On Grad School Life

I post about a lot of random stuff, and I realize that I almost never post about the thing that I spend the most of my time doing: being a grad student. I'm in my thirteenth month of graduate school now (NOTE: although, to be fair, I spent one month on a series of white-kid vacations), and I feel like I've learned enough about my work to run my electronic mouth a little bit. While you read what I have to say, I suggest that you listen to the new Metallica song "Cyanide," available streaming on their website here. Seriously, it's awesome, click on it.

The first thing I've learned is that graduate school brings together a bunch of large personalities belonging to very intelligent people. The second thing - closely related to the first - is that it's mostly impossible for large groups of intelligent people to get along with each other. Intelligent people are just too damned weird, and they care way too much about the quality of how they think. You know what happens when you start believing that you think the truth? You become a zealot, an evangelist, and an asshole. I think of my brain as a sensitive, but mostly stupid, instrument. When I get something right, I'm genuinely surprised. (*NOTE: Some of you might be thinking that I'm refuting my own argument by trying to get you to agree that the way I think is right. Doesn't that make me a zealot? Nope - I actually think what I just typed is wrong, and you shouldn't agree with me. So, there.)

The third thing I've learned is that I'm amazed at how little expertise really exists out there. I've worked with a group of really smart people over the past year, and it seems (to my uncultured mind) that what separates the most brilliant from the merely intelligent is not their speed of finding answers, but instead how quickly they shuffle through questions, seeming to have separated the bullshit from the real point in milliseconds. I cannot do this (yet), and it remains a sight to see. My undergraduate adviser once referred to academia as "intellectual sport," and if that is true, I am a poor man's Wilson Betemit.

The fourth thing is that I expected grad school to help me illuminate where I stand with respect to the rest of the (non-academic) world, but this hasn't really happened yet. If anything, I feel like I've fallen behind my actual money-making compadres in the "real world." Graduate school really makes me think about graduate school is about, and I'm not sure I have the answer yet. I think that it helps that grad school is a highly-controlled environment; I can make a lot of mistakes here that would get me fired from a real job. I think that it shows the world that I'm willing to put off reward in order to obtain a goal. But I'm not certain yet why it's necessary. I'm not sure why it's sufficient.

A week before flying to Albuquerque, New Mexico, this February for my first major academic conference, my adviser sat with me and we discussed what I would expect at the conference. She told me that if I noticed anyone "whose work I admired," I should ask her first if she knew them and get the OK, before I went up to them and... I imagine I would get down on my knees and "idolize" them? I don't know what I would do, and this is a very important aspect of who I am, I think. It's not that I don't admire certain people's work -- in fact, I do. And it's not that I have a problem with approaching people. I may not be the type to walk up to the hottest girl in the bar (which is OK, because I presently date the hottest girl in the bar), but in professional situations I can be very personable.

It's the interaction between the two that gets me. It's that I could never see myself going up to a strange researcher and talking shop for 30-45 minutes. What would be the point? As I mentioned earlier in this post, most academics are absolutely no fun to talk to. They're awkward, self-possessed, and incredibly elitist (one mistakenly thought I was a waiter and asked me to pour him a glass of champagne at a cocktail party). And as I mentioned in an earlier post, I'm terrible at small talk, and I do think that talking about research is "small talk." If a person can't figure out 99.9% of what they need to know from reading a researcher's journal articles, either the researcher sucks at writing or the reader sucks at reading.

And this, my friends, is why I would make a terrible academic.

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If reactions are positive, I'll write more posts in the months to come about how grad school life goes. I do think it's an interesting chapter of my life, even if my average day consists of driving to an office, sitting at a computer, eating a Lean Cuisine, reading Deadspin and chatting on Facebook in between running analyses in SPSS and reading for class. Stay classy out there.