by Adam Ruben
Oh well. The point is, you’re in a different town, you’re interacting with new people, and you’re discovering exactly how close your competitors are to scooping you.
Day 1
8:00 A.M. Wake up in hotel room (or, depending on how cheap your department is, hostel, dormitory, or packing crate).
8:15 A.M. Shower; dress crisply and conservatively. Remember, any attendee in a position of power could offer you a job—so you want to appear professional.
8:53 A.M. Arrive at conference. Stand in registration line to receive a free tote bag you’ll never use outside of this conference because it says something like “Ninth International Meeting on Herpes Simplex Virus.” You’ve never been cool, but even you have limits.
9:07 A.M. Pour a cup of coffee and enjoy a pastry from the breakfast table. Flip through the booklet of conference proceedings, circling all talks that sound interesting or relevant.
9:12 A.M. Find your own name in the proceedings and note that you are scheduled to present at 9:45 a.m. on the third day of the conference (and you’ve brought your laptop, so in the next day or two, you should put your talk together). Stare, flush with pride, at your name in print. It all starts here.
9:30 A.M. Keynote address begins. Take copious notes from seat at front of room. Concoct polite, incisive question for the speaker that illustrates your capacity for reason and suggests an interpretation he might have overlooked.
10:30 A.M. Keynote address ends. Raise your hand and ask your question. Speaker seems impressed but points out something you overlooked. Scholarly dialogue is so exciting!
11:45 A.M. Take conference-provided box lunch. Find an empty spot at a table of other grad students and enjoy the meal (except for the inevitable little container of potato salad that causes everyone to ask, “Does anyone want my potato salad?”).
2:00 P.M. Sit through four consecutive presentations, paying complete attention, even when a presenter mumbles or speaks with an incomprehensibly thick accent.
5:45 P.M. On the way back to your hotel room, meet other grad students, who invite you to an evening mixer. Though you had intended to go work on your talk, you acquiesce.
8:00 P.M. Mixer begins. Strike up a conversation about your research with two grad students.
8:04 P.M. Across the room, you see free wine.
8:05 P.M. Commiserate with the grad students about their own programs.
8:06 P.M. Across the room, you see free wine.
8:07 P.M. Um …
8:08 P.M. Free wine.
8:09 P.M. Excuse yourself. Wait in line for ten minutes, then chug the wine immediately and get a second glass to keep you company on your next trip through the line.
9:00 P.M. Now begins the time that will live on in your memory as “a blur.”
Day 2
8:00 A.M. Wake up in time for the day’s first session. Immediately generate, in your head, five reasons why it would be beneficial to fall back asleep.
8:02 A.M. You can’t argue with logic. Go back to sleep.
10:53 A.M. Wake up in time for the day’s fourth session. Dress in whatever clothes you can find, pausing to ensure the right articles of clothing are on the corresponding parts of your body—because you want to appear professional.
11:32 A.M. Arrive at conference facility. Badger conference personnel about where the free coffee can be found. They remind you that you missed both breakfast and the morning coffee break. Get belligerent.
11:40 A.M. Amble into the lecture hall, awkwardly carrying a sloshing mug of lukewarm coffee. Speaker, midway through his talk, glares at your interruption.
11:42 A.M. Push through a row of seated attendees to find a chair. Immediately put on mirrored sunglasses.
1:22 P.M. Wake up in time for the day’s sixth session, having slept in the lecture hall through lunch.
3:15 P.M. Encounter sixth-session speaker during afternoon coffee break and ask the most intelligent question you can. She smiles and advises you to consider her department when it comes time to select a graduate program. Reply that you are a grad student and that you’re in your ninth year. Bad-mouth your own program. Cry a lot.
5:05 P.M. Locate stash of leftover wine from previous night’s mixer and leftover pastries from this morning’s missed breakfast. Oh baby.
5:17 P.M. Slip into your hotel room carrying five full wine bottles and a box of Danishes. Bolt the door. Your presentation is tomorrow, so you should, uh, work on it.
5:31 P.M. With a blank PowerPoint file open on your laptop to help you feel productive, alternate taking swigs of stolen Shiraz and stuffing hotel towels into your suitcase.
8:30 P.M. Take a break from procrastination to drunkenly flip through channels on the TV in your room—and oh sweet Jesus it’s a Twilight Zone marathon!
11:19 P.M. No, William Shatner! Don’t open the airplane door!
1:15 A.M. Your roommate asks you to turn off the TV, stop drinking, and please go to bed. This startles you: All this time, I’ve had a roommate?
2:02 A.M. Before losing consciousness, set your alarm for 8:15, since your talk—which you seriously plan to begin assembling in the morning—is scheduled for 9:45.
Day 3
11:08 A.M. Wake up on top of the hotel vending machine with no memory of how you arrived there.
11:19 A.M. Stumble downstairs to the conference wearing your free tote bag on your head—because you want to appear professional.
