Surviving Your Stupid, Stupid Decision to Go to Grad School
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The student who asks every speaker a question … will ask the speaker a question.
The slideshow will advance too far by accident, and the speaker will need help finding the “back” button.
If the speaker uses actual transparencies or gives an old-school “chalk talk,” he will act all superior about it.
The final slide will include a cute cartoon. Too little, too late.
Fifteen minutes past the scheduled end time, there will be no end in sight. Is nothing sacred?
YourSpace
Remember that grad students are technically employees of the university (unless it’s a matter of health insurance, benefits, parking, unionization, or living wage). A natural question on your first day is “Where might I find my office?” And a natural answer is, of course, “Ha ha ha ha ha! Your office? You think you’re getting an office? Are you the Queen Mother? Your office?”
Sorry, Your Majesty. Only a few rare grad students ever get their own office, and this fact only gets them beaten up anyway. What space do you have, then, to call your own?
Library Carrel
A library carrel, the place to stash all your obscure books no one else wants to use anyway, is what results when someone starts building a cubicle and gives up. Your carrel is your school’s reluctant acknowledgment that you’d kill someone if you had to share library tables with undergrads demanding to know why they can’t use Facebook on the library catalog computer.
Lab Bench
If you’re one of those science types, you may get your own little plot of laboratory real estate, where you store your bottles of toxic whatnot in exactly the sort of disarray only you can understand. And God help the student at the next bench who steals your Sharpie.
Outdoors
When you’re young and naïve, you picture yourself idyllically toting some work outside, lying on a verdant quad, sipping iced tea, and loving life. But you learn a lot about yourself the first time you try to work outside. Specifically, you learn that you don’t want to work outside. The ground isn’t actually soft—at least not compared to, say, a chair. Your laptop screen does not glow nearly as brightly as you thought it would. And all around you, undergrads yell inanities as they copulate on the quad.
Lap
Your lap is Nature’s desk—or at least that’s your school’s rationale for not giving you a real desk. Perfect for holding books and highly portable, your lap is the intended substrate for your laptop—and the best part is, no matter what, no one can ever take your lap away from you (unless they tell you to stand up).
Coffee Shop
You feel sophisticated when you work at a coffee shop, like an urbane urbanite, a polite cosmopolite, huddled in a corner (where the AC power outlet is) and sipping the largest, most espresso-filled drink they offer. You are not meant to be caged in a small office, you tell yourself—you are a person of the people. Not that you were ever offered a small office, but that’s not the point.
Home
Home is not a place for doing work; it is a place for relaxing. For the sake of your mental health, keep the two aspects of your life separate, and make sure never to bring your work home.
Just kidding. In grad school, you’ll do so much fucking work at home.
Public Transit
Read an advanced textbook with an unpronounceable title on the bus, and you’ll earn the respect of everyone listening to iPods or pretending not to stare at other passengers. “Who is that mysterious genius?” they’ll wonder. “Why didn’t that mysterious genius shower?”
Shared Crappy Office
This is the holy grail of spaces to occupy—which is sad. You get four walls, a door, and a desk, and a whole group of colleagues who talk loudly on the phone and repeatedly demand that you look at distracting websites.
Inconspicuous Consumption
Grad school is filled with special events designed to enrich your intellectual experience. But who gives a shit?
More important, many of these events offer free food—but you have to schedule your mooching carefully. You’re a busy person. You can’t waste time sitting through a boring talk only to learn that the bagels you saw on your way in are meant for something else.
Stealing food is not wrong. Foxes steal food. In fact, foxes steal live chickens. Are foxes immoral? No. Foxes are cute. So follow the example of the noble fox and use this handy guide to your new snack-filled universe. (And if, for some strange reason, your grad school affords you the opportunity to steal live chickens—do it.)
EVENT: Seminar/Colloquium
Likelihood of Free Food: Varies
Pros: If the seminar is run by someone unfamiliar with the mysterious ways of grad students, they may be stupid enough to set the food out before the talk begins. Then you can wander by, steal food, and—oh no!—suddenly remember something else you have to do. Let’s go, Free Doughnut. We’ve got places to be.
Cons: If the food is served after the seminar, you may have to pretend you sat through it. You’ll wander among the post-seminar crowd saying things like “I think the most exciting part of this talk was the middle,” convincing the masses that you shared their ordeal. Watch out for the overzealous Free Food Protector, who might slap your hand away from the food and say, “Aha! I know you’re lying—the seminar had no middle!”
EVENT: Mandatory Safety Training
Likelihood of Free Food: Low
Pros: You’ll learn how the fire extinguishers work, or where the chemical showers are, or how much radiation they’ve arranged for you to regularly ingest. Could be useful.
Cons: There’s rarely free food, and the “useful” part of the training will occupy two or three minutes. The rest will consist of the warning “Be safe” repeated over and over again. There might even be a mandatory quiz that was clearly written for brilliant people:
You come across unexploded munitions and decide to whack them with a hammer. Is this safe or unsafe?
