Grad School Quotes

This made him a grad student, and grad students existed not to learn things but to relieve the tenured faculty members of tiresome burdens such as educating people and doing research.

Oh nookie in the stacks.Figures you're the type to have that fantasy, grad school and all.

Literature could turn you into an asshole: he’d learned that teaching grad-school seminars. It could teach you to treat real people the way you did characters, as instruments of your own intellectual pleasure, cadavers on which to practice your critical faculties.

...I'm worried I will leave grad school and no longer be able to speak English. I know this woman in grad school, a friend of a friend, and just listening to her talk is scary. The semiotic dialetics of intertextual modernity. Which makes no sense at all. Sometimes I feel that they live in a parallel universe of academia speaking acadamese instead of English and they don't really know what's happening in the real world.

It reminds me of grad school, when we couldn’t afford therapy and we’d engage in some healthy communal bitching every other night, just to survive the madness.

Back in business grad school at USC when I was a student, I took the Briggs Meyers test. I took the test again at my first job. Both time it tested the same: That I have the personality of a CEO and an Inventor. Guess it was pretty accurate. - Kailin Gow on Briggs Meyers Tests

Everyone spends nights on the floor of their closet during grad school.

I cast my mind back, to before grad school, before undergrad even, all the way to the first moment I remember loving a story. Feeling like I was living it. Being, even as a child, bowled over by how something imaginary could become real, could wring every emotion from me or make me homesick for places I'd never been

That's my school. I worked harder to get in than I did for anything else, ever. I went there because, coming out of it, I'd be able to be President. Or a lawyer. Rich, that's the point. Rich and successful. And look where it got me. One stupid year and here I am with not one, but two bracelets on my wrist, next to a shrink in a room adjacent to a hall where there's a guy named Human Being walking around. If I keep doing this for three more years, where will I be? I'll be a complete loser. And what If I keep on? What if I do okay, live with the depression, get into College, do College, go to Grad School, get the Job, get the Money, get Kids and a Wife and a Nice Car? What kind of crap will I be in then? I'll be completely crazy.

The stress of grad school can drive anyone temporarily mad.

By the time you're an adult, you're used to seeing your friends disappear into their five-year plans. They drop out to get married, have babies, go to grad school, get divorced. They start a band or enter the penal system. They vanish for years at a time - some come back, some don't. Some of them you wait for and some you let go. Sometimes the only way they come back is in a song.

Grad school was a mistake, but now it's too late to back out of it because my self-worth is unbreakably tied to my academic performance, and what would even be left of me if I decide to drop out?

She would have loved to have someone in her life, but she doubted it was in store for her. Maybe she was unlovable. Maybe spending so many years alone had warped her in some fundamental way and that was why she seemed to be unable to develop a true romantic connection, or even the type of attraction she often heard others talk about. In the end, it didn’t really matter. Grad school and dating went poorly together, anyway, which was probably why Dr. Adam Carlsen, MacArthur Fellow and genius extraordinaire, was standing here at thirtysomething years old, asking Olive what people did on dates. Academics, ladies and gentlemen.

When I interviewed at Yale, the admissions committee asked me why they should let me into the program. I looked at them unblinking and said, 'Because I'm going to change the world some day. And I'm giving you the chance to say, We knew her when.

Is it the public-speaking thing?" He'd remembered. Of course he had. "Yeah. It will be awful." Adam stared at her and said nothing. Not that it would be fine, not that the talk would go smoothly, not that she was overreacting and underselling a fantastic opportunity. His calm acceptance of her anxiety had the exact opposite effect of Dr. Aslan's enthusiasm: it relaxed her. "When I was in my third year of grad school," he said quietly, “my adviser sent me to give a faculty symposium in his stead. He told me only two days before, without any slides or a script. Just the title of the talk." "Wow." Olive tried to imagine what that would have felt like,

Frankly, Olive was a bit on the fence about this whole grad school thing. Not because she didn’t like science. (She did. She loved science. Science was her thing.) And not because of the truckload of obvious red flags. She was well aware that committing to years of unappreciated, underpaid eighty-hour workweeks might not be good for her mental health. That nights spent toiling away in front of a Bunsen burner to uncover a trivial slice of knowledge might not be the key to happiness. That devoting her mind and body to academic pursuits with only infrequent breaks to steal unattended bagels might not be a wise choice. She was well aware, and yet none of it worried her.

What about this? A colony of nothing but Battle School grads. If they bred true, they'd be the smartest military minds in the galaxy. Then they'd come home and take over Earth. OK, not that.

Who wouldn’t love this jargon we dress common sense in: "formal innovation is no longer transformative, having been co-opted by the forces of stabilization and post-industrial inertia," blah, blah. But this co-optation might actually be a good thing if it helped keep younger writers from being able to treat mere formal ingenuity as an end in itself. MTV-type co-optation could end up a great prophylactic against cleveritis—you know, the dreaded grad-school syndrome of like "Watch me use seventeen different points of view in this scene of a guy eating a Saltine." The real point of that shit is "Like me because I’m clever"—which of course is itself derived from commercial art’s axiom about audience-affection determining art’s value.

Grad school really screwed us up, didn’t it?

But I also instantly recognized this response as my conditioning from grad school, where these things were trained out of me, where I was reprogrammed in a way that actually took away my power while purporting to give me access to power--power that, through my voice, I'd already had.

At other times, he wondered whether it was the world that had lost its color, or his friends themselves. When had everyone become so alike? Too often, it seemed that the last time people were so interesting had been college; grad school...What had happened? Age, he guessed. And with it: Jobs. Money. Children. The things to forestall death, the things to ensure one's relevance, the things to comfort and provide context and content. The march forward, one dictated by biology and convention, that not even the most irreverent mind could withstand. But those were his peers. What he really wanted to know was when his friends had become so conventional, and why he hadn't noticed earlier.

Telling people what you want, speaking desire, and I could hear the air quotes in her voice, the ones she used when she slipped into grad-school vernacular. It's like telling people how to hurt you, handing them instructions.

After finishing grad school, the Little Mermaid started a nonprofit to fight for the rights of mercitizens. She decided at that moment that she would never measure her success by financial gain, but instead only by how much good she contributed to the world. Money was irrelevant to her. Later that day she got her first student loan bill.

Renée and I met at a bar called the Eastern Standard in Charlottesville, Virginia. I had just moved there to study English in grad school. Renée was a fiction writer in the MFA program. I was sitting with my poet friend Chris in a table in the back, when I fell under the spell of Renée’s bourbon-baked voice. The bartender put on Big Star’s Radio City. Renée was the only other person in the room who perked up. We started talking about how much we loved Big Star. It turned out we had the same favorite Big Star song – the acoustic ballad Thirteen. She’d never heard their third album, Sister Lovers. So naturally, I told her the same thing I’d told every other woman I’d ever fallen for: “I’ll make you a tape!

At the college where I teach, I'm surrounded by circus people. We aren't tightrope walkers or acrobats. We don't breathe fire or swallow swords. We're gypsies, moving wherever there's work to be found. Our scrapbooks and photo albums bear witness to our vagabond lives: college years, grad-school years, instructor-mill years, first-job years. In between each stage is a picture of old friends helping to fill a truck with boxes and furniture. We pitch our tents, and that place becomes home for a while. We make families from colleagues and students, lovers and neighbors. And when that place is no longer working, we don't just make do. We move on to the place that's next. No place is home. Every place is home. Home is our stuff. As much as I love the Cumberland Valley at twilight, I probably won't live there forever, and this doesn't really scare me. That's how I know I'm circus people.

Do I hate him? No. Yes. No. I haven’t forgotten how much of a dipshit he was in grad school, or that he reprimanded me about my clothes on my first day of work, or any of the dickish things he’s done to me. But after a big day like today, when he saved me from total, catastrophic implosion, it all seems so distant. No, then. I don’t hate him. In fact, I kind of like him. But I don’t want to admit it,

In the dresser mirror, my face looks the same, but I feel something happening around me, some change as palpable as weather. Stuck in the mirror are mementos from my childhood—red and yellow ribbons for various underachievements, a brown corsage from grad school graduation, a curling and faded picture of me petting a deer in Wisconsin—which is now over. I wandered through it and came out the other side. It’s a stark feeling. Like getting to the last page of a book and seeing ‘The End.’ Even if you didn’t like the story that much, or your childhood, you read it, you lived it. And now it’s over, book closed, that long-ago deer you petted in the Dells as dead as the one in The Yearling.

I thought about what I wanted to do now -- if I wanted to eat or leave the park, if I wanted to apply to grad school in the fall, if I wanted to find Ben in the crowd. Nothing sounded appealing, and I had the vague desire to slip through the cracks of what everyone else was doing.

There’s a popular, potent story right now that says success is a straight line from the right school to the right college to the right internship to the right grad school to your chosen profession.” “Raise your hand if this is the path that you took.” About 5 percent of the hands went up. “That’s right,” she said. “In any group of people only 1–10 percent have taken a straight trajectory. The much more common route is circuitous.

Top academic institutions are wonderful, but there are unrecognized benefits to not coming out of one. Grads from top schools are funneled into high-income 80-hour-per-week jobs, and 15–30 years of soul-crushing work has been accepted as the default path. How do I know? I’ve been there and

Hey, Meg," she said without preamble. I need you to write a letter of recommendation for me. I'm applying for grad school." Meghann screamed into the phone. "Oh, my God! I'm so proud of you. I'm hanging up now; I have to draft a letter that makes my best friend sound like da Vinci in a bra and panties.

I cast my mind back, to before grad school, before undergrad even all the way to the first moment I remember loving a story. Feeling like I was living it. Being, even as a child, bowled over by how something imaginary could become real, could wring every emotion from me or make me homesick for places I'd never been.

Reading manuscripts was the exact opposite of reading for grad school: it was pure instinct, with some emotion and intelligence thrown in.

And I could stand here, stare at my closet, and agonize over the fact that my grad school nemesis saved my life. Or I could bask in my excitement and pick an outfit.

Grad school was a mistake, but now it’s too late to back out of it because my self-worth is unbreakably tied to my academic performance, and what would even be left of me if I decided to drop out?

Most fundamentally, I used to write because I received positive feedback. To a guy who was picked on pretty relentlessly through a lot of his childhood, the respect and affection of students and teachers is addictive. It was a couple years after grad school that I realized that a need for affirmation wasn’t a good enough reason to keep writing, especially in the face of rejection after rejection after even personal rejection, and that if I was going to do it, I had to acknowledge that it was going to take my whole life. The decision to do it until I’m dead has made the writing and the writing life so much easier.

I'll bite: Hard science TA's and RA's often repair equipment; it's part of our science. If you want a silver spoon, don't go to grad school. Science is all about dangerous chemicals, semi-safe experimental equipment, and 4am drives down gravel roads in old vans with a nice steep drop on one side. Guardrail? Ho ho ho. Fixing the computers is just the tip of the iceberg. Plus, where else could you get on-the-job experience with a PDP-8?

Women, the most beautiful things in the world,” answers the model. As if it’s the only thing worth painting, as if everyone should aspire to it. Normally coming from a guy that answer would sound so incredibly skeezy—a greasy, obvious pick-up line. But something about this guy’s earnest tone tells me he means it." -from Model Position by Kitsy Clare

I've always thought of myself as a realist. I can remember fighting with my professors about it in grad school. The world that I live in consists of 250 advertisements a day and any number of unbelievably entertaining options, most of which are subsidized by corporations that want to sell me things. The whole way that the world acts on my nerve endings is bound up with stuff that the guys with the leather patches on their elbows would consider pop or trivial or ephemeral. I use a fair amount of pop stuff in my fiction, but what I mean by it is nothing different than what other people mean in writing about trees and parks and having to walk to the river to get water 100 years ago. It's just the texture of the world I live in.

better be fucking up there, or this whole thing has been a fucking waste, just like everything else,” everything else meaning, variously, grad school, moving back to New York, the hair series, or life in general, depending on how nihilistic he felt that day.

