Quotes & Sayings About Grad School

When I say that I went to grad school in Iowa City, people often assume that I went to the famed writers' workshop MFA program at the University of Iowa. I didn't. I got a master's in journalism. — Chelsea Cain

If start-up activity is the true engine of job creation in America, one thing is clear: our current educational system is acting as the brakes. Simply put, from kindergarten through undergraduate and grad school, you learn very few skills or attitudes that would ever help you start a business. — Michael Ellsberg

I ran through most of college and ran through most of grad school. When I was writing my dissertation for my Ph.D., it was literally the only hour of the day that I wasn't working. It was nine months of torture, but I made sure I got out to run. — Jane McGonigal

I think my parents wanted me to be whatever I wanted to be. But I do remember them - when I first moved out to L.A. - sending me applications to grad school for teaching. — Riki Lindhome

My family couldn't be more supportive. They're worried and they're always in my business, and my mother does send me grad-school applications every now and again. — Ana Ortiz

In 1975 I decided that there was no future in flying (airline jobs were impossible to get, and who wants a job where you are judged only by seniority?) and headed off to grad school. — W. Richard Stevens

A common and depressing assumption on the part of many college students is that they must stay on the academic rails until they are professionally established - go directly to grad school from college and directly from grad school to a job, as if there were some big rush and even a few years lost would put them catastrophically behind everyone else. Nonsense. Suppose you intend to retire at sixty-five. If you don't start your career until you're thirty, that still gives you thirty-five years to make it professionally. If you can't make it in thirty-five years, you weren't going to make it in forty or forty-five. — Charles Murray

I spent many years in grad school in English, so I've read a lot in a variety of genres. But adventure fantasy is my bread and butter as a reader, and probably always will be. So it's only natural that I came to that genre as a writer. — Saladin Ahmed

When I was finishing grad school, the hot new PC was the IBM 286. Bulky. Immobile. Expensive. I touched-typed easily and quickly, but nevertheless, I realized that the machine was a chain. — Jane Lindskold

I'm talking to anyone who has been dumped - have not gotten the job you really wanted or have received those horrible rejection letters from grad school. You know, the disappointment of losing, or not getting something you badly want. When that happens, show what you are made of. — Jill Abramson

I went to grad school with the grand plan of getting my Ph.D. and writing weighty, Tudor-Stuart-set historical fiction - from which I emerged with a law degree and a series of light-hearted historical romances about flower-named spies during the Napoleonic wars. — Lauren Willig

The uninitiated often assumed that undergraduate students were at the bottom rung, but undergrads were the paying customers, or at least their parents were. And paying customers needed to be kept happy. Grad students worked for the school as teaching and research assistants--TAs and RAs--but weren't really proper employees, and as such they weren't entitled to the benefits that, say, a cataloger in the Coffey Library received. Then there was the fact that they had to learn to leave behind passive studying and test taking, which was what most of them had been taught in their school careers up to that point, and learn how to actively attack research problems and come up with new ideas, all while being poorly paid. Like Helen had said, a not insignificant number of grad students left after a year instead of sticking around to work on obtaining their PhDs. Who could blame them? Industry paid more and had better benefits. — Neve Maslakovic

Who wouldn't love this jargon we dress common sense in: "formal innovation is no longer transformative, having been co-opted by the forces of stabilization and post-industrial inertia," blah, blah. But this co-optation might actually be a good thing if it helped keep younger writers from being able to treat mere formal ingenuity as an end in itself. MTV-type co-optation could end up a great prophylactic against cleveritis - you know, the dreaded grad-school syndrome of like "Watch me use seventeen different points of view in this scene of a guy eating a Saltine." The real point of that shit is "Like me because I'm clever" - which of course is itself derived from commercial art's axiom about audience-affection determining art's value. — David Foster Wallace

In this knowledge-worker age, it's now increasingly tied to doing well in school so you can get into better grad schools so you can get better jobs - so the pressure to do well is really high. — Stephen Covey

Most fundamentally, I used to write because I received positive feedback. To a guy who was picked on pretty relentlessly through a lot of his childhood, the respect and affection of students and teachers is addictive. It was a couple years after grad school that I realized that a need for affirmation wasn't a good enough reason to keep writing, especially in the face of rejection after rejection after even personal rejection, and that if I was going to do it, I had to acknowledge that it was going to take my whole life. The decision to do it until I'm dead has made the writing and the writing life so much easier. — Donald Dunbar

