Bridgit Mendler reveals she hasn’t earned her PhD yet

Bridgit Mendler has opened up about one aspect of her education that hasn’t been made entirely clear.

The former Disney Channel star recently made headlines when she announced that she was adopting her foster son and revealed she’s the chief executive officer of satellite data startup, Northwood Space.

However, she has since taken to X, formerly known as Twitter, to clarify the academic achievements listed on her LinkedIn page, which previously stated that she has earned degrees from the University of Southern California (USC), the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and is currently finishing up her last year of Harvard Law School.

The page previously made it appear as if she had earned her PhD from MIT, but she posted on Thursday 7 March that she hasn’t finished yet.

“It came to my attention that something on my linkedin profile is causing confusion that I want to clarify: I am two months away from a JD and I don’t already have a PhD,” her post on X began.

“The PhD is something I started working towards in 2020 and I pursued it jointly with my law degree but when I moved to California last summer and decided that for family reasons we would stay on the west coast, it had to go on pause. I apologise I really should have updated my LinkedIn page sooner. I’ll still fight for it, but how it gets completed is up to the administration and my principal investigator and what they think is appropriate.”

Her post continued as she went on to justify why she decided to leave the program, mentioning that she was juggling “hard things” and that resulted in making “hard choices”.

“(Side note, if anyone has a recommendation for how to best express my circumstance wrt the PhD on LinkedIn (sic), would happily take suggestions as I make the edit),” the post ended.

In the post, Mendler also reflected on her mindset in recent years as she’s gone through life changes - like becoming a mother to her foster son in 2022, which she announced on X.

“The other news I wanted to share is I’m a mama to a sweet four-year-old boy. Started fostering in 2021 adopted near Christmas of 2022. I’m so lucky — being a parent is the biggest gift and most defining experience there is,” her tweet read alongside a photo of two people on a beach during a sunset. “That’s my news for now folks.”

The Good Luck Charlie actor, 31, also broke the news that she is launching a career in the space industry with Northwood Space, which will create a “data highway between earth and space”.

“We are designing shared ground infrastructure from first principles to expand access to space,” Mendler wrote on X. “We have a lot of work ahead of us but that’s the fun part. If you like building quickly and seeing your work deployed in locations around the globe with real impact, we want you at Northwood,” she added, along with a link to a hiring page.

Speaking to CNBC, Mendler explained that the California-based startup aims to mass produce ground stations - large antennas that connect to satellites in space. Her company has already received around $6m in funding from investors including Founders Fund, Andreessen Horowitz, and Also Capital.

“Space is getting easier along so many different dimensions but still the actual exercise of sending data to and from space is difficult. You have difficulty finding an access point for contacting your satellite,” she told the outlet.