My percussionist boyfriend graduated and went away to grad school a few semesters later, but not before he introduced me to the most amazing thing I’d ever experienced. No, not sex (I’m a lady; I don’t write about that) but something just as good: the World Wide Web. It

But I am scared. Everybody's scared." "You know what I mean, like scared scared. Like coward scared, like if you never went to begin with. But with everything you've done nobody's going to doubt you." Then she made a somewhat frantic speech about a website she found that listed how certain people had avoided Vietnam. Cheney, Four education deferments, then a hardship 3-A. Limbaugh,4-F thanks to a cyst on his ass. Pat Buchanan, 4-F. Newt Gingrich, grad school deferment. Karl Rove, did not serve. Bill O'Reilly, did not serve. John Ashcroft, did not serve. Bush, AWOL from the Air National Guard, with a check mark in the "do not volunteer" box as to service overseas. "You see where I'm going with this?' "Well, yeah." "I'm just saying, those people want a war so bad, they can fight it themselves. Billy Lynn's done his part.

The truth is, when I arrived here, I was exhausted from years of foster homes, where I had to stay on my toes, then scrambling through undergrad, then grad school, trying to figure out how to make a name for myself, make a mark. Survival takes a lot of work if you’re an orphan woman in America.

If you were born in 1950 and were in the top ten percent, everything got better for twenty years automatically. Then, after the late sixties, you went to a good grad school, and you got a good job on Wall Street in the late seventies, and then you hit the boom. Your story has been one of incredible, unrelenting progress for sixty years. Most people who are sixty years old in the U.S.—not their story at all.” The establishment had been coasting for a long time and was out of answers. Its failure pointed to new directions, maybe Marxist, maybe libertarian, along a volatile trajectory that it could no longer control.

You know who traditionally does poorly on standardized tests? Women and marginalized individuals. It’s a self-fulfilling prophecy: groups that are constantly told by society that they’re less smart walk into a testing situation anxious as hell and end up underperforming. It’s called Stereotype Threat, and there’s tons of literature on that. Just like there’s tons of literature showing that the GRE does a terrible job at predicting who’ll finish grad school. But the heads of graduate admission all over the country don’t care and persist in using an instrument made to elevate rich white men.” She shakes out her hair. “Burn it down, I say.

Once I was walking my path, once I’d found my creative niche, my photography—and my life—had focus. The difference was dramatic. Suddenly I went from wandering the woods to sprinting like a track star. I dropped out of grad school and went from my first few local clients to working with some of the world’s biggest sports brands.

JB's friends were poets and performance artists and academics and modern dancers and philosophers -- he had, Malcolm once observed, befriended everyone at their college who was least likely to make money -- and their lives were grants and residencies and fellowships and awards. Success, among JB's Hood Hall assortment, wasn't defined by your box-office numbers (as it was for his agent and manager) or your costars or your reviews (as it was by his grad-school classmates): it was defined simply and only by how good your work was, and whether you were proud of it.

Though the dopamine system is similar across numerous species, humans do something utterly novel: we delay gratification for insanely long times. No warthog restricts calories to look good in a bathing suit next summer. No gerbil works hard at school to get good SAT scores to get into a good college to get into a good grad school to get a good job to get into a good nursing home.

I felt I would live a long, lonely, useless life and die alone and unmissed (did I mention that I never bothered filling out any grad-school applications?) It’s self-indulgent, I know, but this is what happens to the overachieving but essentially useless children of parents who raised their children to do well on tests but failed to equip them with the poison-tipped spurs of true ambition.

On the bright side, I have figured out how to fix the American educational system. End it at sixth grade.” “Brilliant. Then what?” “Lock them up in empty factories, give them all the Red Bull, condoms, and nachos they want, pipe in club music, and check back when they’re twenty-five. Anyone still alive, we send to grad school.” Wade pushed his glass forward. “How’s that for a campaign platform?

The universities are an absolute wreck right now, because for decades, any graduate student in the humanities who had independent thinking was driven out. There was no way to survive without memorizing all these stupid bromides with this referential bowing to these over-inflated figures like Lacan, Derrida, Foucault, and so on. Basically, it's been a tyranny in the humanities, because the professors who are now my age – who are the baby boomer professors, who made their careers on the back of Foucault and so on – are determined that that survive. So you have a kind of vampirism going on. So I've been getting letters for 25 years since Sexual Personae was released in 1990, from refugees from the graduate schools. It's been a terrible loss. One of my favorite letters was early on: a woman wrote to me, she was painting houses in St. Louis, she said that she had wanted a career as a literature professor and had gone into the graduate program in comparative literature at Berkeley. And finally, she was forced to drop out because, she said, every time she would express enthusiasm for a work they were studying in the seminar, everyone would look at her as if she had in some way created a terrible error of taste. I thought, 'Oh my God', see that's what's been going on – a pretentious style of superiority to the text. [When asked what can change this]: Rebellion! Rebellion by the grad students. This is what I'm trying to foment. We absolutely need someone to stand up and start criticizing authority figures. But no; this generation of young people have been trained throughout middle school and high school and college to be subservient to authority.

I'm out there competing with a million other hungry grads. You know they should have warned us in high school. Instead they told us we were all fucking special snowflakes and the world was at out feet. Such bullshit.

Who's cooking your food anyway? What strange beasts lurk behind the kitchen doors? You see the chef: he's the guy without the hat, with the clipboard under his arm, maybe his name stitched in Tuscan blue on his starched white chef's coat next to those cotton Chinese buttons. But who's actually cooking your food? Are they young, ambitious culinary school grads, putting in their time on the line until they get their shot at the Big Job? Probably not. If the chef is anything like me, the cooks are a dysfunctional, mercenary lot, fringe-dwellers motivated by money, the peculiar lifestyle of cooking and grim pride. They're probably not even American.

The decision to move to the second post-college city (or suburb, or town), however, is usually made independent of friends. No matter if you do it for love, career, family, or school, the second move is on your own terms.

Though everyone had been uniformly gracious with me throughout our visit, I couldn’t shake the feeling that I was being vetted in some way and that I’d already come up short. Peter was the one they wanted; I was merely the collateral—the boyfriend, the grad-school widow. I was accustomed to monopolizing Peter’s affection, but for the first time in our relationship, I felt like I’d arrived at a meeting only to find all the seats at the table filled.

your future, your whole life, is in his hands right now!” “My whole life?” Lucie stared at Charlotte dubiously. “Do you understand the ramifications of what could happen if that footage ever went public? Let’s start with grad schools—you can forget about getting into any of the Ivies. And then you’ll never be hired by a Fortune 100 company. You’ll never get into any of the good clubs. You’ll never marry into a good family. And let’s not forget, you’ll never be president!

