Ten Things I miss about graduate school

Is being a professor all that different? I'm not so sure. Chairs replace advisors; the promotion & tenure committee replaces the dissertation committee; I'm still not teaching graduate-level courses....on and on. So, now that the year is done, a little nostalgia seems in order.

Ten Things I miss about graduate school (grad school memory: faculty-life reality)

1. systematic infantilization: at least it was somewhat expected and predictable, whereas now it is unjustified, unprofessional, and offensive

2. being encouraged to have my fill of the cheese plate, crudité, and cheap wine after talks: now I'm expected to buy it

3. speaking with intelligent people in my field: 'nuff said

4. grading blue books for profs without having to take the flak from students: as I'm too junior to have a paid grader, I now grade and take flak from dissatisfied customers

5. being understood to be of meagre means: being thought to be loaded and expected to entertain visiting scholars (school teachers of my age, years in service, and with an MA are making a lot more than me)

6. being somewhat encouraged, somewhat, to pursue ancillary interests: being somewhat encouraged to do the same thing forever (I do have to say, though, that in grad school I pursued too many ancillaria and my advisor did have to reign me in often and it ticked me off at the time)

7. permitted to take time researching in Europe, with departmental support, because it was understood that it would benefit my work: permitted to apply for buy-outs or release time, but only to apply; Mediocre U. couldn't afford to bring in an adjunct to take over my teaching load for even a semester and our own graduate students are not qualified

8. seeing committee work as exciting: seeing committee work as an opportunity to try out new body armour (in grad school I was on the brown bag committee and the grad representative to open faculty meetings--pretty lightweight stuff, really)

9. the collegiality of my graduate cohort: the paranoid subtext of even the smallest of talk among my colleagues at Mediocre U., paradigmata of the discourse of mistrust and deceit (At least the lot of us from grad school are still close. At a recent national conference, I, two other alums of my cohort from Intense Research University and my diss advisor were presenting on the same panel. The audience was very large for this particular conference, and IRU was well represented in the audience. While listening to my advisor present, a friend from IRU who was only a year ahead of me, now an asst prof, leaned over and said "We're all still listening to Dr. Funnimammal, but now we're all professors." We ROCKED that panel and were the talk of the conference. It was a good feeling that I'll never share with my colleagues here.)

10. still idealizing the professor's life: still idealizing the professor's life beyond Mediocre U.