Surviving Your Stupid, Stupid Decision to Go to Grad School Read online

  FOREWORD

  PREFACE

  PROLOGUE

  INTRODUCTION

  1 / Stop? Drop? Enroll?

  Deciding Whether to Ruin Your Life

  Many applicants believe that graduate school will be a wonderful land of chocolate daisies fed to playful otters in the golden autumn sunshine under a prostitute-filled sky. Chapter 1 will shatter those illusions and, paradoxically, also provide advice to help you enroll.

  2 / Selecting a Graduate Program

  Where, When, How, and Why, God, Why?

  Graduate programs come in many miserable shapes and harrowing sizes, and now it’s time to select which one you’d like to financially devastate your future—in other words, chapter 2 will prepare you to eventually file for Chapter 11.

  3 / Grad Student Life

  You Weren’t Going to Do Much with Your Twenties Anyway

  In chapter 3, you will learn tips and tricks for your day-to-day life, including techniques for free food theft, alternatives to hygiene, and, given current stipend levels, the surprising nutritional value of sawdust.

  4 / Research and Destroy

  Making Data Pretty

  The purpose of research is to keep one’s advisor happy. Or, to use a tired analogy, if a graduate student is a vibrator, research is the battery that fuels the vibrator, which sits in the rectum of one’s advisor. Chapter 4 is dedicated to the fine art of keeping the batteries charged and the vibrator running.

  5 / Undergraduates and You

  The Hand That Robs the Cradle

  It is with envy, resentment, and prurient lust that we regard our undergraduate colleagues. While we refine Lexis Nexis searches, they spend spring break in Mazatlán with twelve sorority sisters named Jen who “really shouldn’t lick that, but, hey, it’s spring break!” Chapter 5 details the proper relationship to maintain with undergraduates, an earnest rapport that blends disdain with sporadic boob-touching.

  6 / Six Degrees of Exasperation

  Law School, Business School, Medical School, and More

  Graduate school can be considered the bastard step-cousin of its prodigal postgraduate relatives: law school, business school, and medical school. Chapter 6 is dedicated to the students who were dumb enough to stay in school but smart enough to study something that makes them employable. Fuckers.

  7 / Let My Pupil Go

  Getting the Fuck Out of Grad School

  Finally, in chapter 7, the reader exits graduate school like a caterpillar gracefully emerging from some sort of shit-filled caterpillar trap. As an advanced degree recipient, you are now prepared to enter society armed with an acute method of determining, conclusively, whether your clients want fries with that.

  EPILOGUE

  AFTERWORD

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  THERE exists a subculture of dedicated academics who view spending a decade masochistically overworked and underappreciated as a laudable goal. They lead the lives of the impoverished, grade the exams of the whiny, and spend lonely nights in the library or laboratory pursuing a glowing truth that only six or seven people will ever care about. These people are grad students, and they are idiots.

  This book is for readers considering or already committed to spending the best years of their lives without sunlight. You’ll learn which departmental events have the best free food, what pranks to play on hot-but-vapid undergrads, how to convincingly fudge data, and why your friends who opted to take nondescript nine-to-five jobs after college were actually the smart ones.

  SERIOUSLY? A foreword and a preface?

  Yes. The existence of both sections can teach you a lot about grad school:

  Much can be gained by stretching a small amount of content over multiple pages.

  In general, such redundancy imparts powerful messages that are powerful.

  Your reaction right now reveals whether you should be a grad student:

  Those unfit for grad school have skipped ahead, probably to a page with an illustration.

  Those who belong in grad school feel a compulsion to read every word (and, in some cases, to take notes and prepare an extensive critique on the book’s use of dialectical assonance).

  ALL right, now this is just insane. A prologue? Really? Are we stuck here in limbo, doomed never to begin the book?

  Exactly. Now you’re getting it. This book is like your life, and the prologue is grad school. You eagerly want to begin your life, but grad school stands in the way, and just when you think it’s over—nope! Another section.

  And the hell of it is, you could begin your life this moment. Really. You could skip to chapter 1 and begin reading the actual book. But out of obligation to the printed word, or out of inertia, or out of a misguided need to finish what you start, you’ll keep reading and waiting.

  A foreword, a preface, and a prologue. Ridiculous. I mean, seriously, what’s next—an introduction?

  EVERY speech at my college graduation buzzed with a sense of finality. “You have completed your education,” each one reminded us. “Now go contribute to society!”

  And most of my classmates eagerly accepted the challenge, having known that this day—the official, robe-clad end of the beginning—would someday arrive. As they pocketed their diplomas, they envisioned their new jobs, their new responsibilities, their lives outside the academy. They entered college as children, but they exited on that hot June afternoon as citizens of the world.

  Most of them. Not me.