I'd say I've gone to grad school for comedy being on 'Community.' — Gillian Jacobs

I grew up in Washington State and then eventually found my way back to Iowa City for grad school. — Chelsea Cain

When I interviewed at Yale, the admissions committee asked me why they should let me into the program. I looked at them unblinking and said, 'Because I'm going to change the world some day. And I'm giving you the chance to say, We knew her when. — Sarah Thebarge

There are the relationships you make. All of the friends I made in grad school are the closest ones that I have. — Alfonso Gomez-Rejon

I went to grad school in San Francisco, and then left for New York City with my eye on Broadway. I had saved $5000, which seemed like a lot of money in my mind ... until I realized it was going to take $2500 to get to New York and then the first and last month's rent. — Anika Noni Rose

Improv definitely made me a better auditioner, without a doubt. We did do an audition semester in grad school, and that was helpful for those times that you have a script and you have a few days to prepare it, to really work on sides. But the auditions I was doing in New York, if you got it the night before, you were very lucky. — Rich Sommer

I remember getting out of grad school and coming to New York and not wanting to get a teaching job because I wanted to work on my own, to develop my own ideas. There isn't that time now. Artists are exhibiting while they are still in grad school. There isn't that safety cushion. — Brice Marden

The stress of grad school can drive anyone temporarily mad. — Jonathan Kellerman

It all started with the most basic level of Uta Hagen, right at the beginning. I'm like, 'Really? I came to grad school; I'm going to do the 'Respect for Acting'?' And I realized the importance of that, because it was really to just get you to get rid of everything. Get rid of everything you've learned and just start from the bottom up. — Kunal Nayyar

In the dresser mirror, my face looks the same, but I feel something happening around me, some change as palpable as weather. Stuck in the mirror are mementos from my childhood - red and yellow ribbons for various underachievements, a brown corsage from grad school graduation, a curling and faded picture of me petting a deer in Wisconsin - which is now over. I wandered through it and came out the other side.

It's a stark feeling. Like getting to the last page of a book and seeing 'The End.' Even if you didn't like the story that much, or your childhood, you read it, you lived it. And now it's over, book closed, that long-ago deer you petted in the Dells as dead as the one in The Yearling. — Jo Ann Beard

Though everyone had been uniformly gracious with me throughout our visit, I couldn't shake the feeling that I was being vetted in some way and that I'd already come up short. Peter was the one they wanted; I was merely the collateral - the boyfriend, the grad-school widow. I was accustomed to monopolizing Peter's affection, but for the first time in our relationship, I felt like I'd arrived at a meeting only to find all the seats at the table filled. — Dan Lopez

My percussionist boyfriend graduated and went away to grad school a few semesters later, but not before he introduced me to the most amazing thing I'd ever experienced. No, not sex (I'm a lady; I don't write about that) but something just as good: the World Wide Web. It — Felicia Day

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

I've always thought of myself as a realist. I can remember fighting with my professors about it in grad school. The world that I live in consists of 250 advertisements a day and any number of unbelievably entertaining options, most of which are subsidized by corporations that want to sell me things. The whole way that the world acts on my nerve endings is bound up with stuff that the guys with the leather patches on their elbows would consider pop or trivial or ephemeral. I use a fair amount of pop stuff in my fiction, but what I mean by it is nothing different than what other people mean in writing about trees and parks and having to walk to the river to get water 100 years ago. It's just the texture of the world I live in. — David Foster Wallace

I went to college, grad school. I got an M.B.A., had a really cush corporate job. But I was just bored stiff. I didn't fit that mold. — Dean Karnazes

There was an Israeli artist who was in grad school with me. I remember trying to get to know him on a more personal level. He had moved to the Fairfax area, not realizing that it's a super Jewish part of L.A. He told me, I don't understand why American Jews feel this connection with me. I was embarrassed because I was feeling that connection with him, too! — Jill Soloway

I first tried a novel when I was 14. First finished one when I was 16. First started working on stuff that had a chance of being salable in my early 20s, then didn't write much fiction at all because I was in grad school. — Harry Turtledove

