The Hack PhD.

I am a pretty ambitious person when it comes to both motivation and pursuit. I like doing things and my brain is always at work. I struggle to rest, and stillness makes me antsy. I am trying to get better at this, to give myself time to think, to step back, consider, mull, marinate.

Nevertheless, with all the ideas I generate it wasn't until recently that I felt confident sharing them with others, collecting feedback, risking failure.

What is an ambitious person if they are unwilling to fail?

In high school I had a quote pinned to my desk:

"A ship in the harbor is safe, but that's not what ships were made for."

Another read,

"Ideas are useless if they stay ideas."

So here's an idea I had this week as I returned to the classroom with my students.




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We all have things we're passionate about and our thought lives are uniquely our own. If we were to graph, however, every direction of our mind's wandering, and plot the correlations and relationships between seemingly divergent ideas, would there be some common ground on which to stand?

I've come to the conclusion that the answer is yes. And it is on the foundation of this assumption that I introduce to you an idea.

The idea is inspired, I'm sure, by Logan LaPlante's TED talk about hackschooling, Austin Kleon's Steal Like an Artist, as well as Elizabeth Gilbert's book, Big Magic. But here's the thing: it's also inspired by everything that's ever inspired me, because, well, that's the point.


The Hack PhD.

So, the idea behind the Hack PhD. is that you can push yourself toward becoming an expert in some fascinating field that deeply interests and inspires you. Your inspiration just needs a little organization.

Imagine your brain goes absolutely bananas for the following:

Children's books
Maps
Spoken word poetry
Coffee
Anything having to do with Albrecht Durer


Well, perhaps your PhD would be in the field of

Prepubescent Canonical Cartographic Studies with a concentration in caffeinated oration and Germanic Renaissance motif.

Of course this sounds ridiculous, but how cool would the syllabus be?

Who would the authors be that would inspire this student? What films or TED talks or interviews would they unearth? What would the dissertation be, and how could they seek out connections and relationships between their ideas and those of the people who preceded them in this work? Would their "professors" be living or deceased, and would that even matter?


What would the final essay be? Where would it lead them? What would they learn? What would they share?


Where could these dissertations be housed and collected?

Who would read them?

And what would you learn about someone by merely reading the title of their PhD?

This suggestion does beg the question, but isn't this just what interesting people do? Well, yes, but the idea here is to go beyond self-indulgence and to share ideas with others; it's allowing other people into your sphere of influences. It's about finding other people who love horses and comic books and politics and jellyfish as much as you do and seeking out their "research." It's about getting past the stale nature of academia and hijacking it in a novel way that embraces humor, irony, and a significant measure of levity.

Finland just elected to abolish academic subjects in schools. For anyone aged 16 or older, the purpose will be lateral thinking, learning to learn, and escaping from the silos that incarcerate us. It is more fluid.

We need fluidity.
We need art.
And we need to be inspired in 2017.

It's just an idea, but it's a start...