Draw a funny animal mascot promoting safety.
EVENT: Holiday Party
Likelihood of Free Food: High
Pros: In the spirit of the holiday season, no one can deny you a little free food. You’re like Tiny Tim—the child, not the entertainer.
Cons: This is one of the few times your department may serve you alcohol, which is great—until you realize that all of the professors are getting drunk, too. It only takes one butt slap from a ninety-year-old cultural anthropologist to make you want to give up both drinking and Christmas.
EVENT: Distinguished Professor So-and-So from Elsewhere Tours the Department
Likelihood of Free Food: High
Pros: Departments like to deceive visiting dignitaries. They’ll casually fill all empty spaces with food—and good food, too. Food that needs to sit in a steam tray. Food heated with cans of Sterno. Crab dip. Chicken satay skewers. Little pita triangles. Real-people food.
Cons: This food is based on a lie. Your department wants the dignitary to think you celebrate this way all the time, that trays of crudités and assorted cheese cubes sit out in your department lobby every day.
More Pros: Free food based on a lie is still free food.
EVENT: Department Halloween Party
Likelihood of Free Food: High
Pros: If you don’t already have something you call your “Candy Drawer,” now’s the time to establish one. Candy transports well and keeps for months, so be sure to wear a shapeless costume with lots of internal pockets—i.e., dress as a ghost, a priest, or a candy thief.
Cons: You have to put up with all the dorky bullshit that academics trot out on Halloween. Someone always dresses as a student of a different discipline and thinks it’s hilarious. (“I’m a molecular biochemist, but I’m dressed as a molecular biophysicist! Ha ha ha ha ha!”)
EVENT: Exam Grading
Likelihood of Free Food: Medium to High
Pros: When professors ask you to do their job for them, they know you need a little extra encouragement. Grading a stack of three hundred ex
ams is such a heinous job that free pizza may not make up for it, but it will somewhat ease the pain of reading another illiterate lacrosse player’s attempt to fudge his way through the essay questions.
Cons: The pizza will keep you happy for an hour. Exam grading may last six hours. Sucker!
EVENT: Foody McFreeFood’s Free Food Bonanza, with Free Food
Likelihood of Free Food: Very High
Pros: This event features tons and tons of free food.
Cons: This event does not exist.
A special note on bagels: Free bagels are great. You can legitimately call them breakfast, lunch, or a snack. You can even call them dinner if you’re a hobo, which you might be. You stare at the tray of yeasty tori outside a seminar, marveling at the wonderful variety of flavors. Cinnamon raisin! Chocolate chip! Pumpernickel! Truly, we live in the best of all possible worlds.
But beware, for the bagels hold a deep, dark secret: the onion bagel.
The function of an onion bagel is to make all other bagels in a half-mile radius smell and taste like the onion bagel. Just as you’re enjoying a mouthful of, say, sweet cranberry goodness—you stop. Sniff. Lick tentatively. Could it be? Curse you, Onion Bagel!
If only, by some miracle, you could intervene at the moment of purchase. “Let’s see,” your department administrator probably said while waiting at the supermarket bakery. “We’ll get a dozen plain bagels. A dozen sesame seed. Half a dozen blueberry. And what are those? Gingerbread bagels? Ooh, how seasonal. A half dozen of those, please …”
Stopstopstop oh please stop, just pay for the bagels and go, oh pleasepleaseplease—
“… and one onion bagel. Just to fuck with the grad students.”
Noooooooooooooooo!
Recipes for Success
Grad students cannot live on free bagels alone. Free bagels fulfill only one of the four food groups (the “Freebie” group), the other three being the “Outright Stolen” group, the “Temporarily Hidden Until Its Rightful Owner Forgets About It” group, and of course, the (use sparingly!) “Food Purchased and Cooked Yourself” group.
When you absolutely must prepare your own food, try one of these special grad student recipes. Bon appétit! (That’s French for “Get back to work!”)
Fast-acting Coffee
INGREDIENTS/EQUIPMENT
Coffee beans Plastic stirring straw
Bean grinder
INSTRUCTIONS
Grind the coffee beans to a very fine powder.
With one end of the coffee straw in your nostril, snort the powder.
Wheeeeeeeeeeeeeeee!
Roasted Undergrad on a Spit
INGREDIENTS/EQUIPMENT
Barbecue pit
Open flame
Your favorite undergrad
INSTRUCTIONS
Skewer the undergrad on a spit, taking care to run the iron rod from the student’s pampered ass through his or her lying mouth.
As you rotate the spit over the open flame, instruct the undergrad to tell you again why he or she deserves to have the last exam regraded.
Wake up and sigh wistfully. Someday.
