Before I started grad school, I visited the place as a prospective student. It was terrifying.
The day started with a 9am meeting with a professor in my chosen field. As I walked into his office, he started his rant. "This field is very competitive," he said. "So I tell my students, if you want to succeed, you’re going to have to be THE BEST." He went on to describe his strict program for inculcating grad students and then shooed me from the office.
My next meeting was with the only female grad student in my field (there were, of course, no female professors). "I’m the only woman here," she said immediately, "but it doesn’t matter. No one treats me differently from anyone else." Somehow, I was suspicious.
Next I heard about the extensive general exams, and the dangers of flunking out. Later, I met a second woman, who openly admitted to hating her lab. Yet somehow, six months later, the prestige factor won out, and I went there anyway.
Even before arrival, I had doubts about being "THE BEST." Soon I had hard evidence to back up my fears. For the first few semesters, B. was definitely The Best. While most of us mortals had to eat and sleep between problem sets, B. had eliminated this necessity. He only slept four hours per night, and he only ate every other day– when he had one microwave pizza. The rest of the time, he popped vitamins and Sweet Tarts and sucked in Pixie Sticks. ("My parents definitely support me," he said. "They send candy packages in the mail every month.") As an extra time-saving bonus, he didn’t check or send email. Thanks to all that effiency, he always had the assignments finished two or three days ahead of time, and would just stop by our problem-solving session to help us out. Meanwhile, I slept nine or ten hours a night but somehow managed to get my A’s.
Then came the general exams, and M. pulled into the lead. A veteran of his national science Olympiad team, he had gone to a special Olympiad high-school for an entire year, where they practiced endless variations of tests like these. He knew every problem backwards and foward. Feeling progressively stupider, I nevertheless soaked up his knowledge and passed the exams.
Moving into the research years, C. was the new superstar. A dark-horse contender, he was in fact two years younger than me but twice as speedy. In no time at all, he had generated a well-cited stack of influential publications. Meanwhile, he was ALSO quietly completing a financial studies minor, and so after finishing the PhD, headed off for Wall Street to get rich.
Some of my other friends were leaving as well. B. discovered campus activism, and realized you needed to eat, sleep and email to organize the People. He left academia for a left-wing think tank. Y. got tired of jockeying for position in his own incredibly-competitive subfield, and went off to be a furniture designer.
That left S., who (no way around it) was not just two, but ten times smarter than me. Fortunately, he was also a few years ahead of me, and got a professorship. As Professor S., his comparative brilliance was somewhat easier to bear.
When I tell people where I went to grad school, they always assume it must have been competitive. They must picture us stealing exam papers from one another, trashing lab notebooks, and the like. It wasn’t like that at all. My friends and I were in it together– we studied together, got each other through exams, and hung out in the coffee shop for hours when we "should have been working". The competition is much more subtle. It is the constant pressure that yes, you are in one of the best departments in the world, and you had better be coming up with something really important. Other people certainly are. And that, perhaps, if you can’t, you should eventually leave.
I made it through. I got my PhD. And I am still fighting against that idea– while trying instead to simply aim for quality.