I thought that I wasn't an essayist because I just didn't see myself in a lot of the essays that were popular at the time. That's why I joined the poetry program in grad school. — John D'Agata

One of the reasons why I went to the Yale School of Drama is because I felt that I was acting off of instinct, but sometimes that is not reliable. When you're not feeling it, what do you do? So, going to grad school was about getting the tools to just use my instrument to the best of my ability. — Lupita Nyong'o

If I'm not in the dead heat of working on something, I can end up spending tons and tons of time on the Web, and I hate it. I feel the same shame I did in grad school when I was pretty much addicted to reruns of 'Star Trek: The Next Generation'. I wish someone would make the Web just go away. Just remove it from the earth. — Susan Choi

Jenny Marzen is who again?" Amy knew perfectly well who she was. Jenny Marzen was hot, hotter than Amy had ever been, and Jenny Marzen would be washed up in ten years and didn't know it. "And Jenny is my number one fan?"
"No, but she likes you. She read your stories in grad school."
"What is she, twelve?"
"The point is, she really liked the article, and all that stuff about experience and news. Lex says she says you've got gravitas."
"That's a dirty lie. I never even had mono. — Jincy Willett

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

JB's friends were poets and performance artists and academics and modern dancers and philosophers
he had, Malcolm once observed, befriended everyone at their college who was least likely to make money
and their lives were grants and residencies and fellowships and awards. Success, among JB's Hood Hall assortment, wasn't defined by your box-office numbers (as it was for his agent and manager) or your costars or your reviews (as it was by his grad-school classmates): it was defined simply and only by how good your work was, and whether you were proud of it. — Hanya Yanagihara

When I got out of undergrad, I had a degree in theater and telecommunications. My first job, I was a news reporter for the local stories for NPR. Then I was a country-western DJ. I did data entry for a yearbook company. In my mid-20s I went back to grad school at NYU, and I specialized in playwriting. — Suzanne Collins

After college, I moved to Breckenridge, Colorado, and went snowboarding every day. I didn't know what I wanted to do, but I knew what I didn't want to do. So I applied to grad school for writing, and I just gave it a shot and took it from there. — Kaui Hart Hemmings

And then, one acting class turned into two, turned into four, and then turned into, "I love this. I could do this for the rest of my life. But, I don't have a background in acting. I never acted in college, or did anything like that. How can I go about doing this?" That meant going to grad school and getting some training, and I did. I literally walked down the path. It was real fortuitous for me to walk by that school, that one morning. — Tim Kang

In the acting community in New York we call 'Law & Order' 'grad school,' because everyone eventually does a 'Law & Order.' My first one was in 1995, which was a year after I got out of school. Matthew Blanchard was the character's name. — Dallas Roberts

I always wanted to live in L.A. The other thing that always inspired me was movies; that's why I'm here. I always wanted to be a part of the movie business and make movies. That's why I went to AFI grad school for filmmaking. — Jeff Vespa

Other people do better going on to grad school and others yet are naturally inclined and do just fine without any formal training at all. Everyone is different. The only things I think are imperative are focus, determination and hard work. — Toks Olagundoye

At the college where I teach, I'm surrounded by circus people. We aren't tightrope walkers or acrobats. We don't breathe fire or swallow swords. We're gypsies, moving wherever there's work to be found. Our scrapbooks and photo albums bear witness to our vagabond lives: college years, grad-school years, instructor-mill years, first-job years. In between each stage is a picture of old friends helping to fill a truck with boxes and furniture. We pitch our tents, and that place becomes home for a while. We make families from colleagues and students, lovers and neighbors. And when that place is no longer working, we don't just make do. We move on to the place that's next. No place is home. Every place is home. Home is our stuff. As much as I love the Cumberland Valley at twilight, I probably won't live there forever, and this doesn't really scare me. That's how I know I'm circus people. — Cathy Day

After finishing grad school, the Little Mermaid started a nonprofit to fight for the rights of mercitizens. She decided at that moment that she would never measure her success by financial gain, but instead only by how much good she contributed to the world. Money was irrelevant to her.

