Ron’s Blog

The strange world of the Ph.D. student

Jorge Cham’s Piled Higher and Deeper is a comic strip about being in grad school from someone who clearly has. Pretty funny if you’re acquainted with the micro-world of ABD life. As someone who’s looked at dissertations from both sides now, from up and down, and still somehow, it’s their distractions I recall…

Sorry, too much Joni Mitchell on the MP3-pod. Anyway, perhaps my favorite is bit is Newton’s Three Laws of Graduation (for Ph.D. Students):

• First Law: A grad student in procrastination tends to stay in procrastination unless an external force is applied to it.
• Second Law: The age a, of a doctoral process is directly proportional to the flexibility F, given by the advisor and inversely proportional to the the student’s motivation, m.
  (I.e., F = m a)
• Third Law: For every action toward graduation, there is an equal and opposite distraction.

Lots more tastiness; check out the comics.