Things I Could Live Without: Grad School Edition

Congratulations (to me)! I successfully finished my first year of grad school, for varying degrees of "successfully." There were some bumps and bruises and a t-butyllithium fire I'm not terribly proud of, but I managed to scrape by relatively unscathed. Physically, anyway. My ego, on the other hand, has taken a complete 180° and is currently jettisoning off somewhere in between Bittersville and Total Loser Station. (While my chemistry knowledge ego might be waning, at least my capacity for metaphor still remains. I'm in the wrong field, I swear.) But now that I have officially finished one year, I feel I have gained enough insight to make some humble suggestions for the good people of the university to make future generations' first year of graduate school less shitty. The following should be eliminated.

Half of the Undergraduate Student Population. There are over 30,000 undergraduates at this school. Please remove half of them. At this point, I don't really care if they're the smart ones or the dumb ones.

Donut Class. I believe some explanation is in order here. Here at our prestigious department, the prestigious wingnuts of the prestigious organic division felt that the graduate students, in order to preserve the prestige of the department, needed a little something extra in their schooling. That "little something" turned into a Saturday morning class that organic graduate students take the spring of their first year, known as "donut class" for the sweet pastries we receive as a result of us having to take a class on fucking Saturday morning. That's shitty enough as it is. What's shittier is the content of the class. Every lecture was essentially an hour-long propagandafest on the myriad of services the department had to offer; it was the kind of crap you listened to if you went on ANY prospective weekend. Same shit. We had one worthwhile lecture on No-D NMR, and that was it. It was essentially a class to get our asses up on Saturday morning for no good goddamned reason, and any PI who's worth a shit would make clear his or her recommendation for working on Saturdays. I can buy my own donuts, thank you. (Also, only the organic graduate students have to take this class.)

Summer Pay. Our stipend is for eleven months, because we're not supposed to get paid in August. Cause, you know, that's fair, cause we don't work in August. Yeah. So instead of not getting paid in August, our summer pay is prorated down. Instead of just divvying up our paychecks equally among twelve months, cause nono, that'd be too easy.

The Tradition of Suffering. Well, I had to go through a lot of bullshit and I turned out great! So you should too. It's good for you, and you'll thank me later. Fuck you. It's this kind of attitude that plagues an education system that is quite flawed in its treatment of pupils. To the higher-ups, we are seen as worker bees, students and professional colleagues simultaneously. That is a recipe for disaster. But little changes from it, because only the people who succeed in the system- professors- are allowed to change it. As long as graduate school is relegated to this unreality in which the people unable to escape feel the need to perpetuate this attitude of self-sacrifice as a virtue, the tradition of suffering will continue. Working seventy hours a week for 51 weeks a year isn't good for anyone, period. So why perpetuate it? Because the powers that be don't know any better. They did fine in it- so can you! One prof here told his group this year, "It's not fair. But it's grad school." That's like Bush telling the American people, "Yeah, I stole the 2000 election. It's not fair. But it's the Electoral College." And, I mean, it changes people. For the worse. We've all seen normal, happy people crumble under the occasionally Promethean pressures of graduate school, but there's another, far more annoying consequence. It turns a lot of other people into complete pricks. I suppose there is something Zen about running ten thousand columns in the course of four years; it transforms insecurity into scathing arrogance, without ever seeing the happy medium of humble self-confidence. To be fair, there are plenty of normal people who are easy to deal with here. It's the other ones that make this place seem unreal, though.

Elimination of these burdens/annoyances will result in... who the fuck am I kidding, it's an exercise in futility, this is. Maybe the problem is within, anyway. Maybe I simply don't have the tolerance for pain necessary to receive a PhD. If I did, I wouldn't be complaining about it on a blog, which will probably get back to bite me in the ass. Is getting a PhD worth the trouble? That's a rhetorical question, by the way. Lord knows most grad students I know have lost the capacity to recognize those. I haven't decided yet whether it is worth the trouble, and I appreciate other blogs' honesty in asking this question as well.

Most of us, being the intelligent people that we are, recognize that a lot of the hoops one has to jump through in grad school are bullshit. However, how does one act as a source for change? Do we not owe it to ourselves to identify and try to eliminate bullshit when we see it? The answer appears to be an overwhelming "no," and the Tradition of Suffering, thus, continues. I think part of it is that for many, trying to take a proactive stance in the quality of graduate education /= working in the lab, and people who do it are relegated to "lazy shit" status. And so, the people who were most successful in the system plagued with bullshit, the professors, take it over and do what they will with it, and nothing ever changes. It's kind of disgusting, when you think about it.