Grad Student Quotes

“What kind of grad student do you take? I never take a straight A student. A real scientist tends to be critical, and somewhere along the line, they had to rebel against their teachers.”

— Lynn Margulis

“This was in [Orwell's] 1946 'Politics and the English Language,' an essay that despite its date (and its title's basic redundancy) remains the definitive SNOOT statement on Academese. Orwell's famous AE translation of the gorgeous 'I saw under the sun that the race is not to the swift' in Ecclesiastes as 'Objective consideration of contemporary phenomena compels the conclusion that success or failure in competitive activities exhibits no tendency to be commensurate with innate capacity, but that a considerable element of the unpredictable must invariably be taken into account' should be tattooed on the left wrist of every grad student in the anglophone world.”

— David Foster Wallace

“If you imagine someone with 100 percent determination and 100 percent intelligence, you can discard a lot of intelligence before they stop succeeding. But if you start discarding determination, you very quickly get an ineffectual and perpetual grad student.”

— Paul Graham

“I was an undergrad math major and a grad student in computer science. I'm hugely introverted, not atypical of math majors.”

— Judith Faulkner

“I was a grad student at UC Berkeley when I bought my Apple II and it suddenly because a lot more interesting than school.”

— Andy Hertzfeld

“The classification above is based on a 2011 presentation by MIT grad student David Hernandez for my cosmology class. Because such simplistic taxonomies are strictly impossible, they should be taken with a large grain of salt:”

— Max Tegmark

“Only a four-hundred-year-old vampire would wonder if a grad student could understand procrastination.”

— Chloe Neill

“As a freshman in college, I was having a lot of trouble adjusting. I took a meditation class to handle anxiety. It really helped. Then as a grad student at Harvard, I was awarded a pre-doctoral traveling fellowship to India, where my focus was on the ancient systems of psychology and meditation practices of Asia.”

— Daniel Goleman

“When I was a grad student at MIT, I had a chance to become friends with the Viking Mission's chief scientist, Dr. Gerald Soffen. Viking was the first Mars lander looking for signs of life on Mars.”

— Peter Diamandis

“This made him a grad student, and grad students existed not to learn things but to relieve the tenured faculty members of tiresome burdens such as educating people and doing research.”

— Neal Stephenson

“I was hugely impressed ... was the ultimate example of a man who knew what he didn't know, was perfectly willing to admit it, and didn't want to leave until he understood. That's heroic to me.
I wish every grad student had that attitude.”

— Randy Pausch

“Some Poor grad student pressing on the flanks of a hamster and out comes a doctorate on the other side”

— Robert M. Sapolsky

“There is this thing called Actors Access, which is run by the breakdown services. What they do is they put up casting notices that are available to everyone. Because there's thousands and thousands of actors and there are student films and grad student films and, sometimes, some small independent projects that are on there.”

— Bostin Christopher

“I felt a little lost as a student. At Iowa, I felt as if I had gotten into this program that was going to save me, and so I moved myself across the country for grad school and yet still didn't have a home. It was upsetting. And I know that's a common feeling.”

— John D'Agata