11:23 A.M. Place mouth around spigot and drink entire contents of coffee urn.
11:45 A.M. Encounter keynote speaker in hallway. Tell him his work is bullshit and his wife is hot. Throw up on his shoes.
11:50 A.M. Since you slept through your own talk, interrupt the present talk to deliver yours. Shout the current contents of your presentation across the room: “Click to add title! Click to add subtitle!”
11:55 A.M. Meet Randy, who is widely respected in his field as a hotel security guard.
11:58 A.M. Meet the rest of the field, which is actually a field. Randy has removed you from the conference and thrown you into a field.
2:20 A.M. Board flight to return home. Tell advisor you “really got your name known” at the conference. Submit receipts for reimbursement.
The Blame Game
So things aren’t going well in grad school. Your classes are difficult, or your responsibilities are overwhelming, or your research is going nowhere, or your baby done left you for a grad student with access to a larger flow cytometer. But that couldn’t be your fault, could it? Could it? COULD IT?
No. Of course not. The First Law of Grad School states that everything that could go wrong is someone else’s fault. Whose fault, you ask? That depends on where the spinner lands. Go to the next page and give the Blame Game a spin and find out whom to bitch about today. (The spinner is really just a printed arrow, not an actual moving part—but that’s the publisher’s fault.)
* Congratulations; you found the most obscure joke in this book. Call Apogee. Say aardwolf.
* This technique is used exclusively by entitled, sniveling little undergrads.
5
Undergraduates and You
THE HAND THAT ROBS THE CRADLE
THERE’S a great line in the film Ferris Bueller’s Day Off. (Okay, there are many great lines, but here’s one.) When Ferris and his friends outwit a snooty waiter to sneak into lunch at an exclusive restaurant, the waiter sizes them up and says, before walking away, “I weep for the future.”
I felt that way many times in grad school, particularly when I worked as a teaching assistant.
“But we need to check Facebook during the lecture!” my students would whine.
I weep for the future.
“But in high school, we were allowed to plagiarize!” I weep for the future.
“I turned on the chemical safety shower because you let me get bored, and now it won’t turn off.”
I weep for the future. And I call the Environmental Health and Safety Department immediately.
To un
dergrads, we’re the outsiders who don’t belong on their campus, whose lives they don’t quite comprehend, whose foreign accents they make no secret of not tolerating. To us, undergrads are the entitled little snots who have no interest in the subjects we love or the classes their parents are paying for them to sleep through.
Neither group is allowed to have sex with the other, which is more of a problem for us than for them, since on average they’re hotter than we are.
What should one make of this relationship? What happens when we encounter undergrads socially? Why didn’t they do this week’s reading? And how do we communicate to them that serious academic papers should not, at the bottom, read, “Sent from my iPhone”? Let’s learn more about academia’s dominant but least evolved species, its complex motivating forces (aka “grades”), and how, together, you may covertly do the nasty.
A Little College Is a Dangerous Thing
As a teaching assistant, you’ll have the pleasure of interacting with a variety of undergrads. Well, not so much “pleasure” as “obligation.” After a while, you’ll recognize that most undergrads, far from being the complex and unique individuals they think they are, fall into a few discrete categories:
The Athlete
Colleges are run by old people who like to watch balls being thrown well but cannot throw balls well themselves. Some young people at these colleges can throw balls well. Thus, the old people have abolished academic requirements for the ball-throwing young people so that said young people have more time to throw balls for the amusement of said old people.
Expect to receive a note from the Athlete’s coach excusing him from attendance, assignments, and consequences. You might say the unfair privilege accorded to student athletes is the eight-hundred-pound gorilla in the room, but really the eight-hundred-pound gorilla in the room is the neckless behemoth who occasionally shows up and occupies an entire end of your seminar table, awakening only occasionally to drool and make long vowel sounds.
The Absentee
Though the registrar assures you this student is in your class, you’ll see her only at the midterm and final exams, when she’ll casually waltz in as though she’s always been attending. The Absentee will also show up on the last day of class just to fill out the end-of-semester course evaluation, in which she’ll criticize you for not being accessible.
The Extra-Credit Whore
For reasons that defy the laws of mathematics, some students believe that the points earned by “extra” credit are worth more than points earned by “credit.” The Extra-Credit Whore will wait until the end of the semester—literally wait, without doing any work—and then begin begging for an extra-credit assignment. And not just any extra-credit assignment, either. An easy one. Maybe one that involves making a funny video or shoebox diorama with a friend.
The Activist
It’s cute when young people think they’re making a difference, isn’t it? The Activist has noble, unrealistic ideals (“This bake sale will cure cancer!”) and strong political opinions only occasionally grounded in fact.
THE ACTIVIST: The World Bank is evil and must be stopped!
YOU: Tell me what the World Bank is.
THE ACTIVIST: Um … can I look at Wikipedia?
