Chapter 3559: Edge of Tomorrow (Part 16)

Speaking of Shiler's teaching situation over the past few years, it was also a story of bitterness and tears.

Currently, he has a total of three doctoral students and five graduate students, and there are also two doctoral students who rotated from other supervisors. That is to say, he currently has ten students in total.

The gold content of American master's and doctoral degrees is very high. The course difficulty is high, the thesis requirements are high, and the graduation cycle is long. About 30% of doctoral students are unable to graduate for life.

That is to say, one-third of American doctoral students are unable to obtain a doctoral degree for life.

Prestigious universities are even more so. Cat Getan University's doctoral delayed graduation rate has consistently remained above 70%, and more than half of the doctoral students cannot graduate on time. 40% of doctoral students have been delayed for more than three years.

Take Bruce as an example; he looks quite outrageous—it's been several years, and he still hasn't graduated with his doctorate. But in fact, this situation is very common at Cat Getan University; there are plenty of people who have dragged it out longer than him.

A rotating doctoral student Shiler received last year is already 42 years old this year, having rotated through 6 supervisors, three of whom retired, two went to other doctoral stations, and the last one was Shiler. And from the current situation, he still won't be able to graduate this year.

As far as Shiler knows, among the students at Cat Getan University who still cannot graduate with a single doctoral degree, the oldest is already 45; not only do they have a family and career, but they have also obtained four master's degrees, and the only doctoral degree is the one they cannot graduate with.

Therefore, even if Bruce drags it out for another 10 years, he can't be called a graduation-challenged student.

The main reason for this situation is that the graduation conditions for doctoral degrees at prestigious American universities are too harsh, having rolled to a non-human level.

First of all, doctoral students don't just write a thesis; they also have to take advanced professional courses just like undergraduates. There are 14 advanced professional courses in the psychology discipline alone, three of which are high-difficulty courses, with a stable pass rate of 60% each year.

If you don't pass a course in a year, you must retake it, and you are not allowed to compress the class hours; you must read the course from the beginning again.

After all the courses are read, you still have to take exams, which is commonly known as the doctoral graduation exam. The difficulty of this exam is even more outrageous.

The comprehensive qualification exam for the psychology course Shiler teaches requires a 7-hour written test in one day, a three-day clinical application test, and a week-long subject analysis test.

After everything is finished, all relevant professional teachers in the college grade and score comprehensively together. Each person only has three chances; if you don't pass the exam three times, you are directly expelled.

After passing the exam, you still can't directly start writing the thesis, but have to take a two-month thesis writing training course. After the course is passed, you still have to take an exam, and only after the exam is finished does the training stage count as over.

Most people need to spend 3~4 years to complete the training stage, and even for a super genius, it takes at least two years to complete all class hours and finish all exams.

After passing the training stage, you start creating your graduation thesis. The review standard for doctoral graduation theses is even more outrageous; basically, you have to be an expert in a sub-field and have world-class innovative achievements to have a possibility of passing.

Because of its unique regional attributes, Cat Getan University has quite good student quality in the field of psychology. Currently, among the five doctoral students under Shiler, only one who just started reading for a doctorate this year hasn't passed the comprehensive qualification test, and the others have already finished the exam and started writing their theses.

But when it comes to writing a thesis, Shiler has a headache.

This has to mention Shiler's own academic path.

In fact, in his previous life, Shiler was just an ordinary university professor and not a very well-known figure, let alone an industry expert. In terms of academic level in psychological theory, it could only be said to be mediocre, without achieving any achievements worth staring at.

Because he didn't put most of his energy into academic research, and he just dealt with his job when he went to work, most of the time he was just an ordinary university faculty member.

However, after coming to DC, his predecessor was already a world-renowned psychologist. This psychology master wasn't something he could stop being just because he wanted to.

Only then did Shiler start putting most of his energy into academics. However, fortunately, his unique psychoanalytic talent made him smooth and unimpeded in this regard, well maintaining his psychologist persona.

But speaking of which, the original body before this, Anatoly, didn't study theory but focused on the application direction. Whether it was behavioral analysis or psychoanalysis, he didn't study them—he didn't study analysis methods at all.

After Shiler came, he turned to study psychoanalysis, which didn't cause surprise in the industry, because most disciplines are like this: starting from the application field when young, and starting to study pure theory in old age.

This is because the fundamental purpose of all disciplines is actually to explore the world, and studying theory is closer to exploring the truths of the universe. Every scientist who has reached a certain level of academic achievement must have such a pursuit.

Shiler having so many students is also because he has dabbled in both applied psychology and theoretical psychology, and his reputation is well-known. Who wouldn't want to have an industry leader as their supervisor?