What do you need them for, JB? You’ll find somewhere else, to which JB would reply, respectively, “Are you sure?,” and “I fucking doubt it,” and “I’ve fucking invested this time—three whole months of my fucking life—I better be fucking up there, or this whole thing has been a fucking waste, just like everything else,” everything else meaning, variously, grad school, moving back to New York, the hair series, or life in general, depending on how nihilistic he felt that day.

Literature could turn you into an asshole; he’d learned that teaching grad-school seminars. It could teach you to treat real people the way you did characters, as instruments of your own intellectual pleasure, cadavers on which to practice your critical faculties.

You read the most obscure, hyperspecific academic articles on the planet to the point where you develop actual burning ire over scholars you’ve never met. (“Can you believe that the interpretation of Patel et al. contradicts that of Chen et al.? Those sons of bitches!”)

and while a couple of prorectors are feared, none of them is all that much respected, and they're avoided, and stick together with one another and keep to themselves and seem on the whole sad, with that grad-schoolish sense of arrested adolescence and reality-avoidance about them.

A common and depressing assumption on the part of many college students is that they must stay on the academic rails until they are professionally established—go directly to grad school from college and directly from grad school to a job, as if there were some big rush and even a few years lost would put them catastrophically behind everyone else. Nonsense. Suppose you intend to retire at sixty-five. If you don’t start your career until you’re thirty, that still gives you thirty-five years to make it professionally. If you can’t make it in thirty-five years, you weren’t going to make it in forty or forty-five.

She would have loved to have someone in her life, but she doubted it was in store for her. Maybe she was unlovable. Maybe spending so many years alone had warped her in some fundamental way and that was why she seemed to be unable to develop a true romantic connection, or even the type of attraction she often heard others talk about. In the end, it didn’t really matter. Grad school and dating went poorly together, anyway, which was probably why Dr. Adam Carlsen, MacArthur Fellow and genius extraordinaire, was standing here at thirty-something years old, asking Olive what people did on dates. Academics, ladies and gentlemen.

For the rest of Kat’s childhood, she moved from one relative’s house to another’s, up and down the East Coast, living in four homes before entering high school. Finally, in high school, she lived for a few years with her grandmother, her mom’s mom, whom she called “G-Ma.” No one ever talked about her mom’s murder. “In my family, my past was ‘The Big Unmentionable’—including my role in putting my own father in jail,” she says. In high school, Kat appeared to be doing well. She was an honor student who played four varsity sports. Beneath the surface, however, “I was secretly self-medicating with alcohol because otherwise, by the time everything stopped and it got quiet at night, I could not sleep, I would just lie there and a terrible panic would overtake me.” She went to college, failed out, went back, and graduated. She went to work in advertising, and one day, dissatisfied, quit. She went back to grad school, piling up debt. She became a teacher. Kat quit that job too, when a relationship she had formed with another teacher imploded. At the age of thirty-four, Kat went to stay with her brother and his family in Hawaii. She got a job as a valet, parking cars. “I’d come home from parking cars all day and curl up on my bed in the back bedroom of my brother’s house, and lie there feeling desperate and alone, my heart beating with anxiety.

There are no single guys who don’t have at least one major flaw, and a flaw, I might add, that would stop you from dating them – even if everything else was great. Why? Simple math. Women are interesting and honest and sensitive. Most men are not. There is only one normal, decent single guy for every five women in this city. This is what’s known as the Great Male Statistic. Girls don’t want to face the GMS. They want to believe there’s someone for everyone. The truth hurts. You only start coming to terms with the GMS when you’re twenty-six or twenty-seven. It actually killed Sylvia Plath. She finally found this guy in grad school who she thought was so great, and she married him, and he cheated on her.

The reason Dr. Caner’s flameout didn’t make a bigger dent in this school’s spiritual life, I think, is that Liberty students have much more pressing things to do than contemplate the existence of God. There are papers to write, grad school applications to complete, girls to ask out. Even if you were convinced by the Rational Response Squad, entertaining a crisis of faith would mean reevaluating every aspect of your life, from the friends you hang out with to the classes you take to, really, whether you should be at Liberty at all. In a faith system as rigorous and all-encompassing as this, severe doubt is paralyzing. Better just to keep believing, keep living life, and take up the big questions later, when not so much is at stake.

I needed a story. Something local, but juicy. And more than just newsworthy. I was holding out for gasp-worthy. And I found it. Or rather, it found me. Yup, your humble J-school grad was pretty much handed a tale that had it all: sex and drugs (not the regular kinds), multiple deaths (untimely, natch), rich folks and rituals and loads o' lawsuits- even a celebrity cherry on top. My newbie journo peers might be settling for three inches of coyotes in the subway, some spry centenarian's weightlifting regime or a bucket of campylobacter in the church supper salad, but I was planning to debut large and with oomph. The story was mine. I just had to figure out how to tell it.

the system being employed at the children’s hospital down the street from my grad-school apartment made the Victorian approach look relatively benign. The modern system featured not only highly aggressive cosmetic genital surgeries in infancy for children born with “socially inappropriate” genital variations like big clitorises, but also the withholding of diagnoses from patients and parents out of fear that they couldn’t handle the truth. It treated boys born with small penises as hopeless cases who “had” to be castrated and sex-changed into girls, and it assumed that the ultimate ability of girls to reproduce as mothers should take precedence over all else, including the ability to someday experience orgasm.

