Student Graduate Quotes & Sayings

I had a major in business, and I graduated with a business degree, but I was perhaps the worst student to graduate from that program. — William Shatner

It was a funny, impossible little trap of nature, motherhood. It muddled your brain with floods of hormones and sleep deprivation, kept you constantly busy tending to a million needs, had you forever thinking about the care of others. You could disappear into motherhood, forget completely that once upon a time you were an athlete, a graduate student, that you had ambitions to go into politics, change the world. That once upon a time you wanted to write. And even though motherhood wiped all that away like a cosmic eraser over the chalkboard of your life, it gave you something else - this crazy, blissful, adoring love that splits you open and redefines you from the inside out. — Lisa Unger

While a student in McCollum's class, Jobs became friends with a graduate who was the teacher's all-time favorite and a school legend for his wizardry in the class. Stephen Wozniak, whose younger brother had been on a swim team with Jobs, was almost five years older than Jobs and far more knowledgeable about electronics. But emotionally and socially he was still a high school geek. — Walter Isaacson

I feel like a 1960s graduate student. I still work on note cards. I've never found a better system. — Lawrence Wright

When you start in science, you are brainwashed into believing how careful you must be, and how difficult it is to discover things. There's something that might be called the 'graduate student syndrome'; graduate students hardly believe they can make a discovery. — Francis Crick

I also don't think that parents should pay for their children's graduate or law school. Helping a student with a four-year bachelor's degree is very generous, but an advanced degree should be considered a personal responsibility. That will ensure that the coursework is taken very seriously and makes the young person take ownership of their degree. and when they graduate, it's a shared accomplishment that the whole family can be proud of. But do not encourage graduate school just for graduate school's sake. Work experience is much more valuable if the decision come down to that. — Dana Perino

[A]s a graduate student at Columbia University, I remember the a priori derision of my distinguished stratigraphy professor toward a visiting Australian drifter [a supporter of the theory of continental drift]. [ ... ] Today [ ... ] my own students would dismiss with even more derision anyone who denied the evident truth of continental drift a prophetic madman is at least amusing; a superannuated fuddy-duddy is merely pitiful. — Stephen Jay Gould

One graduate student told me, "When the Apocalypse comes, you want to know an archaeologist, because we know how to make fire, catch food, and create hill forts," and I promptly added her to my address book. Knows how to make hill forts - who can say when that will come in handy? — Marilyn Johnson

As a graduate student, I wrote a long paper connecting the dots between mathematical models of learning and language development in children. It was published in a major journal. — Steven Pinker

Sure, some [teachers] could give the standard limit definitions, but they [the students] clearly did not understand the definitions - and it would be a remarkable student who did, since it took mathematicians a couple of thousand years to sort out the notion of a limit, and I think most of us who call ourselves professional mathematicians really only understand it when we start to teach the stuff, either in graduate school or beyond. — Keith Devlin

As a graduate student I studied mathematics fairly broadly, and I was fortunate enough, besides developing the idea which led to 'Non-Cooperative Games,' also to make a nice discovery relating to manifolds and real algebraic varieties. — John Forbes Nash Jr.

A lot of student directors used to pick other students to be in their graduate films, so. I ended up doing a couple of them just for fun. Eventually, I got an agent through a friend and I did some commercials; then I got Knots Landing. — Brian Austin Green

My father was a graduate student at Oxford in the early 1960s, where the conventions and etiquette of clothing were crucial to the pervasive class consciousness of the place and time. — Russell Smith

I entered Princeton University as a graduate student in 1959, when the Department of Mathematics was housed in the old Fine Hall. This legendary facility was marvellous in stimulating interaction among the graduate students and between the graduate students and the faculty. The faculty offered few formal courses, and essentially none of them were at the beginning graduate level. Instead the students were expected to learn the necessary background material by reading books and papers and by organising seminars among themselves. It was a stimulating environment but not an easy one for a student like me, who had come with only a spotty background. Fortunately I had an excellent group of classmates, and in retrospect I think the "Princeton method" of that period was quite effective. — Phillip A. Griffiths

I was once a graduate student in Victorian literature, and I believe as the Victorian novelists did, that a novel isn't simply a vehicle for private expression, but that it also exists for social examination. I firmly believe this. — Margaret Atwood

When I make a film, I am hoping to reinvent the genre a little bit. I just do it my way. I make my own little Quentin versions of them ... I consider myself a student of cinema. It's almost like I am going for my professorship in cinema, and the day I die is the day I graduate. It is a lifelong study. — Quentin Tarantino

Arthur Compton became my graduate advisor. He was the ideal graduate advisor for me: he came into my research room only once during my graduate career and usually had no idea how I was spending my time. — Luis W. Alvarez