The flyers the Activist hangs all over campus are hilarious, too, because they can’t hide the reality that the group’s social function supersedes its altruism:
Did you know that AIDS kills 8,000 people per day?
Come to the Student AIDS Coalition meeting on Thursday at 7:30 pm in the Multipurpose Room.
FREE PIZZA!!!
The Legacy
When grading the Legacy’s first exam, you’ll notice that (a) the Legacy is as dumb as a box of frozen waffles, (b) the Legacy conveniently wrote his or her middle name on the exam, and (c) it happens to be the name of the new stadium on campus. The Legacy expects items (b) and (c) to compensate entirely for item (a). If you fear that this student could someday end up as your boss, relax: This student is your boss right now.
The Partyer
The Partyer spends every night partying and every day talking about the previous night’s party. You can identify the Partyer because he arrives in class every day with a newly permanent-markered X on one hand and a sixty-four-ounce cup of tap water in the other. And then sleeps. And maybe throws up.
The Pledge
To some extent, all people need to feel accepted. But many undergrads need to feel accepted by a group of binge-drinking idiots whose only goal is to get into the pants of other binge-drinking idiots. While you thankfully get to miss most of this process, you do have to witness one part: the pledge period.
If students will only answer you in rhyming two-word sentences, or if they show up for class in duck costumes but won’t explain why, you may initially misconstrue them as creative. Nope. They’re Pledges, which means they’re doing what an older idiot commanded them to do so that someday they can command the next set of younger idiots.
The Student Visa
Foreign students are absurdly respectful. In other nations, apparently, instructors command reverence, so when your students turn in an assignment, expect to see differences like this:
FOREIGN STUDENT: Pardon me, Dear Leader, but my staple has not penetrated all twenty-five pages I have authored. I am much shamed.
AMERICAN STUDENT: Yo, can I get an extension? Hey, who farted?
For all their welcome deference, though, Student Visas create a problem when it comes time to grade their work. Since English may not be their first language, your university will remind you that (a) you cannot grade their work the same way as that of other students, and (b) you cannot grade their work differently from that of other students. Somehow this dichotomy makes sense to your university, but it’s the sort of logical conundrum that’s been known to make robots explode.
The Canadian Student Visa
Canadian students think they’re exotic because they attended International Student Orientation and don’t have Social Security numbers. You can recognize Canadian Student Visas because they say things like I don’t know, “I got such high marks during my grade-twelve victory lap that the Minister of Moose awarded me an igloo! Eh?”
The One Who Will Get You Expelled
The One Who Will Get You Expelled sits there, sultry and nubile, fully aware of his or her power to get you expelled. Over the course of the semester, the One Who Will Get You Expelled makes you repeatedly weigh the importance of your graduate career against the transient pleasure of turning that undergrad into an undergrab.
Think again: Your school’s deans constantly remind you that if it’s true love, it can wait until the semester ends. This is because the deans lost their libidos years ago, and their genitals have long since shriveled up and dropped off like zucchini flowers. If the deans weren’t sexless spoilsport eunuchs, they’d know that true love waits half an hour at the most. Like swimming after eating.
The Entitled Snowflake Who Thinks He or She Is the Center of the Universe
All of them.
Perplexed by TXT
To the professor at the front of the lecture hall, undergraduates tapping away on laptops and mobile devices look studious. But to you, the teaching assistant who stands in the back, all of their little screens are visible—and you haven’t seen one pixel that’s in any way related to the lecture topic.
Honestly, you wonder, why do they even come to class if they’re just going to ignore the professor and text one another? Then you feel old.
As you shake your head at their goldfish-level attention spans and curse whichever misguided administrator decided to enable wireless Internet access in the classroom, you may wonder what exactly the dimwits are saying. Here’s a translation of a text-message conversation between two undergrads during class:
STUDENT1> SUP
Hello, colleague.
STUDENT2> hey
Good day to you as well.
STUDENT1> i h8 this class
Frustratingly, my apti
tude and interests lie elsewhere.
STUDENT2> me 2
I concur. Would that I were studying the classical arts!
STUDENT1> ta is so boring
Unlikely as it seems, our attractive teaching assistant has failed to command my rapt attention. Clearly I have no one to blame but myself.
STUDENT2> lol
Your plight amuses me.
STUDENT1> dude i got so wastd last nite
You know, sending text messages in class is rude and inappropriate.
STUDENT2> i kno
Indeed. You make a fair point.
STUDENT1> u gonna git wastd 2nite?
Our rudeness ought to result in punishment.
STUDENT2> mayb
I will bake cookies for our attractive teaching assistant as a means of apology and supplication.
STUDENT1> did u git wit dat grl
Knave! It is I who should bake cookies for our attractive teaching assistant!
STUDENT2> yeh she ws ok
Let us be reasonable: We can BOTH bake cookies.
STUDENT1> lol
What a ticklishly scintillating proposal! O, such boundless cunning.