Generalized Social Anxiety In contrast to people with specific social anxieties, you may be afraid in a wide variety of situations. You might feel that people are judging everything you do and you might set unreasonable standards of perfection for yourself. This condition is called generalized (or discrete) social anxiety. Generalized social anxiety accounts for 80 percent of all cases of social anxiety. Often, people with generalized social anxiety get caught in a vicious cycle. Because they are overly anxious in many situations, they act in clumsy and awkward ways, which in turn makes them feel even more discouraged and anxious. This cycle often results in depression and chronic stress. Generalized social anxiety can affect almost every aspect of your life. This has been the case for Toni, a college senior. In high school, I hardly had any friends. I didn’t participate in any extracurricular activities and managed to get by with average grades. Because I attend a large state university, I am even more invisible. So far, I have avoided any class that has any interaction with my peers, such as discussion groups or labs. As graduation approaches, I need to decide what type of career I want. The thought of job interviews terrifies me. I am considering grad school but would need recommendations to apply. I haven’t even spoken to most of my professors, and the ones who know me probably can’t say anything good about me. As a result, I’m really depressed. When I imagine the future, I can’t see myself being happy. I’ll probably move back to my parents’ house after graduation. I know they are disappointed in me, and that makes me feel like a complete failure.

The uninitiated often assumed that undergraduate students were at the bottom rung, but undergrads were the paying customers, or at least their parents were. And paying customers needed to be kept happy. Grad students worked for the school as teaching and research assistants--TAs and RAs--but weren't really proper employees, and as such they weren't entitled to the benefits that, say, a cataloger in the Coffey Library received. Then there was the fact that they had to learn to leave behind passive studying and test taking, which was what most of them had been taught in their school careers up to that point, and learn how to actively attack research problems and come up with new ideas, all while being poorly paid. Like Helen had said, a not insignificant number of grad students left after a year instead of sticking around to work on obtaining their PhDs. Who could blame them? Industry paid more and had better benefits.

See especially academia, which has effectively become a hope labor industrial complex. Within that system, tenured professors—ostensibly proof positive that you can, indeed, think about your subject of choice for the rest of your life, complete with job security, if you just work hard enough—encourage their most motivated students to apply for grad school. The grad schools depend on money from full-pay students and/or cheap labor from those students, so they accept far more master’s students than there are spots in PhD programs, and far more PhD students than there are tenure-track positions. Through it all, grad students are told that work will, in essence, save them: If they publish more, if they go to more conferences to present their work, if they get a book contract before graduating, their chances on the job market will go up. For a very limited few, this proves true. But it is no guarantee—and with ever-diminished funding for public universities, many students take on the costs of conference travel themselves (often through student loans), scrambling to make ends meet over the summer while they apply for the already-scarce number of academic jobs available, many of them in remote locations, with little promise of long-term stability. Some academics exhaust their hope labor supply during grad school. For others, it takes years on the market, often while adjuncting for little pay in demeaning and demanding work conditions, before the dream starts to splinter. But the system itself is set up to feed itself as long as possible. Most humanities PhD programs still offer little or nothing in terms of training for jobs outside of academia, creating a sort of mandatory tunnel from grad school to tenure-track aspirant. In the humanities, especially, to obtain a PhD—to become a doctor in your field of knowledge—is to adopt the refrain “I don’t have any marketable skills.” Many academics have no choice but to keep teaching—the only thing they feel equipped to do—even without fair pay or job security. Academic institutions are incentivized to keep adjuncts “doing what they love”—but there’s additional pressure from peers and mentors who’ve become deeply invested in the continued viability of the institution. Many senior academics with little experience of the realities of the contemporary market explicitly and implicitly advise their students that the only good job is a tenure-track academic job. When I failed to get an academic job in 2011, I felt soft but unsubtle dismay from various professors upon telling them that I had chosen to take a high school teaching job to make ends meet. It

I’ll let you off your leash, but you have to show some manners. No humping, no pissing on anything man made, and keep the crotch greetings exclusive to your four-legged fury friends. Got it?” Swarley nods because I’ve made him part human over the past few months and I’m pretty sure I saw him roll his eyes at me too. Guess I’d better start getting used to sassiness and eye rolling … read that on a parenting blog too. Note to self. Find more positive bloggers that paint the picture of parenthood with rainbows, fairies, and pixie dust. “Sydney?” I turn. “Hey, Dane!” He bends down to let his dogs off their leashes. “Gosh, I didn’t think you’d be back. How was Paris?” Which part? The view of the ceiling from the couch or the drain from the top of the toilet? “Great!” Extremely sugarcoated … maybe teetering on an outright lie. “So how long are you staying?” He rests his hands on his hips. Dane is adorable. I’m sure grown men don’t like to be called adorable; hell, I didn’t like it when Lautner said it to me, but Dane is just that. Tall, dark, and admittedly handsome with a boyish grin that makes me want to take him home, bake him cookies, and pour him a tall glass of milk. “I’m not sure. Trevor and Elizabeth just moved to San Diego and I’m staying at their house until it sells or until I find something else.” He cocks his head to the side. “Yet, they left Swarley?” Turning my gaze to look for the wild pooch, I shake my head. “Their condo association doesn’t allow large pets. They’ve been looking for a new home for him, but for now I have him.” “You two have come a long way since the first day you showed up at my office.” Clasping my hands behind my back, I look down and kick at the dirt. “Yeah, you’re right. As of lately, I’ve considered taking him myself. But until I know where I’m going to end up, offering it would be a little premature if not irresponsible.” “Grad school with a dog. You’d have to find some place to live that allows pets.” My faces wrinkles as I peek up at him. “I’m not going to grad school, at least not for a while. Something’s kind of come up.” “Oh?” Dane’s hands shift from his hips to crossing over his chest as he widens his stance. I blow out a long breath, scrubbing my hands over my face. My fingers trace my eyebrows as I meet his eyes again. “I’m … pregnant.” Dane’s eye are going to pop out of his head and the dogs will be chasing them if he opens them any wider. “I’m sorr—or congrat—or—” I smile because his adorableness doubles when he gets all nervous and starts stuttering. “It’s congratulations now … ‘I’m sorry’ was last month.” He nods in slow motion. “So you came back for Lautner?” “No … well, yes, but that backfired on me. He’s … moved on.” “Moved on? Are you serious? From … you?” I shrug, bobbing my head up and down. “Well … he’s a fuc—a freaking idiot.” As much pain as this conversation brings me, I still manage to let a giggle escape with an accompanying smile. “You’re right. He is a fucafreaking idiot.” Dane grins. “Especially because he’s with Claire.” His eyes go wide again. “Dr. Brown?” I nod. “Dr. Fucafreaking Brown.” Dane mouths WOW! “Exactly.

shaky year in grad school. Kolt’s on vacation from his life. It’s been six months. In another six, he’ll go back to it, and I know as surely as I know my own name that he intends to bring me back with him. I tick off all

Or maybe we could send you to grad school, where you’d learn something useful. I know a few people at the University of Chicago, if you want your economics degree. Expand your horizons a little.” “You’re throwing me to the Straussians?” I said, in horror.

