At orientation and visitation weekends, you get to see a lot of great and exciting stuff. Everyone wants to talk to you, there’s free booze and sampler plates as far as the eye can see, and if you’re really really lucky, you will get laid (particularly if you’re going to play football at CU-Boulder). But then you get to graduate school, and reality sets in.

There are a few things that they just don’t tell you at orientation, and I’d like to share a few of my observations about this based on my personal experiences. Before I continue, I want to make it totally clear that I have enjoyed my time in graduate school and am glad I came, even if I can’t quite put my finger on why yet.

Classes will be harder than you have ever dealt with before, and sometimes they’re hard purely for the amusement of the faculty. — Think of it as a form of academic hazing. They had to learn electrodynamics from Jackson, and so should you. I’m confident that I had maybe two or three real “weekends” beyond institutional holidays in my entire first academic year. Saturdays and Sundays were marked by the fact that I got to sleep in instead of go to class before starting on homework at noon and working until dinner time. This was the hardest I’ve ever worked in my life, and I went to undergraduate where a professor that gave out exams designed to be finish in some finite amount of time was considered “easy”. Be prepared to work hard. The Reason: This is your last chance to learn this stuff before you become a professional expert on this subject and might be called on to teach it. For the most part, your chops get busted because twenty years from now a bunch of younger versions of you might be sitting at a desk waiting for you to teach them, and you can’t do it very well if you are not a master of the source material. It also gets you ready for your thesis research, because if you can work without a weekend to recuperate, being able to take Saturdays and Sundays off makes everything else look like vacation.

Your career will depend greatly upon what politicians deem important – In the midst of this budget crisis, I’ve been trying to find an advisor. I’ve had two since November, and both dropped me in part or in whole because they just can’t find the funding. The Bush administration’s program to double the NSF budget in 10 years got derailed the second the Democrats took over Congress, which is the weirdest turn of events imaginable. I’m still searching for an advisor, and contemplating a jump to the private sector, although with the economy the way it is I’d almost rather do something I dislike than have to wrestle with MBAs for the few jobs out there that would pay as much as I’d like. Note that I’m the only person in this year’s class that has come across this, so in my experience it is not a common problem, but it is something you should be aware of. The Reason: Congress is run by fickle idiots who will change directions on a dime to go with what the body public wants so they can stay in power.

Teaching assignments, even the best ones, suck — Grading is just another homework assignment but, unlike your classes, there is zero possibility that it will be even remotely interesting. There might be one student per class that is not so bad it makes you want to cry sometimes. I’ve sometimes considered recommending to my students that they buy and read Strunk & White’s The Elements of Style, but I know that they’d ignore the suggestion because it would require that they work to improve themselves. What many graduate students forget is that the intellectual motivation and curiosity that drove them to become graduate students is absent from the vast majority of the population; it’s why most people don’t pursue an advanced degree. To most undergrads, a diploma is not an indication of higher learning, and a symbol of four or so years spent improving themselves and preparing for the next phase in their life, it’s a chance to party on weekends and get a piece of paper that some job will require for them to become a low level functionary. This fundamental disparity between objectives will result in limitless frustration for graduate students that keep trying to convince their students that there is something interesting behind what they are seeing, and it’s not just there because the mean old Undergraduate Curriculum Committee decided to take their tuition money. The resulting work is frequently disturbingly sub-par, and truth be told if undergraduates were held to standards that would represent preparation for graduate work, failing rates would be around 60% (coincidentally, this was the typical failing rate of Physics I and Physics II at Georgia Tech, so maybe they had it right…). So what is there to do? Grade inflation keeps the masses happy, and trying to locate and push the select few students who are actually beacons of intelligence and curiosity is very rewarding in the end. But at the end of the day, after all this philosophical musing, you still have a pile of homework and lab reports to grade, and it’s going to simply kill your Monday afternoon. The Reason: At some point in the nineteenth century, a professor looked at a bunch of starving first year graduate students, and a pile of homework he just didn’t want to grade, and the mountain of grant money he was sitting on, and had a revelation…

Graduate school is, on a given day, extremely stressful and frustrating or incredibly rewarding – This sounds like fun if you enjoy being manic depressive. But in the end there’s a reason grad students drink a lot. I know I developed quite a reputation as a partier in my first year, and upon reflection I did basically use alcohol as a crutch to get through the week. It is incredibly stressful, and if you don’t develop a strong network of friends to rely on during the early months of your first year, you will probably fall apart and either wash out or have a complete mental collapse before you’re done with everything. The Reason: Research itself is marked by periods of incredible highs dominated by long stretches of frustration and distraction. So really, it’s just preparing you for life after graduate school. Only you’ll be balding and 35 by then, so going to bars and hitting on women becomes a little creepy.

Your life is effectively on hold until after you graduate – This isn’t hitting some of my friends, who came in engaged, married, or in a long term relationship, but you are at the prime age for meeting that special someone and you are spending it burying yourself in work. I’ll freely admit that it is pretty depressing coming home every day and having nobody there, and it’s a very hard reality that I will probably not even be in a position to get married until I’m over 30 due to my life decision to go to graduate school. You won’t own property, you’ll drive the same car you drove as an undergrad, and if you came in single unless you get very lucky (I mean that in every sense of the word) that’s how you’ll probably stay until you leave. The Reason: Your lifestyle is, at its peak, as hectic as any lawyer, accountant, or financial consultant, but your salary is an order of magnitude lower. Because you decided to explore the mysteries of the universe rather than help the Joneses prepare for retirement. Moron.

At the end of all of this, I’m glad I went to graduate school and would do it again. But you have to love what you do, and the people in your life have to be incredibly supportive, or you’re just not going to make it through. For all the people that give graduate students crap for being lazy or making a poor life decision, not one of them would trade places, and most of them don’t understand the rush from being the only person in the world to know something even if it’s for a fleeting moment before you share the result with your research group. But that’s why you’re here, and they can have their fancy Ferraris and their gorgeous trophy wives and their six figure salaries, but at the end of the day, are they that much happier than you? Don’t ponder that question for too long, or else you might actually come up with the answer. Then who’s going to grade all those lab reports and finish up a poster presentation for the submission deadlines tomorrow?