
Things not to say to a graduate student - lquist
http://jbdeaton.com/2010/things-you-never-say-to-a-graduate-student/
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tsk
There are much tougher things than to be a grad student. Everyone who is
working hard at whatever they are doing deserves the proper respect, and so
does someone working on a thesis. But, I dislike the tone of this article. It
makes it sound like grad students are somehow special and deserve special
treatment. This is simply not true. If a person is corteous when asking a
question, that should be enough. If the receiver of the question can't be
bothered, that is an entirely different matter. If you are a grad student,
people who have gone through the same may ask questions that you might be more
comfortable with, but you should not expect that from everyone or anyone in
particular. As long as you think that you "deserve " to be asked appropriate
questions about what you do, you are still nothing but a kid inside. And if
this comment stings you, it should be food for thought.

~~~
shdon
That's the same thing that I thought as I read the article. In fact, to me the
article comes across as having a slightly whiny tone. Sure, there are
questions that may not be the most pleasant to hear or answer or may even seem
ignorant, but I doubt very much that that is exclusive to grad students. The
author seems to have lost sight of the idea that these questions, even if they
are not perfect, are often just intended to be a polite way of displaying
interest. If somebody asks "When will you finish your thesis?", why take that
as an annoying question? It allows you to say whether your research is going
as expected, whether you've encountered strange hurdles along the way, in the
research, in writing the thesis etc. Or perhaps things are moving swimmingly
and you can proudly say you're going to finish much sooner than anticipated.

Those questions could be construed as annoying, but I don't think they're
worth any special consideration over "when will you find a girlfriend?"

------
BruceIV
As some of the other commenters have said, some of the language here is a
little strong, but it does do a good job covering the nature of grad school -
people do seem to think that it's like undergrad (likely because many of them
know what that's like). It's not, it's really more like an entry-level
professional position (where you have to pay a huge chunk of your salary back
to your employer for professional training); it's highly entrepreneurial and
self-directed, so yes, you can take off holidays, and you can have a life, but
you're still responsible for finishing your research before your funding runs
out, and that may well involve a fair number of nights and weekends. You do
need some smarts to pull it off, but mostly you just have to love it enough to
forgo higher income in industry while you do it (at least in CS). Here's to
grad school!

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guard-of-terra
All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy.

It makes me seriously sad when people say that their occupation takes all
their time, they have no time off and no time for what we call "life".

This is a sad state of affairs. We all should be working 40 hours weeks and
take the honest time off for the remaining 128 hours in that week.

(The most bizzare thing is when it happens in education. Come on, children are
supposed to play and read books and play computer games and just slack off.
They are not supposed to work long hours. Who set this up?)

~~~
fragsworth
I know plenty of people who refuse to work more than 40 hour weeks. They'll
never be renowned for their research, and they're not likely to get rich.

If someone wants to become "great", it almost always comes at some expense to
their personal lives; if this is a trade-off they're willing to make, all the
power to them.

As far as children go, I'm not concerned with the typical number of hours they
go through (in the U.S.) in their education. You really think it's too much?
Look at the typical 17-18 year old out of High School and see if you're
satisfied with their knowledge/understanding of things.

~~~
guard-of-terra
I don't think so. We should find a way for people to become great without
sacrificing their lives. Why? Because we want everyone to be great. And we
can't have everyone sacrifice their life. It makes no sense if you look at it
from this standpoint.

"Look at the typical 17-18 year old out of High School and see if you're
satisfied with their knowledge/understanding of things."

That's because education doesn't work. You can make them "study" 80 hours
weeks and they will not know or understand anything. They don't have time for
that! They have to study.

The only way to understand something is to relax and see the big picture. You
can't see the larger picture from inside the treadmill.

~~~
endtime
> We should find a way for people to become great without sacrificing their
> lives. Why? Because we want everyone to be great.

I don't think you are actually expressing a coherent desire. To paraphrase the
villain in The Incredibles: "If everyone's great, no one is."

~~~
evincarofautumn
I disagree. Suppose you increase the baseline “greatness” of humanity on the
whole, so that the average person compares to the greats of the past, and the
greats of the present are greater still.

------
Xcelerate
As a grad student in chemical engineering, I'm not sure I entirely get the
joke. I can answer both "How is your research going?" and "How long until you
finish your thesis?" At least at my school, there's a general plan that most
students are expected to follow to get their degree.

Progress must be reported to receive additional funding, so I can certainly
explain the same to anyone that asks.

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hudell
So, don't talk to you about your PhD at all? I understand someone would expect
his close friends not to ask those questions, but you can't seriously hope the
average people will know what to tell you. You could just ignore the "wrong"
question and answer it properly:

a) When are you going to graduate? \- I can't know for sure, but I hope it
will be in two years or so. b) Do you have such and such holiday "off"? \- No.

And no matter what you tell me, I can not accept you saying that "you must be
so much smarter than me" is offensive. Even if I don't like hearing that
myself.

------
1123581321
It seems that to satisfy this person, all I have to do is compliment their
work ethic, ask when they're hoping to finish, ask if they are tired of
pursuing degrees, and confirm that they have no free time.

~~~
eli_gottlieb
You should read more closely.

 _Don't_ ask when we're hoping to finish. Research is not a course, it's a
job. It's like asking, "when is your start-up's IPO?"; it makes a lot of
assumptions _and_ implies your career is a paint-by-numbers affair.

 _Don't even talk to us_ if we seem like the kind of kvetchy grad-student who
bitches about having no free time. Maybe it's just that I'm at Technion
instead of some American university where everyone's a careerist workaholic,
but over here many grad-students do have lives, at least until we actually get
into doing our thesis. We _know_ there are no new professorships, without
illusions, so we're a little less hasty to finish.

~~~
billyjobob
A PhD is a three year programme of study. I would certainly assume that every
PhD student at least has the intention to complete it in three years. Some
will take longer, but this isn't desirable because the grant money won't
continue to pay you after the three years are up. Some unis even have hard
deadlines of four years - you can't submit after that. The finish date is
therefore likely to be important to the student and therefore is a natural and
logical topic of conversation. The only assumption and implication here is
that you do intend to complete. If you don't then you probably shouldn't be
doing a PhD. Even as a post doc, when your research really is your job, people
will still ask you when is the funding completion date for each project you
work on, when will you submit papers, etc.

~~~
bartonfink
Where are you that a PhD is a three year programme of study? It's absolutely
not the case in the United States that a PhD is expected to be completed in
three years, and a hard deadline of four years would be exceptionally tight.

~~~
goodcanadian
In Europe and Australia, a PhD is commonly a "three" year program. I put
"three" in quotes because the truth is closer to 3.5 or 4. This is still very
short and oddly specific to North Americans where a PhD is nominally a 4 year
program, but in practice is more typically 6 (depending on whether or not you
do a masters first). It is not unusual for it to take 7 or 8 years. North
Americans are not being slow or lazy, they come out of it with far more
research and teaching experience and are generally far more capable than the
equivalent overseas. It is sort of like already having one postdoc under your
belt.

------
languagehacker
As a former graduate student who M.A.'ed out of a Ph.D. program, I don't have
a great deal of sympathy for people at the C. Phil stage of their graduate
career. By the time a grad student qualifies, they should be well-aware of the
current exploitive state of academia. Grad students at this stage of their
career are treated as cheap knowledge labor by professors who are either
motivated themselves to achieve tenure, or simply to do as little of their own
work as possible. They are severely overworked and underpaid, and in STEM
disciplines generally have all the knowledge and training they need to live a
very comfortable life for themselves in private industry, instead of propping
up the comfortable lives of their advisors. More and more, as publication
platforms democratize, the knowledge academics provide has as much of a chance
of being recognied or adopted by industry and even academia if it were blogged
as if it were submitted to a scholarly journal. And let's not even get started
on journals, which have their own litany of unresolved issues that endanger
the true furthering of knowledge (in a word, Springer).

So grad students make peanuts, professors do less and less work as they age;
fewer and fewer professors retire, and more and more unnecessary
administrators demand a cut of the budget. Academia is broken in a way that
would be very entertaining to someone like Karl Marx (who was, ironically
enough, an awful scientist). The means of production is being exploited by
those who have the power of prestige, budget, and the rather arbitrary ability
to tell you whether or not you can graduate. This system is a lot like
indentured servitude, except there is no set period of indenturement -- a
committee arbitrarily decides whether they feel they have gotten enough cheap
work out of you, whether they have gotten their names on enough papers they
did minimal work on, etc. I've seen this take a lot of good people's lives.
You can actually see what fatigue, hopelessness, and sunken costs looks like
on an person's face when someone asks them what "year" grad student they are,
and it's revealed that it's been eight or more years working 80 hours a week
and living off of ramen, going from department to department in search of free
pizza.

So being a doctoral candidate is in many ways like being upside down on your
house. But it's been this way since I was in grad school from '05 to '08. So
for people who are just starting out, make a plan for a master's and run. The
real world is scary, but what's even scarier is finding out you went to grad
school for 8 years just to end up a post-doc, which is -- surprise! -- exactly
like grad school, but with a relatively meaningless title after your name. And
that's what will happen, because baby boomer professors simply refuse to
retire. They like the prestige and the money, along with the platform to
pontificate, which they are so used to having by now. Then you realize why
associate professors are so desperate for tenure, and by that time, it's
really too late to change careers. You will be mired in a bad deal, generally
unrecognized outside of your discipline, and continuously exploited by
university administrators. Your only choice will be to take part in the
exploitation and continue the cycle.

Sorry for the rant. Get out while you can.

~~~
smky80
Great post. Could you please email that to myself 5 years ago?

------
knieveltech
Timid. Questions you _really_ shouldn't ask a grad student:

1\. So how come you don't just get a job?

2\. When you graduate how long will it take for you to pay off your student
loans?

~~~
michaelhoffman
1\. For a PhD student, doing graduate research and teaching usually _is_ their
job.

2\. PhD students in science or engineering are paid to do their work, should
not require additional student loans to complete their PhD, and almost always
do not.

~~~
eli_gottlieb
Well yes, which is why those are stupid questions that make us facepalm.

It's all invoking the #1 way to offend a grad-student so much we sputter:
imply that we're children who refuse to ever leave college.

------
jacques_chester
In Australia, PhDs are bounded by government funding.

You have 4 years.

5, if you count the qualifying Honours year you'll need to complete as an
undergraduate.