The tech start-up world from which Musk hails embraces disruption as one of its organizing principles, encouraged in part by the influential blog TechCrunch, which named its flagship conference, TechCrunch Disrupt, for the concept. Silicon Valley’s budding capitalists have long been encouraged to use their software prowess and processes to disrupt existing industries, and hence we have Facebook, which disrupted the news media industry, Airbnb, which disrupted hotels, and crowdfunding, which disrupted traditional investing. When Ted Craver asked Musk to share his thoughts on disruption with an audience of old-school electricity providers, you could see why the chairman might nervously fiddle with his pen. Could Tesla, with its emerging energy-storage business, disrupt the utilities? It might have come as some comfort to those at the conference that Musk is no fan of disruption. Indeed, he and Straubel were probably there to convince utilities to work with Tesla on energy storage projects that could benefit both parties. But the industry’s fear that it might have been on the wrong side of history would not have dissipated completely. The same was true for at least one auto industry leader. The man who, until May 2017, was CEO of the Ford Motor Company is one person who does appear to be a fan of disruption. Mark Fields, a Harvard business grad and Clayton Christensen follower, was fifty-three when he was appointed to succeed outgoing CEO Alan Mulally.

Who am I? Am I Caleb? Am I James? I've often asked myself this very thing and have always come up with a different answer. Perhaps the only truthful answer is, "I am both." Caleb will always be a part of me--probably the largest part. I want to be James. James is a 29-year-old from Oregon. He was raised by his mother and always wondered about his father. He grew up with respect for women but also a need to display his masculinity to make up for his lack of a father. He went to college but took time off before grad school to go and see the world. He met Sophia at The Paseo de Colon and fell instantly in love. James never met anyone named Livvie. He never hurt her. We know different. We know the truth. So, for the purposes of this story you begged me to tell--I am Caleb. I am the man who kidnapped Livvie. I am the man who held her in a dark room for weeks. I'm the one who tied her to a bedpost and beat her. I'm the one who nearly sold her into sexual slavery. But, most importantly, I am the man she loves. She loves me. It's quite sick, isn't it?

Yes, but I’m worried I will leave grad school and no longer be able to speak English. I know this woman in grad school, a friend of a friend, and just listening to her talk is scary. The semiotic dialectics of intertextual modernity. Which makes no sense at all. Sometimes I feel that they live in a parallel universe of academia speaking academese instead of English and they don’t really know what’s happening in the real world.

Nina’s already thinking about grad school? Is she that much older than you?” “A few years, yeah.” “Whoa.” I refrain from making any cougar comments.

On Books - Books are the ultimate accessory; they go with everything. Carpets wear down, drapery fades, statuary chips, wallpaper tears and appliances become obsolete and out of date. Movie posters simply scream “Poor high school grad”. But no one ever looks at books and scoffs, “Books? Really? What are you, a college professor?

Ah, our facilitator,” Charlotte said. “Everyone, this is Helen.” I knew her. Helen Harland was my long-lost friend from seminary. One of the five other UUs in my class, she’d been my confidante there, my study partner, my ally. I hadn’t seen her in sixteen years. Unlike me, she’d finished her degree and been ordained. She’d then taken a job at a small church with an ingrown, hidebound congregation—no seasoned minister would have touched it! The two years she spent there were so difficult that when she left, she left ministry. For a while, she worked at a retreat center near Santa Barbara, and she planned to go to grad school again, this time to become a therapist. She called me the night before she left for a month-long silent meditation retreat. That was sixteen years ago and the last I ever heard from her.

The first truth is that this is a big decision. It is a decision that has many pros and cons: from credibility, mainstreaming, lifelong friendships, and pre-reqs for worthwhile advanced degrees on the one hand to binge drinking, staggering debt and subsequent indentured servitude, high drop out rates (especially for males), aimlessness, and protracted adolescence on the other. Selecting a college is also a different decision than it was 30 years ago, or 20, or 10. College costs have been rising faster than the economy and inflation for decades. Meanwhile, the predictive value of a college education is going down as corporations are increasingly less likely to provide extended training resources and opportunities to new grads. This is a result of the average length of tenure for new employees going ever downward.

The meticulous work and the discovery still thrill me, but ever since grad school, I’ve become more strategic, a careerist intent on job security with ample funding and a travel stipend. So why the sudden revolutionary zeal?

My mother had told me there were always uncles and cousins around when she was growing up, and it wasn’t unusual to be touched or pinched in a way that felt wrong but was always covered up with a laugh. “I will never let anything like that happen to you and your sister,” she had said, preemptively angry at the thought of it. And when I was in college and grad school, and on all the holidays in between, weekends and Thanksgivings and spring breaks, my parents always knew where I was, they were always begging me to come home; I had never walked the streets of any place because I had nowhere to go. Destiny was telling me what an extraordinary privilege that was. She was also telling me something else, and if I listened carefully, I might have heard a little warning. But I was too busy believing we had nothing in common except that she was my friend and I wanted to make things right for her. As for me, I was protected, cocooned against such violences. No, it would never, could never, be me.

Don’t you worry about your aunt. She’s proud as hell of you. But you’re only holding yourself back when you blow up like that. So let’s give her something else to be proud about. Yeah?” She sighed. Then nodded again. “Yeah. Okay. But I get to swear when we watch football?” “Damn right you do,” Knox said, ruffling her hair. “And when I’m not in school anymore?” “You can swear as much as you fucking want after you’re out of college. Maybe grad school too, if you want a PhD or some shit.” The corner of her mouth lifted. “That’s better,” he said. “Now, get your ass out there and put the ball in the back of the net so we can get ice cream after.” “But it’s morning,” she said, again looking at me as if I were some anti-swearing, anti-ice cream monster. “No better time for ice cream than after a big win,” he assured her. She grinned up at him. “Okay. Thanks, Knox. Sorry, Aunt Naomi.