One of the biggest reasons I like coaching college ball is the kids. I feel I can impact players' lives. I like the fact that they're student-athletes. I like to see those kids graduate. — Rick Majerus

Students who acquire large debts putting themselves through school are unlikely to think about changing society. When you trap people in a system of debt, they can't afford the time to think. Tuition fee increases are a "disciplinary technique," and, by the time students graduate, they are not only loaded with debt, but have also internalized the "disciplinarian culture." This makes them efficient components of the consumer economy. — Noam Chomsky

War at home is matched by a war on youth. I wrote about this recently. Young people graduate with an average of $23,000 in student loan debt, and they are the ones saddled with it. Youth have become indentured servants and that turns them away from public service. — Henry Giroux

Graduate study is an intensive education. — Lailah Gifty Akita

In graduate school, I was a student of E.L. Doctorow, and he had us read 'Moby-Dick' in a week. — Garth Risk Hallberg

The wit of a graduate student is like champagne. Canadian champagne. — Robertson Davies

I had been offered fellowships to enter as a graduate student at either Harvard or Princeton. But the Princeton fellowship was somewhat more generous, since I had not actually won the Putnam competition ... Thus Princeton became the choice for my graduate study location. — John Forbes Nash Jr.

PhD made me poorer, without money, but richer in thoughts. — Lailah Gifty Akita

Graduate school introduces student to extensive knowledge search. — Lailah Gifty Akita

I had a friend at Princeton, a Russian graduate student. He had a cute message on his answering machine, delivered in his thick Russian accent: Who are you and what do you want? Some people spend a lifetime trying to answer these questions. You, however, have thirty seconds. My father and I chuckled. What happened to him? Gone. My point is that you could think of the people you meet in your life as questions, there to help you figure out who you are, what you're made of, and what you want. In life, as in our new version of the game, you start off not knowing the answer. It's only when the particles rub against each other that we figure out their properties. — Zia Haider Rahman

I require every Taipei student to swim; if they can't pass the test they won't graduate. Why do I do that? Because I think that is very, very important integral part of their education. — Ma Ying-jeou

He orders a batch of handmade tiedyed shirts from Guizhou province and takes them to a graduate student at the Central Authority Fine Arts School to find out what to charge. The graduate student swings his long hair back and forth and tells Hao An these shirts are not authentic enough, not tribal enough. No way are young Beijingers going to be interested in them: there's no art, no attitude. "What should I do now then?" asks Hao An. The graduate student tells him to head to the bars in Sanlitun and sell them to drunken foreigners and pretentious businessmen with art collections. — Xiaolu Guo

I didn't study writing in school, I studied biology as an undergraduate and graduate student. So I think that I write fiction in the scientific way. I love invention, obviously; I love creation of character. But I do feel very rooted in the real world, even in the way that I create characters. — Barbara Kingsolver

Harsh discipline doesn't benefit a student, but social problem solving does. Are strict rules and harsh discipline the keys to successful education? No, they aren't. In fact, harsh discipline is counterproductive to learning. Discipline can make a student focus, but it also gives him anxiety and low self-esteem. Rousseah Mieze, a APR graduate who later became a teacher, said the strict environment of APR shaped his negative self-image. When he was in college, he'd still imagine his former teachers saying things like, You don't work hard enough. You don't belong here. — Anonymous

Lederman is also a charismatic personality, famous among his colleagues for his humor and storytelling ability. One of his favorite anecdotes relates the time when, as a graduate student, he arranged to bump into Albert Einstein while walking the grounds at the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton. The great man listened patiently as the eager youngster explained the particle-physics research he was doing at Columbia, and then said with a smile, That is not interesting. — Sean Carroll

When I was a graduate student, estimating and interpreting distributed lags topped the agenda of macroeconomists and other applied economists. — Thomas J. Sargent

When nearly a third of our high school students do not graduate on time with their peers, we have work to do. We must design our middle and high schools so that no student gets lost in the crowd and disconnected from his or her own potential. — Christine Gregoire

If a stranger saying we are "dependable" activates the reward system, imagine what praise from a boss, a parent, or even an unaccomplished slightly older graduate student will do. Of course, we all know that praise is a good thing, as long as it isn't too unconditional, but until very recently, we had no idea that praise taps into the same reinforcement system in the brain that enables cheese to help rats learn to solve mazes. And positive social regard is a renewable resource. Rather than having less of something after using it, when we let others know we value them, both parties have more. — Matthew D. Lieberman

I didn't give it much thought back then. I just wanted to get all the words straight and collect my A. — Gayle Forman

Being a graduate student is no fun and is hard, but I'm sticking with it. I love making art. — Nell Irvin Painter

As a brand new graduate student starting in October 1956, my supervisor Michail Fischberg, a lecturer in the Department of Zoology at Oxford, suggested that I should try to make somatic cell nuclear transplantation work in the South African frog Xenopus laevis. — John Gurdon