And everyone who studies psychology curses psychoanalysis while wanting to study psychoanalysis, having a kind of "this thing is too outrageous, I have to see what's going on" mentality.

In fact, among Shiler's students, there is no lack of empathy-capable people. There are quite a few people with innate empathy like Jenna, and some are even more talented than her. But this doesn't mean they can write a thesis that is enough for them to graduate.

As everyone knows, empathy is to experience the mood of others at a certain moment through emotional resonance with others, thereby analyzing their psychology and deriving a series of conclusions.

There is a problem here, and that is that the basis of empathy is emotion, and words have no way to completely describe emotion. For the complex and beautiful emotional system of human beings, all words are imprecise.

The basis of empathy and psychoanalysis is emotion, but the basis of a thesis is logic. Writing a psychoanalytic thesis is to express emotion with logic, which is self-contradictory in itself.

Many people have this feeling when watching TV series or appreciating paintings, that is, the transmission of emotion is abstract.

When you see a picture or hear some kind of music, what appears in your brain is not a precise vocabulary, but an abstract feeling.

How to summarize and summarize abstract feelings into logical inferences and vocabulary is the key to writing a good psychoanalytic thesis.

However, most people can only focus on one point: people with empathy will be too inclined to describe abstract emotions, and people who are naturally rational and logically rigorous lack emotional experience.

So Shiler's theses can be roughly summarized as prose with rich emotions and beautiful words, and explanatory essays that are conventional, rigid, and empty, without anyone being able to combine them perfectly. This is truly a sad story.

Of course, some people turn to study behavioral analysis. But as long as it is an analysis method, it is difficult to avoid studying emotion. Human beings are emotional animals themselves, and the motivation for various behaviors cannot come only from rational logic; there must be passion and impulse.

How precise they are when conducting pure logical analysis, they have so much gibberish when conducting emotional analysis. This makes many parts of their theses look even harder to understand than the delirious ravings of hysterical patients.

And correcting this part is very difficult, because everyone's experience of emotion is different. Shiler tells them his experience, but most people can't fully understand it, let alone write anything useful based on Shiler's experience; in the end, it still depends on themselves.

So, compared to the normal teaching process—students independently complete results, teachers point out the shortcomings, students make corrections, and improve their academic level—Shiler is more like playing a card-drawing game.

That is, doing some superficial work that looks like teaching, but in fact, just waiting for the goods to be shipped by luck: putting the students there, waiting for them to have a sudden realization one day, combining sensibility and rationality, achieving academic results and graduating; or finally realizing that they are not suitable for studying psychology, simply giving up and letting each other go.

Of course, although helping them revise their theses rarely plays a substantial help, Shiler will still conscientiously finish reading everything they send over and give them suggestions as much as possible.

This is not out of consideration for creating talents for the psychology community, but mainly to clarify responsibilities and let them realize that it is not the supervisor's problem that they cannot graduate. This might speed up their abandonment speed.

It is the same in any country; responsible supervisors are actually in the minority, and supervisors who are both capable and responsible are even rarer. Shiler's responsible attitude has made him widely praised among students, and although some students call him too strict, the number of students who want to apply for his graduate and doctoral programs every year is still endless.

And Cat Getan University is even more like plucking wool from a sheep, on one hand recruiting new students for him, and on the other hand rotating graduation-challenged students to him, which leads to his card pool becoming more and more mixed, and the probability of drawing good cards is lower. It is truly a desperate story.

However, although he can't draw decent strength cards, he has a pool full of acrobatic players. Besides the decent thesis level, he really has everything, and if packed into a villain organization, he could probably film eight seasons of Suicide Squad, plus two games.

Still the same sentence, learning psychology to the end, either die or go crazy. And people who can study this kind of discipline and survive under such academic pressure are mostly crazy through and through.

Although antisocial personality is mostly innate, it is not necessarily impossible to be shaped later. Because the pressure is too great, mentally disordered, and retaliating against society, there are countless examples. It's just that in Cat Getan, people are not used to wielding knives at the weak, but are more precise, elegant, and artistic.

After Shiler finished sending the email, he soon received a reply. The other party was really unwilling to let go of this big fish and gave an address in the reply email, inviting him to meet.

Shiler felt a bit surprised when he saw the number on the address; it was actually in the activity building of the old campus of Cat Getan University.

After Cat Getan University moved, the old campus wasn't completely demolished; half of the land was sold, and the other half was left to be used as an art museum and teaching buildings for some liberal arts and art disciplines.

No wonder the Brainiac Support Society was so arrogant in its actions, yet there was no news of any conflict on campus; it turned out they had placed their lair on the old campus.

(End of chapter) ===== CHAPTER 3560 =====