Last time, I told you about how to talk to a graduate student, the questions to avoid asking and why. Now, we talk about the world through the eyes of a graduate student. Grad students are not normal people in the strictest sense; the ones in the sciences and engineering gave up lucrative careers in a variety of fields to live just above the poverty line, and the ones in the humanities made a long string of poor life decisions that string back to high school when they decided a philosophy degree would be kinda neat.

So how exactly does a graduate student view the world? Typically what must be remembered is that graduate students are very similar to East Asian mystics that would go into seclusion on a mountain to meditate about the deepest meanings of existence. If you go to them, don’t expect conversation about current events or some sort of help with your taxes. The graduate student has no time for this. He is too busy exploring the subtle, dark niches of the intellectual universe, and really his taxes are pretty easy to do because he doesn’t make shit. So what do graduate students see when they look at the world. Well, everything is generally very pragmatic: Where is food? Where is free food? Where is beer? Where is my adviser and is he coming to my office right now? Mysteriously, graduate students do a remarkable amount of work for their remarkably low salaries and limited respect from the community at large. Therefore, they don’t walk around like they own the place; they slink around undergraduate social events looking for plates of free sandwiches.

Personal experience: walking through the lobby of my own department’s building, a friend of mine comes in wide-eyed and smiling. “Steve, I have seen the greatest thing ever. Free food as far as the eye can see!” I was going to the bank to drop off a paycheck. I instead went in search of free food. That was one of the greatest moments of graduate school, was an entire room full of companies trying to convince me to buy Boar’s Head ham or Dole pineapples. My God, it was beautiful…

You cannot ask a graduate student on campus where to locate anything. A map of the campus looks like a large black mark with a few X’s over the locations of food, the library, the department building, and possibly any medical services. For example, here is a rough example of what the map of my campus looks like to me:

Yeah, that’s about it. I’ve heard of most of the buildings, but I have no idea where they are.

When we see something, the first thing we will ask is “what does this do to my workload?” I have intentionally paid nearly $30 to avoid another hour of work to do over a weekend. It was worth it, because it meant I could sleep until 10 AM on a Saturday, which is one of the few great gifts of life. Some people joke that grad students sleep late — this is true, but frequently because we were at the office from the night before when you were just about to wake up to go to work. Academia provides the opportunity for some pretty bizarre sleep schedules: I lived with a guy who would sleep until noon, but work until 4 or 5 in the morning. He got his work done, and that was that.

So really, when you talk to a graduate student, it is probably in your best interest to avoid anything that might require general exposure to the outside world. You are likely to upset him, leading to a flash of introspection and the depressing realization of how much money he could have by now if he’d just gotten a real job when he finished college, and nobody wants to see a 25 year old man cry like that.