Later that day she got her first student loan bill. — Tim Manley

As frustrating as my time in grad school felt, it also helped tremendously because it challenged me to figure out what it was I thought I wanted. — John D'Agata

I think we'd all hate to be the one who gets declared undateable by one's entire grad-school population based on a couple of told and retold stories. — Carolyn Hax

Compared to the typical Zim/Chomsky-spouting grad school clown, a trucker with a screaming eagle hat is a paragon of political nuance. — David Burge

I did work at Planned Parenthood between college and grad school. For me, anywhere that I worked or anywhere that I've come to know intimately is a great place to set a story because it's a place where you know all the details already, and you don't have to make them up; you can just borrow them. — Lauren Holmes

As an actor I kind of do. I started out doing voice overs in the mid 80s when I was in grad school. — Thomas Haden Church

You know what I'm great at? Trivial Pursuit. What good is that gonna do you in life? It has the word 'trivial' in the name. The game is basically telling you that you pursue trivial things. Trivial - as in not important. Trivial - as in maybe you should've gone to grad school. — Christian Finnegan

When I moved to Los Angeles, I was straight out of grad school, and I didn't have a single credit to my name. I knew one person in town - another actor whose name is John Billingsley. I just had to audition and audition and audition. I was plugging away for 15 years. So I earned my stripes! — Darby Stanchfield

I definitely felt by the time I got to grad school - which was a great experience - I was like, 'What's the difference between the teachers and the students? Why are the teachers teachers if they want to be acting?' It didn't make sense to me anymore. It's not like you learn how to set a broken bone and you get the stamp of approval. — Taylor Schilling

Since I got out of grad school at NYU, I've always done as many plays as I can. — Marin Hinkle

Oh nookie in the stacks.Figures you're the type to have that fantasy, grad school and all. — Chloe Neill

And Lopate's anthology helped a lot too. It came out the same year I started grad school, and I remember the book's publication feeling eventful and celebratory. It got a ton of attention for giving voice to this form that had sort of slipped between the cracks. That was exciting to see. — John D'Agata

At other times, he wondered whether it was the world that had lost its color, or his friends themselves. When had everyone become so alike? Too often, it seemed that the last time people were so interesting had been college; grad school ... What had happened? Age, he guessed. And with it: Jobs. Money. Children. The things to forestall death, the things to ensure one's relevance, the things to comfort and provide context and content. The march forward, one dictated by biology and convention, that not even the most irreverent mind could withstand. But those were his peers. What he really wanted to know was when his friends had become so conventional, and why he hadn't noticed earlier. — Hanya Yanagihara

I hadn't realized quite how intense the first few years of grad school would be. When you're being assigned 40 books a week ... there's not much room for novels. — Lauren Willig

I started my career as a liberal arts major from Berkeley, wrote about enterprise IT for a few years, then followed my passion for the digital narrative into graduate school as well (also at Berkeley, the Oxford of the West or, perhaps, the Harvard - sorry Stanford!). My first project out of grad school was 'Wired' magazine. — John Battelle

Hey, Meg," she said without preamble. I need you to write a letter of recommendation for me. I'm applying for grad school."
Meghann screamed into the phone. "Oh, my God! I'm so proud of you. I'm hanging up now; I have to draft a letter that makes my best friend sound like da Vinci in a bra and panties. — Kristin Hannah

I was trying to release emotions, exercise emotions, and then I entered the art world. Even after grad school, some of [the earlier works] were still lingering in my head. I realized there were some pieces where I felt that I had to respond to the criticism. — Kalup Linzy

The decision to move to the second post-college city (or suburb, or town), however, is usually made independent of friends. No matter if you do it for love, career, family, or school, the second move is on your own terms. — Rachel Bertsche

But I am scared. Everybody's scared."
"You know what I mean, like scared scared. Like coward scared, like if you never went to begin with. But with everything you've done nobody's going to doubt you." Then she made a somewhat frantic speech about a website she found that listed how certain people had avoided Vietnam. Cheney, Four education deferments, then a hardship 3-A. Limbaugh,4-F thanks to a cyst on his ass. Pat Buchanan, 4-F. Newt Gingrich, grad school deferment. Karl Rove, did not serve. Bill O'Reilly, did not serve. John Ashcroft, did not serve. Bush, AWOL from the Air National Guard, with a check mark in the "do not volunteer" box as to service overseas.
"You see where I'm going with this?'
"Well, yeah."
"I'm just saying, those people want a war so bad, they can fight it themselves. Billy Lynn's done his part. — Ben Fountain

Grub Street Writers is the reason I've stayed in Boston. I started teaching for Grub back in 1997, when founder Eve Bridburg, a Boston University M.A. alumna, as I am, kindly gave me my first job out of grad school. — Jenna Blum

Out of grad school, I worked as a tech writer for a while before going into computer coding for a living. — Richard Powers

If you were born in 1950 and were in the top ten percent, everything got better for twenty years automatically. Then, after the late sixties, you went to a good grad school, and you got a good job on Wall Street in the late seventies, and then you hit the boom. Your story has been one of incredible, unrelenting progress for sixty years. Most people who are sixty years old in the U.S. - not their story at all." The establishment had been coasting for a long time and was out of answers. Its failure pointed to new directions, maybe Marxist, maybe libertarian, along a volatile trajectory that it could no longer control. — George Packer

Women, the most beautiful things in the world," answers the model. As if it's the only thing worth painting, as if everyone should aspire to it. Normally coming from a guy that answer would sound so incredibly skeezy - a greasy, obvious pick-up line. But something about this guy's earnest tone tells me he means it." -from Model Position by Kitsy Clare — Kitsy Clare

I wish I had the luxury of time to read and write like grad students do. That sounds pretty awesome. When I was writing my first book one of my friends was going to grad school at the same time and I heard a lot of stories about drinking, too. I feel like everyone was having affairs. — Jami Attenberg

I'm not a Dickens guy. In grad school I had to take at least one course on the Victorians, so I took The Later Dickens, because that was what there was. — Lev Grossman

My brother is an electrical engineer and went to computer science grad school at Stanford, and he'd tell me stories about the happy hours he'd organize. — Alec Berg

By the time you're an adult, you're used to seeing your friends disappear into their five-year plans. They drop out to get married, have babies, go to grad school, get divorced. They start a band or enter the penal system. They vanish for years at a time - some come back, some don't. Some of them you wait for and some you let go. Sometimes the only way they come back is in a song. — Rob Sheffield

The most fun thing about doing the show is that, as a nerd, the fun has been in learning and having it be like a grad school for me, every day. Every moment is a new experience. Every conversation is a new gain. — Steven Yeun

It's the uncertainty, the challenge and the willingness to put it all on the line that draws a lot of people to climb mountains. That can also apply to a lot of other challenges in life, whether it's running for office, starting a family, going to grad school or taking all of your cash and assets and starting a business. — Mark Udall

My odyssey to become an astronaut kind of started in grad school, and I was working, up at MIT, in space robotics-related work; human and robot working together. — Michael J. Massimino

I've always been a relatively big history buff. In college, I took a lot of history courses, and when I was in grad school, I liked to audit them. — Scott Snyder

When I finished grad school, I sort of fell into journalism. Someone mentioned that there was an entry-level job at the Reuters News Agency. I applied, and, to my amazement, I got the job. — Wolf Blitzer

As long as I'm dealing in honesty, I may as well admit that I have been more influenced (as a person) by my childhood readings of Tolkien and Lewis than I have been by any philosophers I read in college and grad school. The events and characters in Narnia and Middle Earth shaped my ideals, my dreams, my goals. Kant just annoyed me. — N.D. Wilson

Literature could turn you into an asshole: he'd learned that teaching grad-school seminars. It could teach you to treat real people the way you did characters, as instruments of your own intellectual pleasure, cadavers on which to practice your critical faculties. — Chad Harbach

I did a lot of theater in college, and I knew that not many people make it, but I just figured, 'Well, I really want to try acting while I'm young, and I don't ever want to look back and say that I never gave it a try.' I fully figured I'd be back in grad school - probably for psychology. — Hank Azaria

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 think the book that really kind of woke me up a little bit when I was starting to write was 'Winesburg, Ohio' by Sherwood Anderson. I was in grad school at Brown, going for an M.A. in creative writing. Those stories seemed to me to be doing away with pretty writing. — Tom Drury

I'm worried I will leave grad school and no longer be able to speak English. I know this woman in grad school, a friend of a friend, and just listening to her talk is scary. The semiotic dialetics of intertextual modernity. Which makes no sense at all. Sometimes I feel that they live in a parallel universe of academia speaking acadamese instead of English and they don't really know what's happening in the real world. — Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie