaning the lint trap—'it doesn't have one'."

"Spoiler alert: it did have one, way in the back and I took out a sweater's worth of lint."

~ arbiterror

It's Not Rocket Science...

I chuckle whenever someone uses this saying to indicate something isn't complex like rocket science ever since my friend became an aeronautical engineer.

Why?

Well, we'd have to go back to the mid-1980s when we were both teenagers in high school. As many teens with cars in rural America did, my friends liked to drive around on the back roads as a form of entertainment.

One sunny, Summer day two of my friends came to visit me with a tale to tell.

It seems they were driving on a stretch of road with a speed limit of 35mph [56kph] because of a cluster of homes and farms. When the car slowed to this speed, Mr. Future Rocket Scientist looked down at the pavement passing by below his window on the passenger side.

Upon studying the passing blacktop for several moments, he came to the conclusion he could easily run as fast as the car was moving, so...

...he undid his seatbelt, opened the car door and STEPPED OUT of the moving car.

According to the driver, one moment our friend was sitting next to him and the next he was gone. Or mostly gone.

After a brief moment of panic during which he slowed then stopped the car, he noticed Mr. Future Rocket Scientist's right hand gripping the door's armrest and his left hand gripping the side of the passenger seat.

He was probably only dragged for a few seconds which wasn't long enough to do more than scuff up his jeans, jean jacket and the toes of his shoes.

He escaped with only minor road rash and a few bruises.

After the driver told me what happened from his perspective, Mr. Future Rocket Scientist interjected:

"It worked!"

"I was doing really well until I tripped over that rock."

Luckily an understanding of things like velocity, speed, trajectory, friction, drag, inertia and gravity aren't needed for aeronautics.

Needless to say, we've never let him forget his "experiment."

He still claims the only problem was that rock on the road.

And I now use the saying "it's not rocket surgery" instead of either of the original sayings.