Kung Fu PhD

Overall Conclusions:
As I conclude my "The PhD dissertation I never wrote series" also known as my "PhD hypotheses series", I would like to put forth the true meaning of a PhD as explained very well by the movie Kung Fu Panda.

Just as in the movie, we all fall into gradschool from the sky and are picked by a seemingly random process (like the tortoise Master Oogway pointing at the giant panda (you) who fell right where he was pointing just by chance). We enter grad school with dreams of being a dragon warrior (or at the very least getting a Nobel prize out of it). In grad school, we feel like a nobody and feel that those around us like the Tigress, Viper, Mantis, Monkey and Crane are much smarter and more accomplished than us.

As we progress through the tough travails of grad school, we keep feeling that we are not learning anything and our research is going nowhere. We then progress to the later stages of our PhD and as we get close to graduation, we realize that the secret to limitless power/knowledge that we thought a PhD held (the dragon scroll), is actually a blank scroll. We then confront the supposedly demonic Tai Lung (our committee) prior to graduation.

However, this does not mean that a PhD is worthless and does not teach you anything. What a PhD teaches you is intangible, it is the ability to be able to self learn, to understand life and solve its tough problems, like figuring out the wuxi fingerhold by yourself which the master's students (Tigress et al.) are unable to do.