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Comment by hasley | Hacker News Reader

This is a very simplistic view of a PhD and basically a prejudice.

During conducting a PhD, you learn a lot about organizing yourself, about how to work together with others in a professional context, about teaching and guiding others, about presenting you and your results orally and in a written way, about using certain tools (whatever applies in your field) and so on.

Some people like to view it the way that a PhD makes you a expert in one field and rendering yourself useless for any other task. But this is in general far from reality. As a PhD (at least where I live in Germany and in the field of engineering) you are indeed expected to have a broad view such that you are able to know where you are located with your PhD topic and such that you are indeed not a narrow expert.

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I know that many American lectures are given by "TAs" that are PhD students, but do most American PhD students (or in Germany in your case) teach and guide others? That is certainly not the case for my European country: even if one wanted to teach as a PhD student for the experience on one's CV, the answer is usually that the department's budget wouldn't allow creating another teaching position for you.

Here, you may give seminars. These are often about solving some tasks (e.g., "compute the Fourier transform of a triangle"). Sometimes it is just consultation where students can ask stuff about the lecture. You may als be asked to conduct lab experiments with students. Sometimes your only teaching consists of supervising student research projects, Bachelor's theses or Master's theses.

The lectures are usually given by the professor (head of the research group). Sometimes a PhD gives a lecture when the professor is away. But yes, it depends on your employment contract. If your contract involves a lot of teaching you might even give a whole lecture - though this is rarely the case for employees without PhD.

Yes, so this could be the case for countries where PhDs are employees of the university. However, in other countries PhDs might be entirely externally funded and not department staff, so they would not do any teaching or guiding during the PhD (or possibly even during their postdocs).

What you are describing is a side effect of pursuing a PhD, not the main goal.

You can achieve the same side effects, often better, by pairing a smart undergrad with a good mentor.

Deep expertise is not about the soft skills here.

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