Ross Geller - Career

Career

Ross trained for a career in paleontology, completed his Ph.D. and later works at the New York Museum of Prehistoric History. In season six "The One on the Last Night", Ross claims to have "given up a career in basketball" to become a palaeontologist. At another point, however, he says that he picked paleontology on a dare. He thinks that he would have been good at advertising and in "The One with the Mugging", Ross claims that he invented the phrase "Got Milk?". He also claims to have had the original idea for Jurassic Park. In high school, he got a 1250 on his SATs, although it's evident that he lies about his scores when he states "I got 1450 on the SATs" and Monica corrects him, to which he replies, "Damn, I forgot you were here." In the series finale, Monica mentions that Ross tried to make it as a dancer one summer.

Ross has always been obsessed with dinosaurs since he was a little kid, in season nine "The One with the Male Nanny", Ross tells a story about a time when he was playing and learning with dinosaurs toys in his room and how his father harshly didn't approve and told him to go outside and play like a real boy. He breaks down in tears as a result of this.

In season six, Ross begins to work as a professor at New York University and causes a stir among his colleagues by dating one of his students, Elizabeth. Eventually, he is given tenure, despite the fact that his papers (including a publication on sediment flow rates) are supposedly widely discredited, forgetting a class once, boring his students to sleep and occasionally giving grades without even looking at students' work.