  And not all of my classmates, either. As guest speakers and valedictorians exhorted us to go forth into the real world, a few of us felt that the directive was a bit premature. We knew that college had ended, but we also knew that the “real” world was years away. We were prepared instead to enter a half-assed compromise between college and real life, a simultaneously intense and lackadaisical academic perdition called “grad school.”

  I felt a little like a cheater, like a twelve-year-old who still waded in the kiddie pool, knowing it was well past time to start swimming, but was frightened of the loud teenagers in the big pool. Or maybe like a budding musician who’d mastered Guitar Hero, but had never picked up an actual guitar.

  Instead of a job and a boss and a mortgage, September would bring another college campus with its dorms and quads and classrooms—and we wouldn’t even feel like its most welcome occupants.

  We would walk around our new planned communities in a daze, not quite fitting in with the social culture, and not really supposed to. We would experience all the disorientation of a new campus—just as we did four years before—but none of the excitement. And we’d have no idea whether to go to the football games.

  I spent the first two months of grad school determining whether three amino acid residues (out of hundreds) were important for the functioning of a certain protein (out of thousands) that helps certain bacteria eat a sugar called arabinose.

  I demonstrated that those three residues are not important.

  Two months.

  But that’s grad school. You take a tiny corner of the universe that a professor finds fascinating and bury your face in it, looking up only occasionally to steal unattended bagels.

  At the end of two months, I felt ready to announce my discovery to the world. “Residues 103, 107, and 109 are unimportant!” I wanted to cry from the hilltops. “Unimportant!” But a journal article never quite coalesced, and I moved on to a different lab, and now exactly zero people know about my discovery—which, had I ended up publishing the results, would have been exactly the number of people who cared.

  What was this? Throughout my life, I felt I was gearing up to do somethin
g. Now I had finished my college education, and as a reward, I got to sit in an ignored corner of an academic building, growing and harvesting plate after plate of meaningless bacteria, solely for the sake of turning grant money into PowerPoint slides into fodder for more grant money.

  To a member of the generation that was reminded at every turn, “You’re special!” nothing strikes a blow like realizing you’ve reached adulthood positioned to be completely, maybe permanently, irrelevant.

  Hence this book. No matter where you are in the grad school process, you’ve probably felt this way (or will soon).

  Sure, you love what you study—but to the exclusion of nearly all else? When you’re typing page three of a twenty-five-page paper at 4:00 a.m., sucking down your ninth Red Bull of the night, will you honestly feel there’s nothing you’d rather do? Or will you shut your laptop in anger, thrust your head into your hands, and lament your stupid, stupid decision to go to grad school?

  If there’s one thing I’ve learned from writing a book about grad school, it’s that writing a book about college must be easy. Most college students are young and overconfident; they drink beer, go to classes, take exams, write papers, party, live in dorms, and deal with professors, parents, and roommates—in other words, their experiences are relatively universal.

  Grad students are all different. You could earn a master’s, a PhD, a JD, an MBA, a DVM, (that’s a Doctor of Veterinary Medicine), or one of hundreds of other degrees. Your daily routine could include hours of classroom instruction (either giving or receiving it), or you may never need to attend class. You might obligatorily spend twelve hours a day in a lab, or you might have to research your dissertation at your own pace in a location of your choosing. Hell, you may not even write a dissertation. You also might not have oral exams, teaching responsibilities, or an actual advisor. Your program may stop after a flat-out guaranteed two years, or you could find yourself puttering around campus a decade later, swearing up and down that you’re going to graduate any minute. You might be twenty-two years old and eager to spend the rest of your life studying particle physics, or you might be fifty, have a job and a family, and have decided to earn an MBA at night online for a little salary bump.

  So here’s what I don’t want. I don’t want to find my book on Amazon.com with little user reviews that say things like this:

  What the hell is a “thesis”? April 13, 2010

  By Stupid Whiny Complainer

  Not everything in this book applied to me! Waah! Waah!

  If you read a sentence in this book about the GRE, for example, and you’re getting your advanced degree from a pharmacy college, which means you’ve taken the PCAT instead—let it go. As grad school teaches in spades, it’s not all about you. In fact, almost nothing is.

  So relax, enjoy, and please fight the urge to take notes. Maybe you’ll even learn something, which is allegedly the point of grad school.

  Then get back to work.

  1

  Stop? Drop? Enroll?

  DECIDING WHETHER TO RUIN YOUR LIFE

  WHEN facing a major decision—say, whether to buy a car—take a piece of paper and make two columns. Label one “Pros” and the other “Cons.” In these columns, write the positive and negative factors that will influence your decision. (For example, “On the one hand, I’d have an easier commute, but on the other hand, I’d have to pay for parking.”) Then see which list is longer—and your decision is made.

  When deciding whether to go to grad school, the process is similar. Take a piece of paper and make two columns. Label one “Cons” and the other “Super Cons.” In these columns, write the negative and really negative factors that influence your decision. (For example, “On the one hand, I’d feel overworked, but on the other hand, I’d also be depressed.”) Then see which list is longer—and do whatever the hell you want anyway.

  After all, the decision to attend grad school is made with the heart, not with the head. And your heart is a moron. Your heart says, “I love to learn!” while your head says, “Hey, wait a minute. I’m the one who has to do the learning!”

  But you can’t fight an organ that could kill you at any moment, so listen to your heart. If it says, “Go to grad school,” you know what to do. (See a doctor. It’s supposed to say, “Ka-thump, ka-thump.” Seriously. If your heart speaks words, you’re fucked.)

  Two Schools of Thought

  Some people think grad school will be just like another few years of college: “College was fun, so grad school will be even funner, because I’ll be able to buy alcohol legally!” These are typically the same people who don’t see anything wrong with the word funner.

  In reality, graduate school can be considered an extension of college in the same way that death can be considered an extension of life.

  Some of the primary differences between college and grad school:

  In College In Grad School

  You drink coffee … on Monday mornings to recover from hangovers. four or five times a day to keep yourself, at best, in a semi-lucid state called “autopilot.”

  The absolute highlight of every week is … Friday night, when you can stay out late and have fun with good friends and cheap booze. Wednesday afternoon, when your department has a seminar that includes free doughnuts.

  A “union” is … the place where students hang out, eat, and play pool. something you and your fellow graduate laborers are not allowed to form.

  You drink away … the night. your sorrows.

  You’re upset because the clerk at the local convenience store … starts carding. makes more money than you.

  You study because … you have to. you want to. Holy shit.

  You sometimes neglect your work because … you’re going to parties, socializing, and enjoying your newfound freedom. you’re doing other work.

  You’re excited because you just successfully hooked up … with this really hot guy or girl you’ve had your eye on. your laptop to the library server.

  You live in … a small, cramped, substandard box called a “dorm.” a small, cramped, substandard box called a “studio apartment.”

  Sometimes, as an accessory, you wear … a pledge pin. a USB flash drive.

  You find this table … amusing. depressing.

  Quiz: Is Grad School Right for Me? Or Do I Prefer Joy?

  Stop! Before you decide to matriculate, which is a hilarious word, consider that grad school is not for everyone. For example, supermodels can count themselves out right away, as can regular models, athletes, aesthetes, optimists, social butterflies, the “in” crowd, the outward bound, the upwardly mobile, international singing sensations, aristocracy, the generally well-adjusted, and anyone else already enjoying life.

  To determine whether grad school is right for you, take this simple quiz. (Hint: If you’re reading this book for pleasure but thinking, “Hooray! I get to take a quiz!,” you’re halfway there.)

  Here’s a criterion to start you off. This quiz is like the ones you see in Glamour or Cosmo. If when you see those titles, you picture them in your mind like this …

  Glamour: (J Glam 6(23): 13826–8)

  Cosmo: (Cos Rev Lett B 167(1): 220–9)

  … you’re ready to enroll.

  I want my significant other to

  love me forever!

  stick with me through good times and bad!

  abandon me after two or three frustrating years of incompatible schedules.

  To me, money is

  very important.

  somewhat important.

  wholly unnecessary and loathsome. Fie upon thee, o vile money!

  If I were an animal, I would be

  a tiger.

  a bear.

  a tiger or a bear who is in grad school.

  At least half my conversations include the phrase

  “It was the best time I’ve had in my entire life.”

  “It was the drunkest I’ve ever been, ever.”

  “It was one of the more thoughtful pieces I’ve heard on
NPR this week.”

  The most beautiful thing in the world is

  a rainbow.

  true love.

  the Euler equation.

  When I was little, I always wanted to be

  an astronaut.

  the President.

  someone who designs a small valve on an astronaut’s shoe or publishes esoteric analyses of presidential policy.

  I see a tray of free pastries. I think,

  “These look pretty good. I may eat one.”

  “I’m not very hungry. Oh well.”

  “Well, that takes care of this week’s breakfasts, lunches, and dinners.”

  I’d love to earn fame and notoriety

  right now!

  during a long and successful career.

  for someone else.

  Train A leaves New York at 9:03 a.m. traveling at 80 miles per hour, and Train B leaves Washington, D.C., at 10:18 a.m. traveling at 70 miles per hour. If both trains maintain a constant speed,

  Train A will have traveled 100 miles by the time Train B departs.

  the two trains will pass each other near Wilmington, Delaware.

  I can still only afford the Chinatown bus.

  I hope

  someday to achieve greatness.

  for a secure, stable future.

  rarely.