from Larry McMurtry, Moving On (1970)
. . . it was a relief to go with someone who wasn't eternally bitching about graduate school. Everyone else felt, or at least declared, that graduate school was really no place for them, that the life was unreal, the projects inane, the themes and theses worthless, the professors disagreeable, the social conventions artificial, the competitions silly. Nonetheless, most of them stayed hermetically sealed in the graduate life, wrote the papers, kowtowed to the professors, plodded through the texts, consumed lakes of coffee a cup at a time, griped, whined, exulted over triumphs so minor they would have been unnoticeable in any other context, competed with one another endlessly, and, by the time they had been at it a few months, would scarcely have known what to do in any other world. To go back into what they liked to refer to as 'real life' they would have had to be reconditioned slowly, like divers coming up from the deep.
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2 comments:
is the problem with these and other such graduate-school-dislikers that they are too separated from the "real" world, or is it that they never fully engaged with the discipline itself?
I think that it takes a few years to come to the satisfaction of engaging with the discipline, and for most people, the interim is pretty miserable in a way that makes them feel alienated from "the real world." To the degree that english grad school is often about defamiliarization, this is actually an interesting response, though for the record, I hate it and try to avoid it, since it romanticizes the work-a-day world and treats the academy as a life of leisure (not work), which it certainly is not.
So you might ask, why did I post this?
A.: First, I think it is funny. Second, I drink lots of coffee. And third, I exult disproportionately over minor triumphs. (But I also suffer disproportionately over minor failures, so it balances out.)
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