Barre was much too expensive for my grad school budget, but I kept paying for it. It seemed, very obviously, like an investment in a more functional life.

Malcolm Gladwell goes so far as to say that attending the most highly selective schools can even harm you. In his best-selling book David and Goliath: Underdogs, Misfits, and the Art of Battling Giants, Gladwell explains that most kids shouldn’t attend the most prestigious schools they get into, because at every college it’s the top kids who get the most attention, resources, and opportunities that lead to greater success in grad school.12 Going to a place where you will be in the bottom half of the class not only means you won’t get goodies such as attention from faculty and access to select experiences in your chosen major, but it also damages your self-esteem, says Gladwell. If you want college to be the strongest possible springboard for what will come next in your life, Gladwell advises going to a college where you know you can be in the top 5 or 10 percent there. The only exceptions to this rule are students from underrepresented backgrounds for whom attending a name-brand school seems to provide a bump in after-college options regardless of where they rank in their college class.

also watched the advanced tape. But Squeaky had gone grad school on me. He’s throwing reach casts, curve casts, roll casts, steeple casts, and casts he calls squiggles and stutters. He’s writing his name with the line in the air. He’s making his dry fly look like the Blue Angels. He’s pitching things forehand, backhand, and between his wader legs. And, through the magic of video editing, every time his hook-tipped dust kitty hits the water he lands a trout the size of a canoe. The videotape about trout themselves wasn’t much use either. It’s hard to get excited about where trout feed when you know that the only way you’re going to be able to get a fly to that place is by throwing your fly box at it. I must say, however, all the tapes were informative. “Nymphs and streamers” are not, as it turns out, naked mythological girls decorating the high school gym with crepe paper. And I learned that the part of fly-fishing I’m going to be best at is naming the flies: Woolly Hatcatcher Blue-Wing Earsnag Overhanging Brush Muddler Royal Toyota Hatchback O’Rourke’s Ouchtail P.J.’s Live Worm-’n-Bobber By now I’d reached what I think they call a “learning plateau.” That is, if I was going to catch a fish with a fly rod, I had to either go get in the water or open the fridge and toss hooks at Mrs. Paul’s frozen

Here's the scam; light is only constant when it's being measured. This is about the most dishonest way to name a value "constant" as you can get, but sure, whatever makes teaching your grad school courses easier for you.

What the fuck am I even talking about? Grad school is bad for the brain.

Not so long ago, on a trip to Morrison’s Cafeteria, she talked incessantly for the full twenty-minute drive. I blew up and told her it was wrong to keep a running monologue, selfish not to leave any space for my response. Her face went red, as if I’d seen right into her liver and heart. She knew what I saw: someone who had lost her friends, someone who told them her secrets, and thus she withdrew, or they from her, as if direct talk about, say, her dead twin brother or her gay son named after him were too much for anybody to take. I cannot be her husband. She must know I can’t accompany her to Home Depot forever, pour shock into the hot tub, fertilize bougainvillea by the downspout. But does she say she can take care of herself on her own? That would be expecting too much. She puts her arms around me so I will feel the consequence in my body, the consequence of her losing once again. And I hug her back even harder in my attempt to do the impossible: push dark feelings out of her and leave light in their place. Maybe she thinks, Why should he get all the freedom I don’t have? Go to grad school, come back home, go off for a fellowship. Why should his happiness spring from, depend upon, my disappointment? What kind of logic is that? Do you think I’m going to die, Mom? Is that why you’re sad?

When she met and fell in love with Paulo, a fellow student in grad school, Lima wasn’t interested in becoming a wife; she wanted to build an empire. She wrote in her bestselling book Believe IT, “I grew up believing that men hold women back, and that belief transitioned into the conviction that I didn’t want to get married.”17 Yet she was so in love with Paulo that, sensing deeply that she belonged with him, she surprised herself by answering yes when he proposed. “My intuition [to marry Paulo] shocked the heck out of me. . . . I set aside my fear and doubt to follow it.”18 Together, they worked on the business plan for her company while traveling for their honeymoon in 2007.

out of grad school, moving to this little town on

I’m worried I will leave grad school and no longer be able to speak English. I know this woman in grad school, a friend of a friend, and just listening to her talk is scary. The semiotic dialectics of intertextual modernity. Which makes no sense at all. Sometimes I feel that they live in a parallel universe of academia speaking academese instead of English and they don’t really know what’s happening in the real world.

Then we’d leave and have our regular dinners at our respective homes. Obviously, the waiters loathed us. In a way we were worse than the dine-and-dashers because at least the dine-and-dashers only hit up Cheesecake Factory once and never showed up again. We, on the other hand, thought we were beloved regulars and that people lit up when we walked in. We’re back, Cheesecake Factory! JLMP’s back! Your favorite cool, young people here to jazz up the joint! I know what you’re thinking, that I ditched Mavis because she wasn’t as cool as my more classically “girly” friends, but that wasn’t it. First of all, JLMP wasn’t even very cool. High school girls who have time to be super cliquey are usually not the popular girls. The actual popular girls have boyfriends, and, by that point, have chilled out on intense girl friendships to explore sex and stuff. Not us. Sex? Forget it. JLMP had given up on that happening until grad school. Yep, we were the kind of girls who, at age fourteen, pictured ourselves attending grad school. Getting a good idea of us now?

Network “weirdly,” e.g., find out what a Yale School of Forestry and Environmental Science grad student is working on (did you even know that Yale had a forestry school?); talk to students and faculty working on matters involving “Big Data;” meet someone at Yale’s Divinity School and try to imagine what an entrepreneur could possibly work on there; sneak into a faculty symposium (preferably a technical one), sit in the back row and try to understand what they’re talking about (for

We didn’t have jobs, not in any real sense—jobs were a myth, a rumor—so we held on in grad school, semester after semester, for lack of anything better to do. We got financial aid, of course, and accrued debt on our student loans. Our car, a hand-me-down from Mallory’s mother, needed tires and probably everything else into the bargain. We wrote papers, graded papers, got A’s and B’s in the courses we took, and doled out A’s and B’s in the courses we taught. Sometimes we felt as if we were actually getting somewhere, but the truth was, like most people, we were just marking time.

