In one of the episodes of the popular animated TV series The Simpsons, Marge Simpson scolded her son Bart for making fun of graduate students.
“Bart, don’t make fun of graduate students. They just made a terrible life choice.”
That time, Marge’s statement made me stop for a moment to take a second look at my choice of going to grad school (not once, twice!). Have I made a terrible life choice?
It brought to mind a conversation between friends as they were walking from the Beaumont Tower to the Union one afternoon.
Friend 1 (The Chemist): I’ve been asking myself this question lately: What does Grad School mean?
Friend 2 (The Geneticist): Uhm, confusion. And going to grad school means getting yourself confused.
Friend 3 (The MBA): (Turning to Friend 4 who was falling a step behind in order to dodge the question) What about you?
Friend 4: I want a heaping ice cream. (Friend 4 didn’t want to answer, she’d been to grad school once before this! And writing the first 60 pages of her master’s thesis on message framing and Kahneman and Tversky’s Prospect Theory was not only a glimpse of monasticism but a 3-week field trip to purgatory.)
Then last weekend, we caught up with a video which a friend posted on Facebook. The video was produced by a group of graduate students doing research on Alzhiemer’s Disease at Baylor College of Medicine. When we watched it, we were shaking with laughter, not because it’s the funniest (if not also the most creative) parody of Lady Gaga’s Bad Romance we’d ever seen. We got into fits of laughter because nothing comes close to capturing Grad School life than this. Very resonant, something that graduate students from different parts of the world and different fields of specialization shared.
More or less, that’s what being in grad school is all about. (Which reminds me of what my professor once said, “Don’t underestimate grad students. Yes, they are poor but they have an amazing capacity to endure pain.” Funny. A very good preparation for the long and arduous battle for tenure.) It appears then that Marge Simpson is correct. Right?
No, she’s not. Grad school is a story of hard work, discipline, perseverance, foresight (read: the ability to recognize a good opportunity when presented with one) and boundless creativity. But believe me, it is in the RIGOR where you have so much FUN! Exams are exciting…no matter how hard you study there is a certain degree of uncertainty in them because you do not know the questions that your professor will give the class. In a way exams are like chess matches, you anticipate and you plan your moves. Writing papers is an equally fulfilling experience. Most of the times we complain about not being heard or listened to. In interactions, we hate the person who monopolizes the conversation because…look, we have so much to say about something. But in your papers, you can even argue with Plato or agree with Machiavelli. Remember, it was that one paper containing the simple equation E=mc2 which revolutionized our understanding of time and space. And with that, who says, rigor kills creativity?
But we do not tell this fun to every people we meet. Otherwise, it will cease to be our secret and grad school will lose a bit of its esoteric and intimidating reputation. Yet, in the darkened halls and lobbies where grad students meet they nod at each other not only because they seem to have a similar story of suffering, or that they acknowledge each other or wanted to show their respect for that unfathomable bounds of human intelligence, but also because they know, that in the midst of stress, they cheat deadlines in order to watch their favorite TV show or movie, stalk other people through Facebook (aha!), waste time in Youtube, find time to laugh with friends, call their parents, (they even pick up litters and throw them in the trash bin on their way to wherever), and who knows what else they do (binge drink perhaps? No, I retract that…they say that’s mostly an undergrad thing). This is the paradox. After all that’s been said about the mess that is Grad studies, it is actually a life, a very fascinating life.