Thesis Committee Bribery Brownies
INGREDIENTS/EQUIPMENT
1 package brownie mix Copy of paper written by a thesis
Baking pan committee member
INSTRUCTIONS
Prepare brownies as per package directions.
Remove all brownies from pan. Line pan with committee member’s paper and replace brownies on top.
Bring brownies to thesis committee meeting. Tell everyone you’ve brought brownies for them—and what’s this? A paper written by a thesis committee member! Guess what must have happened: You were reading the paper for the tenth time because it’s so brilliant, and it must have fallen into the brownie pan, and you were too busy pondering the paper’s wisdom to notice!
Macaroni and Tears
INGREDIENTS/EQUIPMENT
1 pkg. macaroni The ability to view your life objectively
Bowl
INSTRUCTIONS
Cook macaroni and drain into bowl.
Think about your life, your progress, and the likelihood that you’ll graduate. Think about the years you’ll never get back. Think about how much work you have to do tonight.
For a rich, salty flavor, be sure to keep the bowl of macaroni right below your face as you think.
Home Cooking
INGREDIENTS/EQUIPMENT
Car or plane
INSTRUCTIONS
Get in car or plane.
Go home.
Eat what your parents cook.
Data Fudge
INGREDIENTS/EQUIPMENT
12 oz. chocolate Double boiler
1 pt. heavy cream Pan
INSTRUCTIONS
Measure out 12 oz. of chocolate, but you can say it’s 20.
Melt chocolate in double boiler for 9 minutes, but make believe it was 15 minutes, pretending to stir constantly.
Whisk in the heavy cream, writing down the time at which you added it, give or take an hour.
Scoop mixture into pan and tell everyone you allowed it to cool.
Free Food: Is It Possible to Take Too Much?
No.
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Research and Destroy
MAKING DATA PRETTY
IN THEORY, you’re in graduate school to work. (In reality, you’re in graduate school to complain about work.)
You’ve selected a topic that enraptures you so much that you can’t imagine doing anything else, primarily because you don’t have the time to imagine doing anything else. Unlike college, at grad school you can’t change your major, and unlike at an actual job, you can’t charge overtime. Your reward for years of drudgery is, if you’re lucky, the opportunity to publish your ideas in a small, unpopular journal.
What the hell were you thinking?
Oh. You were thinking that you’d use your intellect to illuminate a tiny corner of the world. How naïve.
Unfortunately, you may not yet understand exactly how tiny that corner is. As you progressed through school, the topic of each class narrowed a bit, and now you’re stuck studying only the most focused subjects:
Elementary School Science
High School Biology
College, underclassman Introduction to Animal Behavior
College, upperclassman Birds of the Americas
Graduate School Female-Specific Mating Practices of DulBecco’s Finch in 138 Square Feet of Peruvian Tundra on Alternate Thursdays and Their Impact on Municipal Waste Collection Policy
Your area of study may be esoteric, your findings may be inconsequential, and you may spend more effort validating your data-gathering method than actually employing it—but, man, you are totally gonna rock those 138 square feet of Peruvian tundra.
Your Advisor: Mentor or Tormentor?
Aristotle had Plato. Luke Skywalker had Obi-Wan Kenobi. And you’ve got some weirdo with big glasses and a nice computer who still thinks your name is Jeff.
Choosing your advisor is one of the most important parts of grad school, as it determines specifically who will take credit for the work you do. So when it comes time to select someone to oversee you—or overlook you—watch for the following types of advisor in your department:
The Jet-Setter
This professor’s career is zooming along, and she’s on a tight schedule, giving the keynote address at a different conference every week. For her graduate students, this means she won’t be able to do a lot of “hand-holding,” or “clarifying,” or “mentoring,” or “anything.”
If she asks how your research is progressing, it’s not because she’s interested; it’s because she’s just realized you’re still here.
The Deaf Optimist
Bad news about your research? Say no more. No, really—say no more, because she won’t hear it. A typical conversation with the Deaf Optimist goes something like this:
You: I’ve been working on this project for about a year now, and I don’t think
it’s going anywhere.
OPTIMIST: That’s great!
YOU: No, really—I’m positive it’s doomed to fail. Maybe I should switch to something else.
OPTIMIST: So you’ll have it ready to publish next week?
YOU: You don’t understand. I’ve proven conclusively that this project is a dead end. It’s a waste of time, money, and resources. A year of my adult life has been sacrificed in pursuit of the unattainable. Even if you had a hundred grad students working around the clock, they wouldn’t make an inch of progress toward this ridiculous goal.
OPTIMIST: Yes, now that you mention it, rainbows are beautiful!
There are methods of dealing with the Deaf Optimist, but they all involve weaponry.
The Tenure Master
This professor received tenure in 1970 and—coincidentally!—has not published anything since 1970. The very day his name alone was deemed sufficient to glean a university salary for life, he stopped his research, boarded up his office, and began performing “fieldwork” in Atlantic City.