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Professors’ nostalgia for graduate school
One of the oddest academic phenomena is the nostalgia professors profess for graduate school. It’s something I’ve heard for years, beginning when I myself was a grad student.
At the time I thought the faculty who told me they envied my position were out of their minds. While doing research for a science PhD, most students are highly aware of their low status and vulnerable position. People higher up the academic status ladder often look down on or ignore grad students (especially at conferences). Grad students receive lousy health insurance and no retirement benefits. But the main problem is that a science grad student is so much at the mercy of her adviser: she can be fired if her supervisor is unhappy, or have her career effectively ended if her adviser decides her work is not good enough. Most grad students live in constant worry that their advisers think their work is awful.
I remembered this state of mind recently when talking with a grad student who came to me for advice. His work was not going well, and he seemed very down. He had been avoiding his adviser because his work wasn’t progressing well. He tried to work by himself, hoping that he would get important data that he could then take to his adviser. But he was stuck, and his isolation was making things worse.
As I listened to him, I certainly remembered well that state of grad school misery and fear of the adviser. But at the same time our conversation brought up my nostalgia for grad school. Yes, now I’m a professor and I sometimes have that insane wish to be a grad student again. Because when professors look at grad students—even depressed, isolated, about-to-drop-out grad students—we see what we wish we had: time to do nothing but research. Now that I’m a faculty member I face many demands on my time, especially for grant writing and administrative tasks. It’s a constant struggle to carve out time when I can do research myself.
I certainly don’t want to go back to grad school. I don’t want to relive the worry and the struggle to try to do good work. What I want—what all the nostalgic professors want—is to be myself, with my job and my confidence in my ability to do good science, and at the same time have the freedom to focus on research.