She Earned A PhD Without An Undergraduate Degree

Another interesting fact about Jane Goodall is that she earned a PhD without an undergraduate degree. Since she couldn't afford college, Goodall was encouraged by her mother to take typing and bookkeeping classes in order to get a stable job. However, Goodall found working at an office to be boring, so when a friend invited her on a lengthy trip to her family's farm outside of Nairobi, Kenya, she decided to waitress to help pay for the trip. When she was 23, she was given the opportunity to work at a natural history museum with renowned paleoanthropologist Louis Leakey. According to National Geographic, Leakey thought Goodall would be the ideal candidate to research the social life of chimpanzees at Gombe because of her love of animals and lack of any scientific training. Jane was fascinated by the notion.

Shivey claims that Goodall attended a doctoral program at Cambridge University in 1962 without having earned an undergraduate degree thanks to Leakey's influence. She was one of only a select few to do so, albeit she wasn't overly excited about it. She became the eighth person in Cambridge University history to seek a PhD without first earning a bachelor's degree when she got her PhD in ethology from the university in 1965. Her early years of research at Tanzania's Gombe Stream National Park were documented in her thesis, Behavior of free-living chimpanzees.