The Captain Wants to Get In a Day Late on the Whole Grad Student Thing, And He Wants to Steer the RYS Ship Back Towards Angrytown.

Call me the Captain from Koepenick.

I have long been in the practice of telling grad students that if they’re in grad school to either drop out or never quit, but don’t graduate. Ever. There are no jobs. There should be no bullshit about this. There are no fucking jobs.

Oh, I know every year schools “post” openings, that attract several hundred applicants, but unless you went to a chi-chi school, have publications out your ass, AND (not OR, mind you) you are the luckiest sonofabitch who ever lived AND you’re either blowing everyone on the committee or you have serious blackmail goods on them, don’t waste your time even trying graduate school.

Any undergrad who tells me they want to go to grad school, I sit them down in my office and I let them leaf through the three-inch three-ring binder of my rejection letters. I have been on the market four years.

“So sorry, Captain, we chose the candidate who shits golden bricks and bleeds diamonds! You with your publications and ordinary PhD degree only poop regular feces and there are no diamonds at all when you sweat during the interview.”

Anyone who advises someone into graduate school should be sent to advise young men and women to volunteer for active military service in Afghanistan, because their chances of happiness are better there.