Basic Trope: A character has multiple PhDs to tell the audience that they're a super-genius, even though this would be unrealistic in real life.
- Straight: Devon, the team's polymath and "science guy", is in his thirties and has PhDs in geology, biochemistry, and particle physics.
- Exaggerated: Devon is a Teen Genius who achieved six doctorates by the age of nineteen.
- Downplayed: Devon is in his fifties with one "real" doctorate and one honorary one. He's now working on his second.
- Justified:
- Devon's dissertation was so brilliant and all-encompassing that three departments awarded him PhDs at the same time. He only went through grad school once.
- Devon is a 500-year-old immortal who completes a PhD every once in a while to keep his mind sharp.
- Devon really, really likes to impress people and went through the large amount of years to earn those PhDs for no purpose other than to be admired.
- Inverted: Devon is the smartest of the team by a mile, and yet is the only one without a PhD. Everyone else has two, but seems to be of average intelligence.
- Subverted: The team decides to bring on Devon after hearing he's got three PhDs. He turns out to not be the super-genius they were hoping for, but instead a bumbling perpetual student with no career advancement in sight.
- Double Subverted: The team decides to bring on Devon after hearing he's got three PhDs. He turns out to not be the super-genius they were hoping for, but instead a bumbling perpetual student with no career advancement in sight...until they get into a sticky situation that Devon manages to Mac Gyver his way out of using his expertise.
- Parodied: ???
- Zig-Zagged: ???
- Averted: Nobody has more than one PhD.
- Enforced: ???
- Lampshaded: "...How much time did you spend in grad school, exactly?"
- Invoked: ???
- Exploited: ???
- Defied: After Devon finishes his PhD, his friends ask him when he'll get his next one, because the geniuses in their comics have plenty. Devon incredulously tells them that he's not going through grad school again, but instead going to do some varied postdoctoral research.
- Discussed: "Why has Bob got more letters after his name than I've got in mine?"
- Conversed: ???
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