Grad School: It's What's For Dinner

I would like, if I may, to talk to you about graduate school. And I will. Who's going to stop me? You? Ha! No-one can defeat the Hidden Monkey Hands!

As many of you already know, but mysterious Internet people may not, I am a real live metabolising graduate student. Grad school is what I do all day. (Except for other things.) This is my second year in the Ph.D. programme in the Mathematics Department at the University of Washington, and I know already that I just used far too many prepositional phrases in a row, so let's never speak of it again. I think I'm making pretty decent progress. I've passed all my prelims (aka preliminary exams, aka quals, aka qualifying exams) and picked an area of specialisation (algebraic topology); I haven't yet got a thesis advisor, but I'm working on it. In the five quarters (and one summer) I've been here I've TAed various calculus courses five times, and graded once for an undergraduate- and Master's-level real analysis course (which is sort of funny, because I am an anti-analyst). Next quarter, the Powers That Be in Their transfinite wisdom have seen fit to let me teach my own course, introductory linear algebra. I'll have fifty tiny wee little undergrads all of my very own, getting high off the fumes from my dry-erase markers. Next quarter, by the way, starts on Monday. I'm starting to get a little edgy.

It's a lot of responsibility. My own class. That's ten weeks of lectures to prepare (or start preparing, at least); a syllabus to write up; homework to assign; I need to make a tentative schedule of which topics to cover on which days...And I have to convince a hall full of engineering students three times a week that I know what I'm talking about (which, fortunately, I do) and that I am confident and secure in my pedagogical powers, all while suffering from a wholly unreasonable fear of speaking in front of crowds. I get nervous just speaking up in my graduate classes, which are tiny and intimate. I had to give a presentation on Lie algebra cohomology in one of my classes two weeks ago; as I sat there shuffling my papers waiting my turn, I felt like Dick Cheney was sitting on my chest; I felt his cold, dead hand crushing my heart. I sweated, covertly. I was a deer, staring into a headlight, which belonged to an oncoming train. A subway train. In New York City. At the Bergen Street station, as seen in Jacob's Ladder, the most disturbingly terrifying film I've ever seen.

Oddly enough, all of that goes away as soon as I start talking. Because I do actually know what I'm talking about. It's math. I can do math. As soon as I stop thinking about doing it and just do it, I'm fine. I forget all about Dick Cheney and tiny eyeless figures with melted faces plunging hypodermic needles into people's foreheads. After the Lie algebra cohomology talk, someone even claimed to me that my talk had been enjoyable, if you can believe that. And a number of students I've TAed have claimed to enjoy my style of presentation. Something very similar will happen here, too. As soon as I start lecturing, I'll be fine. I just have to make it to Monday morning without freaking out.

I'm making good progress. I've got a couple lectures' worth of notes written out now, and I have a rough schedule in mind. This evening I'm going to do my course web page and write up a syllabus. And listen to Belle and Sebastian. (Are you familiar? They're Willow music. As opposed to They Might Be Giants, who are Xander music. I've been grooving on them for about a month and a half now.)

Since I'm being all scholastic today, I thought I might share with all of you what I laughingly call my accumulated graduate school wisdom.

My first piece of wisdom is this: go to graduate school.

If you're involved with mathematics, physics, computer science, engineering, statistics, or other hard sciencey fields, at least.

As far as I can tell, by and large, graduate students in mathematics and the sciences and so forth get a much, much better deal than the average graduate student in, say, English. We don't have to read shitty potentially-plagiarised undergraduate papers for general education courses, for starters. And our students can't disagree with us about anything, because we're always right. The things we teach them are objectively True; there is no room for a difference of opinion.

In mathematics, at the very least, graduate school can be a pretty sweet racket. If you get into a Ph.D. programme at any school worth pissing at, you'll be guaranteed a steady TA job, which may not let you live like a king but will at least pay the rent and keep you in cheap Chinese takeaway. And it's easy money. Most commonly, entry-level TAs will handle discussion sections for large lecture courses, which is easy as spitting on a toad. Or you can grade for a graduate course whose equivalent you've already passed. Or, as time passes and you get bolder, you can teach your own class. Like me. This, as I am learning, means considerably more work, but compared to sitting for eight hours a day in a cubicle at RealNetworks staring towards the water cooler with cold, dead eyes and a heart full of sorrow, it doesn't seem so bad. (Unless you care about making respectable amounts of money, as opposed to just not starving.)

Sure, graduate school means taking horrifically difficult courses and passing grotesquely difficult exams...But if you can get into the programme in the first place, and you don't mind biting the bullet every now and then, it's quite doable. It's not like you'll be on your own. Work with other grads. Pool your resources. Don't be shy. It'll even be fun. And don't worry if your grades suck. You just have to pass.

It beats looking for a real job in these dark economic days.

Posted by aloysius at March 24, 2004 06:11 PM | TrackBack |