Paula H. Bloom <pauli@netmeister.org>
If you haven't already guessed, this is written by a somewhat jaded grad student. But don't let that deter you. If you're considering going to graduate school, or would simply like to chuckle at someone else's expense, read on...
For the past six years, I've held the ambiguous title known as ``Ph.D. Candidate''. As such, I've had plenty of time to reflect on the life of a graduate student and all of it's painful contradictions. When I applied to graduate school as a naive college senior, securely ensconced in my isolated, idealized liberal arts campus, I had no idea what I was in for. All I knew was that I didn't want to have to find a job after graduation! And now that I've been a student since I was 5 years old, I feel the time has come to make others aware of what it means to be a graduate student, lest anyone blindly embark upon what I call ``A Life in Limbo''.
You have ideas, ideals, a dreamy image of a comfortable academic existence... Your days consist of sublime reading and writing, not to mention the four months of vacation a year. You believe the interaction with bright-eyed students will keep you forever young, that there is no more admirable endeavor than the commitment to the perpetuation of knowledge and an intellectual environment. Ah, yes, these are truly noble pursuits. But do they really exist? Yes, for some - if you finish your degree, if you get a job, if you get tenure. But these ifs don't occur to an young applicant who has no idea that that elusive doctorate degree is not a foregone conclusion, or that first you must suffer. A lot.
There are several factors determining the extent to which and for how long you will suffer. If you are unfortunate enough to have become interested in a field in the Humanities, as I did, you will suffer greatly for many years. Course requirements are often much greater in a Humanities program than they are in the Natural Sciences, and funding is harder to get. So the pathetic students dedicated to something as impractical as, say, Literature, will be just as dedicated to something equally as impractical: Poverty! Yes, Literature and Poverty seem inextricably linked, absolutely during graduate school and quite possibly afterwards.
Those lucky enough to get a scholarship should keep in mind the following: all that glitters is not gold. If your scholarship requires you to teach, as most do, beware! For it is a thinly-veiled contract for Enslavement, Exploitation, and, of course, our good friend Poverty. A graduate student forced to teach for the privilege of a free education and a pitiful stipend is constantly pulled in different directions: your teaching responsibilities require that you teach well, as if you were paid for it. That means always being prepared, creating tests and sometimes the syllabus, returning corrected homework and examinations promptly, making yourself available to the students outside of class - in short, being competent in the classroom. The students certainly have every right to expect the same (after all, they pay enough to be there), and for their sake and because you have a conscience, you try to live up to these high standards. But is this your primary responsibility? It's easy to lose sight of the fact that it is not. Completing your degree is. So you do your best to study whenever you're not teaching, correcting, preparing, or meeting with students. You try to complete the reading assignments so you can participate in class. You try to steal some time in the library to do a little research for your term papers. You try to figure out what your dissertation topic will be. But every single day you are confronted with the immediate demands of being a teacher. The result? Little time to be a student.
The big universities exploit you so as not to have to pay full-time faculty to teach the same courses. They pretend that their graduate students, who teach most of the undergraduate required courses, do not do the same job as a faculty member, and they pocket the tuition money your students (or their parents) take out huge loans to pay. In the eyes of the university, the graduate student is a student when it comes to salary, and a teacher when it comes to labor. In the eyes of your friends, family, and anyone you meet, you are a mystery. What are you going to do with a degree in Literature? You're 28 years old and have no retirement plan?
Not just a student, not quite a teacher, not really a child, not yet an adult. Such is the life of the graduate student. Such is a life in limbo.