The best job on earth

Between this column, spam, TAing and my family requesting to know if I'm still alive, I get a lot of e-mails. By far, the best e-mail I got this week, aside from the YouTube video of a University of Florida student getting tased by the police (Woot! Go FSU!), was from a fellow graduate student who I'll call Jill.

Jill said a student in her discussion section asked her if she "liked" graduate school, to which she replied, "Honestly, there are very few people who actually 'like' grad school." The student, shocked, then turned to another student, who said, "...But, you guys have... like, the best jobs on Earth."

HAHA. HAHAHAHAAHAHA. AHAHAHAAHAHA. Whew. Yes, just like Justin Timberlake, we graduate students have the best jobs on Earth. I'm actually stocking my toilet paper roll with hundreds as I write this. It seems somewhat obvious that any person who is victim to this misconception has never had the pleasure of scheduling time to take a crap between two meetings, class and a journal club, but for anyone else who's still on the fence, take it from me: Graduate school sucks. The only reason anyone would even subject himself to it is to get health insurance, a whole bunch of letters appended to his name or an ulcer.

There are probably a number of new graduate students reading this right now, imagining their Friday evenings in lab and holding pairs of scissors threateningly toward their eyes. Hold off for just a minute, friends, and let me tell you a secret. We all know grad school sucks, and that's why nobody is actually working as hard as you think they are. Any seasoned grad student can tell you that periodically slacking off is the only way to survive. You just can't let your advisor find out. (Like, by writing it in The Chronicle for instance. I am an idiot.)

First of all, analyzing data for eight hours straight can be incredibly boring, so intermittent Internet slacking is a necessity. I recommend keeping a research database (PubMed is good for all you biological science types) open and minimized at all times for quick camouflage. It might also be smart to pay your undergrad in free pizza to keep an eye out for your adviser and to poke you in time to make the switch. Be careful if you have MySpace, The Onion and Scrabulous all open at the same time, though, or you might click the wrong one in the frenzy not to look like a lazy ass and end up grinning at your professor with a Scrabble board full of curse words behind your head.

Reading papers all day is similarly onerous, but thankfully no one can tell whether you're thinking about sex as long as you're holding a pen and your face is aimed in the general direction of an extensively highlighted article. Just remember to turn the pages periodically or your officemates might get to thinking you don't know how to read. That is, assuming they're not doing the same thing. (They are).

If you are afflicted with unfortunate officemates who seem to keep track of when you are and are not at work on a spreadsheet, go to every talk you can find, eat the free food, then space out for the rest of the hour. You'll look even more dedicated than they think they are. If you have giant brass balls, you can also catch up on sleep by pulling your hair in front of your face and passing out in the back row.

Finally, if all else fails, you can just tell your adviser you're "working from home." It's pretty much universal code for "I'm going to get up at noon to check my e-mail regularly so you think I'm working while I'm actually eating tortilla chips, watching crappy TV and drinking before 5 p.m." I mean... ahem, or so I've heard. (Please don't fire me, Kevin).