In 1939, Munk asked Sverdrup to take him on as a doctoral student. Sverdrup agreed, although Munk recalled him saying "I can't think of a single job that's going to become available in the next ten years in oceanography". Munk's studies were interrupted by the outbreak of World War II. He completed his doctoral degree in oceanography at Scripps under the University of California, Los Angeles in 1947. He wrote it in three weeks and it is the "shortest Scripps dissertation on record." He later realized that its principal conclusion is wrong.