Me try to mimic the liberty statue behind. taken by Eden in Odaiba. The picture has no relation with the story, but anyway, it's one of my picture with a monument in it... :-)The shortest official reason for my taking this long gruesome course called Ph.D. is actually that Indy Jones has a Ph.D. degree :-) - you might think that's a joke, but trust me, it's half true... anyway, for you who didn't buy it, I have another story... hope you'll be convinced this time... :-)
February 2001, I was attending my BCR (Basic Consulting Readiness) training for "the Firm" (what I mean with "the Firm" is indeed "the Firm" :-), didn't help much, did it?). For team building exercise, the instructor assigned us to build a paper monument for a ruler company. The motto of the company was "inch by inch", which meant that the higher the monument, the better. They wanna build the monument in Chicago (because their headquarter was there), and if you can recall that Chicago is often dubbed as "City of Wind", it would imply an additional requirement: not only the monument should be high enough, it should also be strong enough to withstand the wind (in our exercise it's not a real wind actually, it's just the instructor blowing at our monument :-) ).
There are 19 of us, and we were divided into 4 teams, 3 teams would have 5 members and 1 with 4 members. It just happened that there were only 3 engineers there (of course, this is a management consulting company - we do fishy business here. No straight and honest engineer would be tricked to join us... :-) ). Basic arithmetic would show that should the engineers be divided evenly, one team would short of engineer - and the four-member team happened to be the team that missed the engineer.
And to give us a good motivation, the instructor offered champagne for the first prize and chocolate for the second prize, so we went to our team room with head full of champagne and chocolate... :-)
As I was the engineer in my team, by the time we got to our room, every single eyes quickly directed at me and the question that I was afraid to be asked was asked: " You're the engineer here, aren't you? What should we do?"
I tried my best to offer an honest answer without stirring a mass hysteria :-) : "Well, I am a (gas petro) chemical engineer, not civil engineer! I have no clue just like you are..."
I was wondering whether the other two engineers had the same problem as mine. Jin-il and Veronique were both mechanical engineers, and I was sure their knowledge of building a stable monument were just as much (or in this case: as less :-) ) as what I had, so I was save to think that it was a fair contest. My team started some trial and error, and finally we came out with a monument that high enough and strong enough to be presented.
Back to the training room, I could hardly hold my laughter as I saw Jinil's team and Veronique's team came up with more or less the same design as ours (you know, engineer's mindset :-) ). However, I was struck when I saw the fourth team design: it was completely out of common -sense, however, you didn't need to blow it to know whether it was the best: it was rock solid and twice higher than our team (and, for your information, our monument was the highest among the engineer-designed monument, so theirs was simply unbeatable in term of height :-) ).
To make it short, the instructor blew the monument one by one, and the non-engineer team won. Kim (the leader of the team) jokingly said that it was because his team had the less members that the quarrel was also less and they could focus more on creating the best monument. However, if you look closely to their team members, 3 out of 4 have a Doctoral degree, and if my memory didn't fail me, Vivian (one of their team members) got her Ph.D. in Physics (which means that she should be able to tackle the problem better than all of us engineers here... :-) ). Excuses excuses you might say, anyway, our teams got the second price (which was actually better for me since I cannot drink the champagne but any amount of chocolate are welcomed :-) )
In the night after the session, all of us went out for a drink. At that time I had the chance to talk with Dali (one of the Ph.D.), and he told me some about his doctoral course.
"It's not about the class or the research that you do during the course. It's about the experience that you can get. Being a student is one of the most privileged statuses that you can get, and with it you can go to a lot of place and enter a lot of society without much barrier. There you can get to know a lot of people and acquire a lot of thing. But if you close yourself and concentrate solely to your subject, there's not much that you will get."
The bottom line of what he said was: the more people you meet and the more things you try, it will bring you a lot of friends and perspectives, which will help you to win the champagne next time around... :-) well, I don't mind about the champagne at all, but it really gives me the reason to try the Ph.D. course...
Anyway, if you still didn't wanna believe that I want to take my doctor because of that story, just believe the Indy Jones's stuff, will you? It's much more simple... :-)
