grad students: mean girls without bulima

Today's soundtrack:
"Knock 'Em Out" by Lily Allen
"See the World" by Gomez

After a week of the blahs, in which our heroine could not see over the pile of work sitting on her desk, she was just starting to feel better after having written nothing short of a kickass presentation, when her legs were knocked out from under her again. The dear Spaniard did a wonderful job of assuring our heroine that crushing self-doubt is part of the human condition. This, of course, got our dear heroine thinking. She has come to a conclusion.

Grad students are horrifically insecure people. Paranoid that they might not be smart enough, they constantly seek recognition and validation from profs, conferences, and (commonly) fellow insecure grad students. Their actions can take the form of preening, name-dropping, grade-snooping, shots-of-espresso-per-hour graphs, workload kvetching, funding hinting, hours of study to sleep ratios, and (infrequently) brown-nosing. Rather than retreating inward, grad students normally brood over ways to destroy the fledging self-esteem, in one of the aforementioned ways, of other grad students, thereby transfering any self-esteem to the insecure grad student.

In fact, the only group of people more insecure than grad students are models. Apparently, the main difference between grad students and models is the development of an eating disorder.

Now, not all grad students lash out in such high school ways. Roughly 10% of the grad student population deal with their academic insecurity the healthy way - by drinking their weekends away at the Yard. See you at the next meeting. I'll buy the first pitcher.