Thursday, October 05, 2006

some stolen humor

The Top Ten Lies Told by Graduate Students
(taken from the Harvard Crimson)
10. It doesn't bother me at all that my college roommate is making $80,000 a year on Wall Street.
9. I'd be delighted to proofread your book/chapter/article.
8. My work has a lot of practical importance.
7. I would never date an undergraduate.
6. Your latest article was so inspiring.
5. I turned down a lot of great job offers to come here.
4. I just have one more book to read and then I'll start writing.
3. The department is giving me so much support.
2. My job prospects look really good.
1. No really, I'll be out of here in only two more years.

You just might be a graduate student if...

...you can analyze the significance of appliances you cannot operate.

...your carrel is better decorated than your apartment.

...you have ever, as a folklore project, attempted to track the progress of your own joke across the Internet.

...you are startled to meet people who neither need nor want to read.

...you have ever brought a scholarly article to a bar.

...you rate coffee shops by the availability of outlets for your laptop.

...everything reminds you of something in your discipline.

...you have ever discussed academic matters at a sporting event.

...you have ever spent more than $50 on photocopying while researching a single paper.

...there is a microfilm reader in the library that you consider "yours."

...you actually have a preference between microfilm and microfiche.

...you can tell the time of day by looking at the traffic flow at the library.

...you look forward to summers because you're more productive without the distraction of classes.

...you regard ibuprofen as a vitamin.

...you consider all papers to be works in progress.

...professors don't really care when you turn in work anymore.

...you find the bibliographies of books more interesting than the actual text.

...you have given up trying to keep your books organized and are now just trying to keep them all in the same general area.

...you have accepted guilt as an inherent feature of relaxation.

...you reflexively start analyzing those greek letters before you realize that it's a sorority sweatshirt, not an equation.

...you find yourself explaining to children that you are in "20th grade".

...you start refering to stories like "Snow White et al."

...you frequently wonder how long you can live on pasta without getting scurvy

...you look forward to taking some time off to dolaundry

...you have more photocopy cards than credit cards

(thanks Jules....these were great!)

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Someone should add:
You might be a grad student when...

...you make a time-budget allowance for the time it takes for you to walk to class or work.

I find myself going "okay, it takes about ten minutes to walk to the library, that leaves 3 hours and 50 minutes that I can work on my thesis at the office."

funkymonkey said...

hahaha! You forgot about time alloted for pee breaks. I do the whole "I can go as soon as I finish this one page" thing which of course results in one terrible page of text.

ahh...the sick sad reality of our student careers.