100 Reasons

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Showing posts with label Disenchantment. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Disenchantment. Show all posts
Monday, September 21, 2015

95. Academics are unhappy.

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You know that today's graduate students are unhappy when the Wall Street Journal can refer (and not entirely facetiously) to the world...
149 comments:
Monday, October 27, 2014

94. It warps your expectations.

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Graduate students develop unreasonable expectations, but over the course of a long spell in graduate school those expectations swing from on...
150 comments:
Monday, September 9, 2013

91. Downward mobility is the norm.

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The term "downward mobility" describes the phenomenon of falling into a social class lower than the one into which you were born. ...
420 comments:
Monday, May 27, 2013

90. Virtually no one cares about what you are doing.

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In graduate school, you often feel alone because you often are alone, but also because no one cares about what you're doing. You spend ...
247 comments:
Monday, March 25, 2013

89. Virtually no one reads what you write.

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You are not paid for your academic writing (see Reason 88 ) because no one is willing to pay to read it. In fact, virtually no one is will...
247 comments:
Monday, September 10, 2012

86. It is a state of being.

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Graduate school is not school in any sense that you have experienced school before (see Reason 47 ). Nor is it a job, although a job is ofte...
212 comments:
Monday, July 16, 2012

85. It is not a ticket to the upper middle class.

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Even among the college-educated, there is a tendency to envision the life of a professor as one that includes tweed jackets with leather e...
179 comments:
Monday, December 12, 2011

74. Academic conferences.

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The largest academic conferences can be highly depressing affairs involving thousands of participants and hundreds of desperate job seekers ...
139 comments:
Monday, November 28, 2011

73. Perceptions trump reality.

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You really can build a career in academe by writing bogus nonsense (see Reason 35 ). You just have to persuade others to believe (or pretend...
73 comments:
Monday, August 1, 2011

65. Teaching is less and less rewarding.

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Anyone who has been at the back of a college lecture hall recently is familiar with the sight of row upon row of glowing screens. Some stude...
69 comments:
Monday, May 16, 2011

59. You pay for nothing.

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Graduate school is expensive. For the privilege of being a grad student, you pay tuition—unless your tuition has been waived as part of an a...
18 comments:
Monday, April 25, 2011

56. Grading is miserable.

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If Dante had been familiar with graduate school, he probably would have added a level of Hell to his Inferno . The condemned would sit for a...
48 comments:
Monday, March 7, 2011

49. There are few tangible rewards.

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When you build a house, paint a painting, bake a cake, or clean a room, you can step back and see what you have accomplished. Whether you wo...
17 comments:
Monday, January 10, 2011

42. Your workspace reflects your status.

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Facilities vary greatly from one campus to another—and from one department to another—but office space is in short supply on nearly every ca...
17 comments:
Saturday, December 11, 2010

37. The university does not exist for your sake.

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While the modern university increasingly exists for the sake of those that it employs (see Reason 32 ), it still does a good job of creating...
14 comments:
Wednesday, November 10, 2010

30. You occupy a strange place in the world.

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Graduate students not only occupy a strange place in the university (see Reason 10 ), they occupy a strange place in the world. Though it is...
11 comments:
Thursday, October 14, 2010

21. Graduate seminars can be unbearable.

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Imagine sitting with a group of classmates and a professor around a table. Each of you has read a different book about a given topic, and yo...
21 comments:
Monday, October 11, 2010

20. Few ideas are exchanged.

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Perhaps the single greatest disappointment for new graduate students is the realization of how little graduate school resembles a community ...
29 comments:
Tuesday, September 14, 2010

11. There is a psychological cost for quitting.

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Just as there is a psychological cost to be paid for being a graduate student (see Reason 10 ), there is a cost to be paid for quitting a gr...
76 comments:
Monday, September 6, 2010

10. There is a psychological cost.

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Without question, some people are better suited for graduate school than others, and a good attitude goes a long way in making any challenge...
11 comments: