The fourth Royal Academy novel will involve graduate students, so I’ve been asking friends for anecdotes and input on the essence of grad studenthood. So far the overwhelming consensus is that graduate study is all about the search for free food.
Graduate students, according to my sources:
- Attend any artist’s opening that promises a buffet
- Sneak into any reception available
- Pick the fruit off ornamental plantings around campus
- Catch fish in campus water features and eat them
- Eat their study subjects
- Eat leftover pieces of other people’s study subjects
- Buy the undergraduates’ unspent food program dollars
- Buy past-date food in bulk and store it in the lab freezers
I knew graduate students who ate stranded marine mammals and songbirds that had hit the sides of downtown buildings. A vegetarian myself, I specialized in harvesting wild food from local mangrove swamps and riverside parks.
Another feature of grad student poverty in my day was inadequate living accommodations. The grad students who lived in houses without heating or plumbing, in an area where winter temperatures reached -40; the students who chose between having hot water or having air conditioning, in areas where summer temperatures reached 100F. People living on screen porches, in areas where it rained an hour a day. The grad student who spent her first winter at the University of Alaska living in a canvas tent.
Grad student poverty, being supposedly temporary and for the sake of greater things, did not depress my peers. It was high-energy, inventive and competitive, and my sources look back on it with nostalgia. I’m not sure it retains that aura of good fun nowadays, when the grad student may be more prone to wonder whether there is a pot of gold at the end of the rainbow.
I never had the slightest concern for food during grad school. I had a Teaching, then a Research Assistanceship, and all my bodily needs were taken care of by the dorm, the caf, and the Physics Bldg was only 100 ft. away from them. For 2 yrs. I never moved more than 0.5 mi. from that spot, except during Xmas break. I never got less sleep in my life, 100% focused on work.
Later distractions like marriage only lowered my focus on work to 99%.
I remember grad school as incredibly intense and life-changing; it was my war, burning away the unimportant nonsense in life.
Is it one of those things, like war, that you try to forget? Or one of those things (like war) that you are nostalgic for?
I came out of grad school with the idea that you should remove all extras from your life and focus on one thing only, in order to accomplish as much on that one thing as possible. Why I thought that I don’t know, because my peers and I did all sorts of different things during grad school. The image was so powerful it swamped any amount of data.