Simpering Sarah: Shut up. I can’t stand another word of you sucking up to the prof and condescending to the rest of us ignorant graduate students. I don’t even know how you got into grad school in the first place. You obviously do the reading for seminar, because you think that you know it better than all the rest of us, but your interpretations are so bat-shit insane it sometimes seems like you read something completely different. You spend all your class time telling the prof how right and smart his interpretations are, even when he smashes your interpretation. He complains to the rest of us after class about what a moron you are.Last Minute Lucy: You started off the semester great, with great comments and insightful interpretations. Now that it’s late in the semester and everyone’s caught on to you, you’re not doing so hot. You don’t do the readings your self, you just talk with the rest of us before class about what we think about the book, and then tell the prof about our ideas in class like you came up with them yourself. Good luck writing the research paper that way.
Nick Know-it-all: We get it. You’ve read all the collected works of Foucault
, Marx, Lenin
, Locke, and everyone in between backwards and forwards. That’s probably all you’ve read, though, because you never talk about the actual readings.Fraternity Fred: The first time I met you, I thought you were a lost dude-bro flake. It’s bad enough that you went to the same university for undergrad and now grad school, and so you think that you’re BFF with all the proffies and you know everything about the department even though you took ten years off to backpack the Adirondacks or some shit. It’s bad enough that you live next door to your undergrad frat house and bring your undergrad frat brothers to the grad student bar night--my only refuge from the flakes. But you’re also dating a freshman who wants to rush at your frat. Creepers. Not because you’re both guys, or because he’s at your former frat, but because you’re in a god damn position of authority and there’s a ten year age difference. You need a pair of the RYS “No Snowflake” boxers.
Nice Nancy: I see you all day. We share an office, we TA together, we have almost all of our classes together. I wish you were less nice so that I could bitch about you. Don’t you have any human flaws? Or are you some kind of superhuman gumdrop unicorn?
Irrelevant Igor: You’re the only grad student from outside the department in this seminar. What the hell are you doing here? You only talk about the reading in relation to things none of the rest of us have heard of, and call the authors sloppy methodologically because they don’t use your discipline’s standards. Really? Do you know where you are? The prof teaching the class went to school with the people whose books we’re reading.
Awesome Advisor: You’re awesome. You call Simpering Sarah on her bullshit, you shut down Nick Know-it-all when he gets too far away from the readings. But who keeps you on task during class? You spent twenty minutes last week bitching about your kid’s little league baseball coach and what a dick he is. I love your kids, I love hearing about them--but outside class. You getting off task just encourages Sarah to talk about her cake decorating and how it relates to the reading and Igor to go off on the time he was in Istanbul and ran into Author X at a bar.
