Title: The Wisdom Degree: Why I Really Did a PhD
Author: Apollo Buregyeya
Price: Shs40,000
Availability: Aristoc Bookshop
Pages: 204
Published: 2024
Philip Matogo
Doctoral studies and the doctorate awarded at the end of a PhD course are the stuff of legend. What do I mean? Well, we have all heard how undertaking a PhD lends itself to the description of being taken through the ringer: it is so hard that it leaves a mark commonly known as Permanent Head Damage (PHD). It is tough. It is also a journey. This is precisely what this memoir-cum-exhortation to the reader (to come into their own) presents us with.
It is not necessarily a journey thrown into sharper relief by the author’s attainment of a doctorate, rather how he worked through the challenges swirling around such intensive academic inquiry like a dervish, if you like, conjuring what one becomes from the same. This experience, extraneous to doing a PhD, comes with wisdom and that is the highest expression of self-actualisation impacting all that we do. I would expound on this further. However, any book which cannot be explained in a single line or expression or by a solitary word is a book whose message got lost in translation between authorship and how the book’s words crystallise the meaning the author intended.
On this score, Dr Apollo Buregyeya has written a book which not fully humanises his own personal growth (through the furnace of personal loss) and academic achievement. By using a number of engineering metaphors, his words are couched in intriguing language which offers the reader an even greater insight into how the author thinks and what he does in the process of that thinking.
The book opens with what the author describes as “The Hike”. No, this is not an invitation to you to leave, in a proverbial fashion. Instead, it is served up like an appetizer flavoring the contents to come with the literary foretaste of a “watch out for what comes next” tone. He takes this hike in Johannesburg, South Africa. And it turns out to be an encapsulation of his PhD journey.
Clearly, with this approach to the book, the author shows off his undoubted storytelling abilities. In Part One, the book is set forth in four parts, a stark and striking revelation is made: “Nobody tells you that the PhD is a creature,” says Dr Buregyeya. “Not a concept. Not a credential. Not even a curriculum. A creature.” This creature, as it were, is characterized by its near-glacial pace.
Achievement, in any field of human endeavour, takes time. It is the slow burn and not the heated rush that tempers our every effort. Part Two, The Work of Becoming, will certainly benefit all those who believe their work should matter. It all comes down to what the author calls the “Giving Economy”. It is a kind of ‘get in where you fit in’ approach to one’s station in life. In short, it tells us how the truth of the pudding in its tasting and offering: “If you are a builder, give structure. If you are a scholar, give insight. If you are a teacher, give possibility. If you are an entrepreneur, give systems.
If you are an engineer, give trust in the built economy,” writes the author. In Craft of the Scholar, which is the title of Part Three of this book, the author leans into the giving economy with a wealth of insights and knowledge sure to whet the appetite of any avid student of life and learning. Part Four wraps up proceedings by unwrapping the gift of what came out of his PhD and what it means in the grand scheme of things. Here, you will not only discover why the author did his PhD but why your own journey carries the seeds of who you set out to become.
