To continue my analysis of yet another blog that spreads stupid lies about the world of academia.
7. Grad school is more stressful than other kinds of work because it’s useless. Or something.
Graduate school is stressful. Sometimes it is terribly stressful. Stress is virtually unavoidable in any kind of work, but there is a peculiar quality to the stress of graduate school. The worst thing about it is the fact that it is caused by things that really do not matter. No one’s life (not even yours) depends on your meeting thesis deadlines, on your comprehensive exams, or on your finishing a dissertation.
This is obviously written by a person who has never even tried to imagine what the corporate environment is like. This blogger has probably never tried talking to people in sales or in recruitment (to give just two examples) who have a huge billboard with the amount of money they need to make this week in the middle of the office. Such people have nightmares for years about not being able to meet the “objectives” that are inflated beyond all reason on purpose. Nobody’s life depends on meeting those objectives either but the terror of not meeting them every month is daunting.
8. Something is wrong with the fact that not everybody gets the exact same salary:
The academic salary structure seems to be designed to maximize demoralization. On every campus, the faculty members in some disciplines earn more than their colleagues in other disciplines. But worse are the differences within departments, where young academics considered to be up-and-coming stars can be hired at higher salaries than those earned by their senior colleagues.
Only a very deluded person who hasn’t read a single book in their life would come up with the idea that merit-based salaries demoralize. As somebody who was born in the USSR, I can tell you that what really demoralizes and makes people stop working altogether is precisely giving everybody the same salary. My blog is read by people who have an IQ that is higher than the room temperature, so I will not explain why that happens.
9. The following “reason” made me laugh until I choked:
Teaching is less and less rewarding.
This sounds like a 90-year-old gentleman telling a 20-year-old guy, “Look, kid, I really pity your generation. I’m noticing that sex is getting less and less rewarding with every passing year. It scares me to think that people of your generation will not get to enjoy the kind of great sex I had when I was young.” As I said many times before, the moment when you start feeling that younger generations are worse than you were at that age, congratulations, buddy, you have officially become an irrelevant old fart, even if you are only 25.
10. One of the more egregious “reasons” is the following:
Your friends pass you by. For graduate students, nothing drives home the fact that graduate school delays adulthood more clearly than observing friends who choose a different path. You may enter graduate school with the belief that an extra degree or two will give you an advantage in life, but while you are concentrating on gaining an advantage, your friends are concentrating on life. They may never turn into millionaires—though that is far more likely in the real world than in the academic one—but they probably will pass you by.
In this blogger’s mind, life is an endless competition with one’s own friends as to who makes more money. Is there a more miserable, disgusting attitude to life than this? Honestly, I couldn’t say whether I “passed my friends by” or they “passed me by.” I just don’t see life in these pathetic, ultra-competitive terms. One must be a really nasty human being to sit there and calculate whether one has accumulated more money than one’s friends, shaking with terror that if a friend has a higher salary, this somehow means that one is less successful. Normal people want their friends to be happy and successful on their own terms. Gosh, you have to be a truly miserable git to compete with people you supposedly love in who has a higher salary.
The 100 Reasons blogger doesn’t even realize how horrible this way of thinking makes them sound:
They will also be buying cars and houses, getting married, and having children. They may even take an expensive vacation or two. It can be hard to relate to old friends who live in a world increasingly different from your own, and even harder to make new ones.
If you are even remotely capable of feeling resentful that your friend – a friend, damn it! A person you are supposed to care about – took a vacation, then you have issues that no amount of going or not going to grad school will cure. My best friend, who is also my much younger sister, did not go to grad school. She went into the industry, has become wildly successful, and can now afford many more trips, beautiful clothes, cars, etc. than I can. Instead of sitting here in resentment, cursing my sister’s success and calculating by how much she has “passed me by” (and what a disgusting expression that is in this context), I, as a normal person, celebrate her success. It makes me happy that she has found her calling in the corporate world while I have found my calling in academia.
[To be continued. . .]
Clarissa's Blog 
Only a very deluded person who hasn’t read a single book in their life would come up with the idea that merit-based salaries demoralize.
I’ve worked on fully unionized progress-through-the-ranks-only institutions and in merit-based institutions. The latter is much better. In fact, outside of the union bosses it was hard to find anyone who shared their love for a PTR pay scale.
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This is a good analysis. I very much enjoyed my time as a graduate student. It was really nice and I have no complaints about it. However, I would not like to continue within academia for the same reason that somebody who has feasted day and night on a sumptuous banquet would not want to continue doing that after a certain period of time.
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