"Generally, I find that people are attracted to enthusiasm if it's unfettered and for the right reasons," says Hendrik Poinar, director of McMaster University's Ancient DNA Laboratory.
Julia Kempe couldn't bring herself to choose between physics and maths, nor between two graduate institutions. So she did two Ph.D.s at once in quantum computation.
A Ph.D. is great on fundamentals--it teaches you how to make something completely on your own--but it falls short on the practical stuff every entrepreneur has to master.