47. The Doctor Is In
When I mentioned that I have a Ph.D. in physical chemistry, a software engineer smirked and said, “What are ya gonna do with that”? I had spent several years as a professional research scientist, but I skipped over that in my answer.
Instead, I kept my slayage simple: “Well, I taught myself to code, so nowadays I’m an IT consultant. I did all the math for a huge database merger project at Microsoft”.
“Oh,” was all he said. And, yes, his smirk was gone.