Celebrity exceptions are exactly that; exceptions. Those people knew an opportunity when they had one, and were able to generalize their early successes into other domains by leveraging the financial, social, and intellectual capital they accumulated. People who fit this description aren’t the ones reading this thread.
In some fields all you need is a computer and an idea to be impactful, but in plenty of other fields you’d be hard pressed to make any credible, let alone meaningful impact without significant intellectual preparation and tacit knowledge. These things only come through experience, and for many people, the PhD program is that experience.
In some fields all you need is a computer and an idea to be impactful, but in plenty of other fields you’d be hard pressed to make any credible, let alone meaningful impact without significant intellectual preparation and tacit knowledge. These things only come through experience, and for many people, the PhD program is that experience.