I was in a meeting when a principal engineer (with a STEM PhD) mentioned that something didn't work the way he thought his thesis said it would work.
The moral of the lesson is to grapple with real world problems and constraints over academic theory.
School is not the real world
Theory is not the real world
Experimental data under narrow conditions is not the real world
This flies in the face of posters that scream "SCIENCE IS REAL."
The real world is full of unknown unknowns.
The only way to discover them is to get out there continuously.