100 Reasons

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Showing posts with label Working Conditions. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Working Conditions. Show all posts
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, June 23, 2014

93. There is no getting ahead.

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Graduate school attracts highly ambitious people, despite the fact that academe is a terrible environment for highly ambitious people. How s...
146 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, 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, June 11, 2012

84. The politics are vicious.

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 “Academic politics are so vicious because the stakes are so low.” Endlessly repeated, the ironic expression has become a dictum on college...
127 comments:
Monday, April 16, 2012

82. Teaching is moving online.

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No matter what ambitions people may have when they enter graduate school, they are likely to find themselves looking for academic teaching p...
66 comments:
Monday, February 13, 2012

78. It takes a toll on your health.

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Graduate school is hard on your mental health (see Reason 68 ), but it is also hard on your physical health. As a grad student, you spend a ...
83 comments:
Monday, January 30, 2012

77. It attracts the socially inept.

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Graduate school demands that you spend an immense amount of time alone (see Reason 69 ). It demands sustained interest in highly esoteric su...
87 comments:
Monday, January 16, 2012

76. There is a culture of fear.

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The worst fears to which graduate school gives rise are fears about the future, which stem from both immediate concerns about funding (see R...
103 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, October 31, 2011

71. The tenure track is brutal.

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The more time that you sink into graduate school, the more invested you become in an academic career (see Reason 29 ), and the holy grail fo...
168 comments:
Monday, October 3, 2011

69. It is lonely.

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In graduate school, you spend a great deal of time alone. Most academic work is the product of isolation. Studying, research, and writing ...
92 comments:
Monday, September 19, 2011

68. It is stressful.

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Graduate school is stressful. Sometimes it is terribly stressful. Stress is virtually unavoidable in any kind of work, but there is a pecul...
78 comments:
Monday, September 5, 2011

67. There is a star system.

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Academe is more like professional sports than most academics would like to admit, especially when it comes to money (yes, money). Just as th...
66 comments:
Monday, July 18, 2011

64. Smugness.

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Academe takes itself and its hierarchies very seriously, which is why where you go to school matters so much to the trajectory of an academi...
80 comments:
Monday, June 6, 2011

61. Unstructured time.

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At least since the Industrial Revolution, most every institution of human life has been organized according to a schedule, because there is ...
45 comments:
Monday, May 2, 2011

57. Rejection is routine.

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No one likes rejection, but everyone encounters it. Graduate students encounter it frequently. You often feel the sting of rejection before ...
33 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, April 4, 2011

53. Teaching assistantships.

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There is something inherently humiliating about being a teaching assistant. This is true despite the fact that graduate students desperately...
52 comments:
Monday, March 21, 2011

51. You are surrounded by undergraduates.

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Most everyone who works in education experiences the strange phenomenon of growing older while students stay the same age. Graduate student...
62 comments: