I often see PhDs with slightly different titles:
• Earth Sciences
• Environmental Sciences
• Earth and Environmental Sciences
• Geology
• Geology and Environmental Sciences
Can people with these different PhD titles realistically apply for the same jobs? Or does the specific wording matter more than we think?
Comments
The actual content and focus of your publications and research background matters more than whatever the term on the degree is.
In an aligned field, yes. But for non-allied fields, No. For example, I have a PhD from a medical school while working in neurology. I can’t apply to jobs that an Earth Sciences PhD could do as I’m not trained or qualified for it.
The title is irrelevant, it’s the expertise you’ve gained that matters and that’s usually evidenced by publications.
Yes. It matters.
Some fields are extremely insular. Search committees simply won’t consider candidates that are not squarely in their field.
It’s stupid. But, many things in academia are.
I’m in these fields and the different names come down to department focus and university branding. The content of your work maters most.
With one exception of civil/environmental engineering departments which has some overlapping work. For faculty hires often they have more strict requirements since they are accredited differently and you will teach undergrads who will be seeking an engineering license.
You can apply to any job you want. If the people reviewing your application are asking themselves questions about the name of the department that gave you your degree, your application probably wasn’t very convincing to begin with.
It varies a lot by field and outcomes. Some academic lines are very specific, like medicine. If a university hospital needs a neurologist, they need a neurologist, not a psychiatrist who has dabbled in neurology.
Other academic lines are more interdisciplinary, and have changing titles. If they’re hiring in a department that’s called Gender and Sexuality Studies, they certainly will consider that some candidates will have degrees called Women’s and Gender Studies, GWSS, Feminist Studies, etc. But also because GSS is an interdisciplinary field, they’re likely to consider PhDs in literature, social sciences, history, etc. as long as the research applies to gender and sexuality.
No, in the academic world your publication record – i.e. about what topics you published – matters more.
Titles of PhD can vary very much depending on local tradition, regulation of the university, country-dependent legal frameworks, etc. Sometimes titles on PhDs exist solely to give some academic departments or disciplines more visibility. It’s all very relative.
The title on my PhD is defunct and (that specific title) does not exist anymore in the university I got it from 😉
no i have a PhD in chemistry and do brain surgery on the weekends. Im a real cut up then.
It really depends. For interdisciplinary fields, this doesn’t matter as much as long as your research and profile matches the job description. For specific fields, this is important. For example, I’m in a history department, and we would very very rarely, if ever, hire someone with a PhD in American Studies or Asian Studies or Ethnic Studies. Those scholars would be better suited for more interdisciplinary departments/programs. The issue is not that we don’t like non-History PhDs, but rather that it can be a bit too challenging to get tenure in the department unless your work and teaching are both historical—both in content and in methodology. Do some people with other PhDs fit the bill? Yes, but often the department doesn’t like to take risks.
PhD titles can vary wildly from university to university. I can think of at least 6 unique names for the PhD I have that all functionally mean the exact same thing. They can also vary over time. If I had graduated from where I did a decade earlier, the same degree from the same department would have a different name. There was at least one other earlier name change before that. They’re all the same. There’s someone else in my department who graduated from the same program 20 years earlier than I did. Same program, same discipline, working in the same department. We even shared one dissertation committee member. Our PhDs are called different things.
it may matter for your first teaching job. I could have gotten a degree in “molecular biology“ (a relatively new field at the time) or “biochemistry“. The “biochemistry” label made me more attractive to both chemistry and biology depts, which molecular biology would not, because they need faculty to teach intro biochemistry courses.