Test: Are YOU a Graduate Student?

From the Mad Nowhere Woman, via Kiita. I am guilty of the bolded items. Bold and in italics means I have been guilty of these activities in the past, but given them up.

YOU MIGHT BE A GRADUATE STUDENT IF:

you can analyze the significance of appliances you cannot operate;

you have ever, as a folklore project, attempted to track the progress of your own joke across the Internet;

you are startled to meet people who neither need nor want to read;

you have ever brought a scholarly article to a bar;

you rate coffee shops (or bars) by the availability of wifi and outlets for your laptop;

everything reminds you of something in your discipline;

you have ever discussed academic matters at a sporting event;

you have ever spent more than $50 on photocopying while researching a single paper;

there is a microfilm reader in the library that you consider “yours”;

you actually have a preference between microfilm and microfiche;

you can tell the time of day by looking at the traffic flow at the library;

you look forward to summers because you’re more productive without the distraction of classes;

you regard ibuprofen as a vitamin;

you consider all papers to be works in progress;

professors don’t really care when you turn in work anymore;

you find the bibliographies of books more interesting than the actual text;

you have given up trying to keep your books organized and are now just trying to keep them all in the same general area;

you have accepted guilt as an inherent feature of relaxation;

you reflexively start analyzing those Greek letters before you realize that it’s a sorority sweater, not an equation;

you find yourself explaining to children that you are in “20th grade”;

you start referring to stories like “Snow White et al.”;

you frequently wonder how long you can live on pasta or cup noodles without getting scurvy;

you look forward to taking some time off to do laundry;

you have more photocopy cards than credit cards;

you wonder if APA style allows you to cite talking to yourself as “personal communication”;

you can identify universities by their internet domains;

you are constantly looking for a thesis in novels;

you have difficulty reading anything that doesn’t have footnotes;

you understand jokes about Foucault;

the concept of free time scares you;

you consider caffeine to be a major food group;

you’ve ever brought books with you on vacation and actually studied;

Friday or Saturday nights spent studying no longer seems weird;

the prof doesn’t show up to class and you discuss the readings anyway;

you appreciate the fact that you get to choose *which* twenty hours out of the day that you have to work;

you still feel guilty about giving students low grades (you’ll get over it);

you can read course books and cook at the same time;

you schedule events for academic vacations so your friends can come;

you hope it rains during spring break so you can get more studying done;

you’ve ever worn out a copy card;

you find taking notes in a park relaxing;

you find yourself citing sources in conversation;

you’ve ever sent a personal letter with footnotes; and,

you have days when you can’t bring yourself to do any work, so you “keep busy” by procrastinating (or blogging).

Axé.


9 thoughts on “Test: Are YOU a Graduate Student?

  1. What a personal relief that I am not a grad student by these accounts!

    But actually I think the criteria need to be updated for the electronic age:

    * Is your computer slowing down because you have downloaded too many .pdf files from JSTOR, including some that you can see no relevance for, but you keep stored on your hard-drive, just incase you might need them some day?

    * Do you judge the humanity of professional academics by how long they take to reply to your emails?

    *Do you have generalised feelings of hate which come and go for not particular reason?

    * You wonder which of your papers are “works in regress” and why nobody is telling you about them.

    * You like people whose open faces do not remind you of academia.

    * You have spilled red wine over someone in a bar whilst reading Lukacs (yes, actually happened — a terrible mistake, in some respects).

    * You read books by others who have written in your same subject area, and you think ,”I can’t believe the impertinence of that person — advancing their opinions in the area I have chosen to research for themselves. Utter arrogance — competing against me like that. And to make it worse — competing even before I had chosen this area in this discipline. It seems their utter disdain for me is paramount!

  2. LOL! That’s a better list! And it is very grad student … or professorial too, some of us are permanent grad students in a way and I think that’s good.

  3. Well, I AM a grad student and thus many of these things ring true for me. Here are a couple of others:

    …you actually hope your professor assigns homework.

    …you spend Saturday morning waiting for the library to open.

    …you get a 3-hour final with 5 questions or less.

    …the last time you watched TV, Brenda was still on 90210 and McGuiver was making bombs out of duct tape.

    …an exciting trip is when you run errands with your roommate.

    and my personal mantra:

    …you utter the words, “School comes before sex.”

  4. At one point in graduate school a boyfriend and I had taped to the refrigerator a sign saying “In the interest of finishing our dissertations, sex may occupy a maximum of 90 minutes per day!”

  5. No. We had figured 7.5 hours for dissertations including library runs, 1.5 hours for sex, and 15 hours for everything else. We did finish our dissertations on time!

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