Grad student ethnography: Four things grad students like

1. Reminding everyone that their lives are really hard. After getting up at 8, teaching a class, grading some papers, and going to a lecture, they might not even have enough time left over for an afternoon nap! If you think you’ve got it rough, a grad student is always around to remind you that they’re only getting a paltry three weeks of vacation time this summer before heading out to teach in Europe. Ciao!

2. Getting free money, then blowing it on shoes and booze. In the time between graduating from college and starting their grad program, most of these students seem to have forgotten that typically when you go to a university, you have to pay them for the privilege of receiving a higher education. Consequently, they’ll waste no time in telling the world how poor and undervalued they are, even as they spend their afternoons nibbling on sushi and show up to class in one brand new ensemble after another. Scholarship sponsors and grant writers must be filled with joy to know that this is how the university’s best and brightest use the thousands of dollars given freely to them on the basis of their ability to use large words.

3. Being really open-minded. Grad students love to show off the enlightened worldview their liberal arts education has bestowed upon them by measuring the worth of every person they meet according to the extent to which that person shares the grad student’s background, goals, and academic performance. Although a grad student’s thesis might be about something like “prismatic identities and authentic selves within the marginalized,”* he or she will blithely snub undergraduates, older students, grad students from different programs, better students, worse students, and anyone whose snap judgments (“analyses,” “interpretations,” or “kneejerk reactions”) don’t lead them to the exact same conclusions about life/academia/academic subjects. They probably also fail to see the irony in this.

4. Denial. Not a denial letter from that queer studies post-doc fellowship, mind you; rather, for all their snobbery, grad students desperately want to be like common people, which for them means all those folks from their undergrad years who joined frats, slept around, and knew the words to rap songs. The grad students’ 4.0 GPAs made them the academic aristocracy, but beneath it lies self-doubt and a nagging wish that they had been part of the 2.0 proletariat, which is often manifested in conspicuous “partying” behavior: Not content to just hang out and drink together, grad students must also document the occasion with numerous photographs and facebook updates and talk in class about how much they love beer and procrastination. In this way, they hope to ward off the notion that they are in any respect less hip or less indifferent toward school than their non-grad peers. Another key indicator that a grad student is slumming is the fact that, however wild and crazy they claim to be, they never seem to party so hearty that they wake up in their friend’s bathtub or get a C on a test.

 

*No, really.