Ryan Zinke refers to himself as a geologist. That's a job he's never held.
Source: CNN
By Sara Ganim, CNN
Updated 6:16 AM ET, Tue April 17, 2018
Washington (CNN)Defending his decision to shrink the Bears Ears national monument to lawmakers last week, Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke fell back one of his favorite credentials. "I'm a geologist," he said. "I can assure you that oil and gas in Bears Ears was not part of my decision matrix. A geologist will tell you there is little, if any, oil and gas."
Since becoming leader of the 70,000-employee agency, Zinke has suggested that he was a geologist or former geologist at least 40 times in public settings, including many under oath before Congress. He uses it as a credential booster, saying things such as, "I can tell you, from a geologist, offshore mining of sand is enormously destructive environmentally, as in comparison to seismic," as he told the House Natural Resources Committee last month.
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Zinke, however, has never held a job as a geologist.
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"I studied geology as a result of closing my eyes and randomly pointing to a major from the academic catalog, and I never looked back. I am just glad I did not find electronics," he wrote, adding that he was focused and a good student, and earned an outstanding academic achievement award his senior year.
Read more: https://www.cnn.com/2018/04/17/politics/ryan-zinke-geologist-interior-secretary/index.html
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Education major is the degree.
I'm not a chemist; I've never worked in the job. I have trouble referring to myself as a "chemist", degree notwithstanding, because that's somebody in the lab (or behind the chemist's counter). However, I do find that teachers teaching physics refer to themselves as "physicists"--it's a rare job title and the meaning (what's important, even in a pomo world) is what actually matters for regular people.
I'm a Slavist and a linguist. But I've only occasionally taught either and I'm not sure what, exactly, the job description would be. Does "translator" count? But art historians and historians are also Slavists, and you'd certainly count as a Russian linguist. In some contexts. But in others, you'd just be a translator or interpreter--sort of like the difference between an automotive engineer and a grease monkey. Ask me to translate a document, I'm there. Ask about the differences in Russian dialects, to parse an Old Russian text, to discuss how case functions in Russian or the rise of phonemic palatalization in Russian or stress placement in noncewords, I'm still there, you not so much. "Linguist" has different meanings by context.
My BIL's a geologist. He's ABD in geophysics. Never worked professionally as one. I've known lawyers and doctors who got their JDs and MDs but never passed the bar or board certification. They referred to themselves at times as lawyers and MDs. That they were--but "doctor" and "attorney" presuppose a practice are the jobs. An attorney is practicing; a lawyer is somebody who's studied the law, and may or may not practice. Friends in grad school had no trouble referring to themselves as astronomers; notice, they were still in school and didn't work as a practicing astronomer, whatever that means.
In some fields, in some contexts, you are what you trained for. In others, you are what you did. We are often accused, us Americans, of being defined by our jobs. That's not entirely true, it's a bad (and ethnicist) stereotype.
"Geologist" is somebody who searches for oil and gas, where I live. Elsewhere, it's a person who looks at seismic activity and mass wasting possibilities (sorry, that means "things like landslides or mudslides"
. For my BIL, it meant geophysics and deep plate tectonics. But I know of a woman who calls herself one and she taught high-school physics and biology ... but geology was her major.
