Your Ph.D. is a nipple on the surface of human knowledge. That’s how blogger and NASA researcher Leila Battison describes the amount of knowledge accumulated during the years that a student spends pursing a doctoral degree. Her definition stems from Matt Might, professor of computer science at the University of Utah, who came up with his own definition of what a doctoral degree is back in 2010. His goes something like this:

Imagine a circle. That circle contains all of human knowledge. Once you’ve finished elementary school, you know a little bit, so a very small portion of the center of the circle gets colored in. It’s broad, and in every subject. Same for middle school, where the circle grows a little more. Same for high school.

With a bachelor’s degree, especially at a liberal arts college, another ring gets added, with a little bump that becomes your “specialty” (biology, English, math, history, etc.). A master’s degree furthers that specialty. Pursing a Ph.D. pushes you to the circle itself, the limit of human knowledge. “You push at the boundary for a few years until one day, the boundary gives way, and that dent you’ve made is called a Ph.D.” Might accompanies his description with a series of pictures, and after illustrating the Ph.D., after breaking the wall of that initial circle, he pulls back, revealing this tiny, almost invisible bump protruding from the exterior of the circle.

That’s what you know. That bump.

Now — most of us graduating in May — we aren’t at that level yet (to those of you earning your Ph.D., congrats). We’re at that bachelor’s level, that level where we haven’t even reached the edge of human knowledge in a single specialty, let alone on a larger scale.

For me, that’s a problem. I’m looking forward to graduating, and I’m looking forward to starting my master’s program in the fall. I have friends starting jobs, moving across the country, and I know they are looking forward to those journeys as well. But I’m worried about those migrations. I’m worried, class of 2013, that we’ll forget just how little we really know.

Not that we’ll forget what we’ve learned in our undergraduate adventure here at the University of Illinois (though I’m sure some of us will), but that we’ll forget that all of that information — those four years of study — doesn’t actually amount to much.

I don’t say this to scare us or to diminish our accomplishments. Less that 30 percent of Americans have a bachelor’s degree, and even fewer can call themselves alumni of the 56th best school in the world. 

The problem is we’ve accumulated a large amount of knowledge in a very small area. Now, that amount of information isn’t a bad thing, quite the opposite. But I’m worried that we’ll stop now. That we’ll say, “That’s it; I’m out.” That we’ll revile education. That we won’t strive to learn more.

To stop now, to say, “I’ve gotten that degree, on to next one” or, “On to the real world,” disserves us. We can’t live up to our potential if all we’ve got is dramatically tiny knowledge about women in American literature after 1945 or media conglomeration or a subset of biomechanical engineering. We can’t just stop now. We have to keep searching for knowledge.

Greek philosopher Socrates operated on the idea that he knew nothing, and strove his entire life to find someone wiser than himself. That search drove his interactions with poets, philosophers and politicians. Socrates encountered poets who could shape words but not understand them, politicians with wisdom but no knowledge, and remained aware of his own ignorance.

This is what I want for us, class of 2013. Awareness of ignorance. Not acceptance of ignorance, but recognition of ignorance. I want us to know that even as we grasp that diploma, the vast landscape of human knowledge remains unknown to us. I want us to keep our academic spirit strong as we leave the halls of Lincoln and Foellinger. We don’t even know what we don’t know. 

But we should want to.

Sarah is a senior in LAS. She can be reached at [email protected].