I’ve come face-to-face with these two questions countless times as a writer, an entrepreneur, a painter, a musician, and even a lawyer. On a more immediate level, the questions relate to the project you’re working on. If you’re a painter creating a collection of work, you may start to feel the questions arise as you explore whether a canvas or the collection is taking shape as you have envisioned it. On a more expansive level, the question emerges in the context of whether you should even be a painter or a writer, a coder, an entrepreneur, a CEO. I’ve seen actors struggle to build careers for decades, never coming close to earning enough to cover their bills. Yet they keep on keeping on, because their big break could be one audition away. And this is what they feel called to do. These are some of the most difficult and defining moments every creator faces. I’ve been told by legendary entrepreneurs, “If you have to ask, assume it’s resistance and soldier on.” They claim that you just know whether or not a project is meant to be. But I’ve witnessed countless people commit to perpetually unsuccessful projects or careers or, on the other side of the spectrum, come a breath away from what would’ve been breakthrough success had they just held on a bit longer. So I began to explore a more systematic process, a set of benchmarks, tests, and questions that might better guide these moments and help people decide whether to keep leaning into the journey, alter their course, or walk away and do something entirely different. We start by asking, “What was your inciting motivation?” What made you undertake this endeavor to begin with. Was it, in some form, the expression of a calling? Was it something to keep you busy? Was it about serving a group of people, solving a problem, or serving up a delight? Was it about money or doing anything you could to get your parents off your back and avoid grad school? Begin by going back to the time surrounding your decision to create whatever it is you’re creating and answer this question. Then move on to the next question. In light of the information and experiences you’ve had along the journey to date, does that original motive still hold true? Are you still equally or even more determined to make it happen? And given what you now know, do you believe you can make it happen?

Failure can feel like the ultimate death sentence, but it’s actually a step forward. When we fail, life is pushing us in a different direction so we can experience something new. One adventure has ended and another is about to begin, because it must. Think of your activities in life as scientific experiments. Scientists expect the vast majority of their tests to fail, but they still view each test as a step forward, regardless of the outcome. This is because each failed test rules out that particular approach, narrowing the remaining scope of potential solutions. You might be thinking, “What if all of my experiments fail until the day I die?” Great question. That might happen, depending on how you define failure and success. Here’s the magical solution to that problem: The results of your experiments are of little consequence. Only the experiments themselves matter. The old platitude is true: It’s about the journey, not the destination. Doing experiments will account for 99% of your time on this earth. That’s the journey. The result of your experiments is the other 1%. If you enjoy 99% of your life (the time spent in experimentation), who cares about the results? This is how to remove the problem of failure. Failure is just a temporary result. Its effect is as big or as small as you allow it to be. Elon Musk is becoming a household name. He cofounded Paypal. He now runs two companies simultaneously. The first, Tesla Motors, builds electric cars. The second, SpaceX, builds rocket ships. Many people think of Elon Musk as a real-world Iron Man—a superhero. He’s a living legend. He works extremely hard, and he’s brilliant. Did you know that Elon Musk never worked at Netscape? This is interesting because he actually wanted to work there very badly. He applied to Netscape while he was in grad school at Stanford, but never received a response. He even went to Netscape’s lobby with resume in hand, hoping to talk to someone about getting a job. No one in the lobby ever spoke to Elon that day. After getting nervous and feeling ashamed of himself, he walked out. That’s right. Elon Musk failed to get hired at Netscape. The recruiting managers didn’t see a need for him, and he was too ashamed to keep badgering them. So what happened next? Well, we know what happened from there. Musk went on to become one of the most successful and respected visionaries of our time.[30] Take a deep breath and realize that there are no life-ending failures, only experiments and results. It’s also important to realize that you are not the failure—the experiment is the failure. It is impossible for a person to be a failure. A person’s life is just a collection of experiments. We’re meant to enjoy them and grow from them. If you learn to love the process of experimentation, the prospect of failure isn’t so scary anymore.

Jenny Marzen is who again?" Amy knew perfectly well who she was. Jenny Marzen was hot, hotter than Amy had ever been, and Jenny Marzen would be washed up in ten years and didn't know it. "And Jenny is my number one fan?" "No, but she likes you. She read your stories in grad school." "What is she, twelve?" "The point is, she really liked the article, and all that stuff about experience and news. Lex says she says you've got gravitas." "That's a dirty lie. I never even had mono.

could turn you into an asshole; he’d learned that teaching grad-school seminars. It could teach you to treat real people the way you did characters, as instruments of your own intellectual pleasure, cadavers on which to practice your critical faculties.

And if by grace, then it cannot be based on works; if it were, grace would no longer be grace. —Romans 11:6 (NIV) I couldn’t help noticing something on the dashboard of the cab I was riding in this morning: a snapshot of a college grad with mortarboard and gown, holding a diploma, smiling proudly; maybe the driver’s son. “Congratulations,” I said. “Your son?” “No,” he answered, “that’s me.” Momentarily mortified, I found myself thinking, Tough luck, driving a cab with a college degree. I got a better look at the driver. Middle Eastern, middle-aged. Probably has a PhD in astrophysics back in his home country. “Well,” I said awkwardly, “congratulations all the same. That’s great.” “An education is the best thing this country has given me. I just got an accounting degree and pretty soon I will find a job in my field, God willing. But meanwhile I have a family to support. Want to see them?” “Sure.” He flipped open the glove box where there were pictures of two boys and a girl, all in caps and gowns, all recent grads of high school and college. “I try to set a good example for them,” he said with a laugh. “God willing, they will find good jobs too. Education is the key to everything.” As we pulled to the curb, I thought of my own family coming to this country and struggling to reach the American dream, just like this man and his family. I thought of all the opportunities I’d been blessed with and how I can take it all too much for granted at times. “It was an honor to ride in your cab,” I said, handing the driver his fare. “Have a good day, sir,” he replied. “I shall,” I said, “God willing.” Jesus, they called You “Rabbi,” which means teacher. This month please bless all those who have worked so hard and so long for that great key to the future, a diploma. —Edward Grinnan