Three Modes of Graduate Student Being

1) Graduate school is a perpetual struggle in a Hobbesian state of nature. Why am I here? Why am I doing this? Course readings overwhelm; professors intimidate; funding runs low; research topics run dry; job prospects look bleak. Life is real, life is earnest (except that this is the ivory tower!). Perhaps it's pointless anyway. Sigh! Life, research, struggle, graduate school...

End state: Professor at Alaskan community college with more or less the same complaints.

2) Graduate school is meant for those who got good grades in high school and college because they were teacher's pets. It's a safe job for those of us who never want to leave school and enter the "real world." What's all this intellectual talk about? At seminars and elsewhere, learn to drop names: Foucault, Bourdieu, Agamben, and, er, your advisor. Read the "literature" on whatever your advisor does, and then suck up, copy his methods, and extend his argument by a thousandth of a decimal point. Academic research is incremental. Science proceeds this way. Heck, that's what the journals are about!

End state: Tenured professor at old graduate school with a chair named after advisor.

3) Graduate school is inspiring and rewarding as long as one is willing to work hard. Serious intellectual effort is valuable for its own sake. Advisors are role models, even heroes, but not gods. Publishing journal articles and presenting papers at conferences are fine, but the key is to enjoy debate and discussion, learning and teaching. Academia is itself part of the real world, embodying every form of hierarchy and discrimination outside it. Studying important issues in society and teaching college students are important ways to set things right just a wee bit.

End state: Unemployed writer or activist.