by Adam Ruben
If you find you miss the daily pain and nagging annoyance of grad school, give yourself a paper cut.
Wallpaper every room in the only house you can afford. (You’ll still have leftover paper.)
Career Ends
Ask children what they want to be when they grow up, and you’ll get answers that are as cute as they are unlikely—yet we still tell kids that they can be anything they want to be, and they believe us. Crane operator? Sure. Professional baseball player? Why not? Fire-breathing princess? Uh, okay.
By the time you enter college, the phrase “when I grow up” gets a bit awkward. Technically, you’ve already grown up—you’re just taking four years to prepare yourself for your dream career—so “when I grow up” might just mean “next June.”
Spoken in grad school, “when I grow up” is simply depressing, because:
1. Your career choice has gotten very specific and very boring. (“Someday I want to be a visiting lecturer in an expository writing program!”)
2. You’re thirty-two freaking years old. Don’t let your kids hear you talk that way.
Now that you’ve nearly grown up, it’s time to decide on a career. As you can see from the following list of potential jobs, the possibilities are limitless, except in the sense that they’re extremely limited. Pick your favorite, and go fantasize about the career you’ll begin “when you’re middle-aged and broke.”
Professor
The academic route has two stages: First you’re an assistant professor, whose job is to get tenure; then you become an associate professor, whose job is to have tenure. Sound like a satisfying life? If you’re a fan of cruel irony, staying in academia is a good way to perpetuate the accursed cycle that enslaved you for so many years. That way, when people ask what you do for a living, you can happily declare, “I’m part of the problem!”
Captain of Industry
If your degree is in science or engineering, you have the option of leaving higher education to work in industry—or, as the snooty academics call it, “going to the Dark Side.” This is an allusion to Star Wars and would be accurate—if those on the Dark Side worked shorter hours, got paid more, and contributed meaningfully to society.
Strange, Oblivious Hermit
Imagine yourself unshaven, stoop-shouldered, and babbling incomprehensibly—like a grad student, squared. As popularized by that guy who lived in Val Kilmer’s closet in Real Genius, this is the career choice of many physicists and mathematicians, who proudly declare themselves “pre-hermit.” If you’ve ever thought, “Yeah, I could see spending a decade in a garage full of Mountain Dew cans and mail-order centrifuges,” take one last look at the sunshine, grab a final shower, then get to work. The world awaits your brilliance.
High-School Teacher with an Advanced Degree
Maybe you have visions of being that one influential educator, speaking articulately with warm frankness and smiling while crinkling your eyes, like Robin Williams in Dead Poets Society, or Robin Williams in any other movie. Or maybe you have visions of the slight pay increase your degree will earn you (if you work for fifty years, it will financially compensate you for your decision to go to grad school!). But, really, you just don’t want to suffer through years of the tenure process before you get to order people around in the classroom.
Professional Student
If you’re dedicated, efficient, and truly, truly fucked in the head, you may choose to pursue an additional degree. Perhaps you think your PhD is a nice precursor to law school, or perhaps you have a master’s, but you want a different kind of master’s. It’s more likely, though, that you’re just scared of the real world. Either that or you honestly want to become a medical patent attorney and civil engineer who writes creatively about early existentialist philosophy—in Sanskrit.
Someone Who Squandered Something Very Precious
Once you earn an advanced degree, everyone’s expectations of you rise, revealing a previously inaccessible swath of potential disappointment. If, say, you never finished high school, your loved ones will be proud if you end up as an airport shuttle driver. But bag an unused degree, and suddenly it’s the first half of every sentence about you: “That’s Uncle Dave. He actually has a PhD in chemistry, but now he lives in that godawful fishing colony. I think he traps eels or something. Such a waste.”
Haven’t Thought About It
Uh-oh.
* This is absurd, as most dissertations consist of at least three or four sentences.
Epilogue
GRAD school is a world of shit. It just is. You know this.
You work a job with hours that bleed into and subsume your free time. You earn the leanest praise and mediate the pettiest disputes. You’re paid very little, or nothing at all, or—big fun!—you pay them. True, there are moments of real personal discovery, but also tedium, repetition, seminars, and repetition. Even if you vehemently love your subject—and to justify your stupid, stupid decision, you’d better—the day-to-day drudgery can quickly crush your initial idealism.
As each day brings more doubt and less progress, you get caught in grad school’s academic undertow, and even when you notice what’s going on, your natural response is not to act, but to complain.
Please allow this book to offer one piece of serious advice (don’t worry, this is the only one): Take control.
Decide that enough is enough. Stop waiting for your advisor to guide your work—write a paper using your own brain and slap it down on his or her desk. Study—really, actually study—what it is you’re studying. Realize that you can’t include everything in your thesis, and drop your lofty and unrealistic plan to transform the field. You won’t. Plan what you need to do to graduate, write it down, sit with the person whose approval you need, and work up a timeline. Seek out interesting conferences, and if your department won’t pay for you to attend them, search for outside sponsorship. (You have the freaking Internet, for crying out loud.) Actively pursue your own intellectual goals, because—and it’s so easy to forget this—that’s why you’re here.
Can’t find the motivation to work today? Tough shit. It’s like a snow day: Every day off you give yourself makes you feel good that day, but it’s one more day you’ll have to make up in June when you really want to be out of school.
It’s possible that many graduate programs want you to get depressed, say “Fuck it,” and take charge of your own destiny. They may consider this part of your necessary struggle. Well, so be it. Wait no longer. Take charge now.
And get on with your stupid, stupid career.
AN EPILOGUE and an afterword? Really?
No.
DOES anyone actually read the acknowledgments who isn’t mentioned in them? Don’t feel obligated.
First and foremost, I’d like to thank my agent, Laurie Abkemeier, and my editors at Broadway, Laura Swerdloff and Hallie Falquet. You all said yes when everyone else said, “Grad students are poor and won’t buy books.”
I am quite grateful to my illustrator and former college roommate, Darren Philip, for his outstanding contributions and for not even flinching when I said, “I need you to draw a badminton-playing robot being awarded the Nobel Prize for Medicine.” (I love that picture. Go look at it again. It’s hilarious.)
Many thanks also go to the current and former students who gave me valuable advice about their postgraduate experiences: Rachel Ruben, Lee Hadbavny, Abby Sheffer, Eric Huang, Susan Merino, Gene Bialczak, and Hannah Bascom. It was fascinating to learn how our experiences differed, and horrifying to learn how they were similar.
I’d also like to thank everyone who reluctantly agreed to appear in the Lolgrads photos: Sam Leachman, Chuck Na, Erin Vaughn, Jayson Hyun, Marina Koestler Ruben, Dan Koestler, “evil advisor” Dr. Bob Koestler, and Pico the Cat.
Even bigger thanks go to those who read drafts of the book: my parents—Jeff and Gina Ruben—and especially my wife, Marina, whose edits were so thorough that she even caught an apostrophe—in nine-point type—facing the wrong way. (She
probably doesn’t like the fact that there are four em dashes in that last sentence, either, but that’s life.)
And of course I’m going to do the cheesy thing and thank you, the purchaser of this book. I hope it made your burden a little more bearable, and if not, you can probably sell it back to the campus bookstore for fifty cents or something.
Copyright © 2010 by Adam Ruben
All rights reserved.
Published in the United States by Broadway Books, an imprint of the Crown Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York.
www.crownpublishing.com
BROADWAY BOOKS and the Broadway Books colophon are trademarks of Random House, Inc.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Ruben, Adam.
Surviving your stupid, stupid decision to go to grad school / by Adam Ruben ; illustrated by Darren Philip. — 1st ed.
p. cm.
1. Education, Higher—Humor. 2. Graduate students—Humor. 3. Universities and colleges—Graduate work—Humor. I. Title.
PN6231.C6R83 2010
818′.602—dc22
2009043371
eISBN: 978-0-307-58945-3
ILLUSTRATIONS BY DARREN PHILIP
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