Thread

Regarding that WSJ piece that suggests Dr. Jill Biden should drop the "Dr.", the author clearly does not know how that works. In Germany, the Dr. is the only title you can actually put on your passport, and after the painful 5 years I went to, I did exactly that.

Which interestingly lead to the Dr. showing up on my health insurance card, which in turn has led actual doctors (physicians) be confused whether I was a colleague or not :D

Or that one time I went on vacation in Spain and the "Dr." was the only thing that made it into the hotel's reservation system. I was just "doctor" through the whole stay.

And finally, ironically, while I have a Dr. rer. nat. (like a doctor of natural science, you know, the hard stuff), we used to say that you cannot compare that to a Dr. med. (the MD) because typically less work goes into getting those. I know, this was a bit condescending.

Finally, you can become a doctor in Germany, without having a Dr. med., so there's that adding to the confusion.

But in summary, I have huge respect for anyone who goes through the journey of getting that academic degree, and I don't care from which school, or what the rest of the family is doing for a living. Dr. Jill Biden earned it.

A few more thoughts on the importance of titles: while I worked on my dissertation, it was a really important goal. After I got it and was a PostDoc, I was in an environment where everybody got it, so it didn't really matter.

After I started working at Zalando, it didn't really matter. English being the work language, everybody was using first names anyway. This is not Siemens where (I assume) a Dr. has some value.

Occasionally, but only if everyone in the conversation had a Dr., we would address each others by Dr. and last name for fun, because it felt so out of place.