Adam Ruben - Surviving Your Stupid, Stupid Decision to Go to Grad School

1 /Stop? Drop? Enroll?
Deciding Whether to Ruin Your Life

Many applicants believe that graduate school will be a wonderful land of chocolate daisies fed to playful otters in the golden autumn sunshine under a prostitute-filled sky. will shatter those illusions and, paradoxically, also provide advice to help you enroll.

2 /Selecting a Graduate Program
Where, When, How, and Why, God, Why?

Graduate programs come in many miserable shapes and harrowing sizes, and now its time to select which one youd like to financially devastate your futurein other words, will prepare you to eventually file for Chapter 11.

3 /Grad Student Life
You Werent Going to Do Much with Your Twenties Anyway

In , you will learn tips and tricks for your day-to-day life, including techniques for free food theft, alternatives to hygiene, and, given current stipend levels, the surprising nutritional value of sawdust.

4 /Research and Destroy
Making Data Pretty

The purpose of research is to keep ones advisor happy. Or, to use a tired analogy, if a graduate student is a vibrator, research is the battery that fuels the vibrator, which sits in the rectum of ones advisor. is dedicated to the fine art of keeping the batteries charged and the vibrator running.

5 /Undergraduates and You
The Hand That Robs the Cradle

It is with envy, resentment, and prurient lust that we regard our undergraduate colleagues. While we refine Lexis Nexis searches, they spend spring break in Mazatln with twelve sorority sisters named Jen who really shouldnt lick that, but, hey, its spring break! details the proper relationship to maintain with undergraduates, an earnest rapport that blends disdain with sporadic boob-touching.

6 /Six Degrees of Exasperation
Law School, Business School, Medical School, and More

Graduate school can be considered the bastard step-cousin of its prodigal postgraduate relatives: law school, business school, and medical school. is dedicated to the students who were dumb enough to stay in school but smart enough to study something that makes them employable. Fuckers.

7 /Let My Pupil Go
Getting the Fuck Out of Grad School

Finally, in , the reader exits graduate school like a caterpillar gracefully emerging from some sort of shit-filled caterpillar trap. As an advanced degree recipient, you are now prepared to enter society armed with an acute method of determining, conclusively, whether your clients want fries with that.

THERE exists a subculture of dedicated academics who view spending a decade masochistically overworked and underappreciated as a laudable goal. They lead the lives of the impoverished, grade the exams of the whiny, and spend lonely nights in the library or laboratory pursuing a glowing truth that only six or seven people will ever care about. These people are grad students, and they are idiots.

This book is for readers considering or already committed to spending the best years of their lives without sunlight. Youll learn which departmental events have the best free food, what pranks to play on hot-but-vapid undergrads, how to convincingly fudge data, and why your friends who opted to take nondescript nine-to-five jobs after college were actually the smart ones.

SERIOUSLY? A foreword and a preface?

Yes. The existence of both sections can teach you a lot about grad school:

1. Much can be gained by stretching a small amount of content over multiple pages.

2. In general, such redundancy imparts powerful messages that are powerful.

3. Your reaction right now reveals whether you should be a grad student:

   1. Those unfit for grad school have skipped ahead, probably to a page with an illustration.

   2. Those who belong in grad school feel a compulsion to read every word (and, in some cases, to take notes and prepare an extensive critique on the books use of dialectical assonance).

ALL right, now this is just insane. A prologue? Really? Are we stuck here in limbo, doomed never to begin the book?

Exactly. Now youre getting it. This book is like your life, and the prologue is grad school. You eagerly want to begin your life, but grad school stands in the way, and just when you think its overnope! Another section.

And the hell of it is, you could begin your life this moment. Really. You could skip to and begin reading the actual book. But out of obligation to the printed word, or out of inertia, or out of a misguided need to finish what you start, youll keep reading and waiting.

A foreword, a preface, and a prologue. Ridiculous. I mean, seriously, whats nextan introduction?

EVERY speech at my college graduation buzzed with a sense of finality. You have completed your education, each one reminded us. Now go contribute to society!

And most of my classmates eagerly accepted the challenge, having known that this daythe official, robe-clad end of the beginningwould someday arrive. As they pocketed their diplomas, they envisioned their new jobs, their new responsibilities, their lives outside the academy. They entered college as children, but they exited on that hot June afternoon as citizens of the world.

Most of them. Not me.

And not all of my classmates, either. As guest speakers and valedictorians exhorted us to go forth into the real world, a few of us felt that the directive was a bit premature. We knew that college had ended, but we also knew that the real world was years away. We were prepared instead to enter a half-assed compromise between college and real life, a simultaneously intense and lackadaisical academic perdition called grad school.

I felt a little like a cheater, like a twelve-year-old who still waded in the kiddie pool, knowing it was well past time to start swimming, but was frightened of the loud teenagers in the big pool. Or maybe like a budding musician whod mastered Guitar Hero, but had never picked up an actual guitar.