I got married to Chris Sarandon, who was a graduate student, and he knew everything at that point, I thought, because he was older. He introduced me to poetry and black-and-white movies. — Susan Sarandon

Under relentless prosecutorial grilling he sputtered that he had earlier deceived investigators "because I was an idiot," and he finally admitted that he had lied about nothing less than a treasonable overture. That lie he could not explain - but Bird and Sherwin attempt to explain it by citing a remark Oppenheimer made five years earlier to a Communist graduate student and friend of his, in which he admitted "his tendency when things get too much" to blurt out "irrational things." How difficult it must have been for an intellectual of his abilities, pride, and accomplishment to make such an admission ordinary men can only imagine. — Algis Valiunas

A clever graduate student could teach Fourier something new, but
surely no one claims that he could teach Archimedes to reason
better. — Paul Halmos

I became an atheist because, as a graduate student studying quantum physics, life seemed to be reducible to second-order differential equations. Mathematics, chemistry and physics had it all. And I didn't see any need to go beyond that. — Francis Collins

My real education began when I entered the University of Chicago in September 1951 as a graduate student. — James Cronin

Anybody who instantly goes from being a poet and a graduate student to being a public figure has to be in a state of shock. First people want to praise you, and then they want to attack you. No one can prepare you for it. — Erica Jong

Being a famous singer or an international singer - that's my dream, too, but my main goal is to be a real student and be able to graduate and be a lawyer and have my own business. — Charice Pempengco

My Ph.D. is in operations research. I was interested in making things work better and using mathematics to help do that. So operations research is what I studied as an undergraduate and graduate student. — Alvin E. Roth

Active scholars are uniquely attracted by a high-quality graduate school of arts and sciences. Faculty members consider the teaching and training of new generations of graduate students as their highest calling. They believe that working with graduate students maintains and develops their professional skills more effectively than any other activity. It may be the main reason for the great attraction of academic jobs. Laboratory scientists have told me that the opportunity to work with graduate students keeps them in the university. For them, other options would center on research in commercial laboratories, but there the principal investigator would be assisted by technicians, and that is considered a far less creative interaction. — Henry Rosovsky

When I was a graduate student, the leading spirits at Harvard were interested in the history of ideas. — M.H. Abrams

Studying ice crystals as a graduate student, he eventually found the basic design (equilateral, equiangled hexagon) so icily repeated, so unerringly conforming, that he couldn't help but shudder: Beneath the splendor
the filigreed blossoms, the microscopic stars
was a ghastly inevitability; crystals could not escape their embedded blueprints any more than humans could. Everything hewed to a rigidity of pattern, the certainty of death. — Anthony Doerr

If you want to be a graduate student, you have to fall in love with reading. — Lailah Gifty Akita

You share the same destiny as everyone else, the same history, the same hardship, the same rot, the same Tram beer, the same dog kebabs, the same narrative as soon as you come into the world. You start out baby-chick or slim-jim or child-soldier. You graduate to endlessly striking student or desperado. If you've got a family on the trains, then you work on the trains; otherwise like a ship you wash up on the edge of hope - a suicidal, a carjacker, a digger with dirty teeth, a mechanic, a street sleeper, a commission agent, an errand boy employed by for-profit tourists, a hawker of secondhand coffins. Your fate is already sealed like that of the locomotives carrying spoiled merchandise and the dying. — Fiston Mwanza Mujila

Let's also make sure that a high school diploma puts our kids on a path to a good job. Right now, countries like Germany focus on graduating their high school students with the equivalent of a technical degree from one of our community colleges, so that they're ready for a job. At schools like P-TECh in Brooklyn ... students will graduate with a high school diploma and an associate degree in computers or engineering. We need to give every American student opportunities like this. — Barack Obama

Political journalists love graduate student intelligence, the ability to make clever allusions in seminars, and in 1999-2000 they hassled George W. Bush for not having it. They didn't realize what this book succinctly displays: that the President has something far more important-CEO intelligence, the ability to ask tough questions, garner essential information, and make discerning decisions. — Marvin Olasky

I've always been - as a teacher, as graduate student, as a student, and I think, really, as a child - I've been interested in poems, but not so much for what the take home pay is, what you might sum up from them in moral or intellectual terms or whatever, but what's in the certain lines and how lines relates to other lines. — David Ferry

Science itself is badly in need of integration and unification. The tendency is more and more the other way ... Only the graduate student, poor beast of burden that he is, can be expected to know a little of each. As the number of physicists increases, each specialty becomes more self-sustaining and self-contained. Such Balkanization carries physics, and indeed, every science further away, from natural philosophy, which, intellectually, is the meaning and goal of science. — Isidor Isaac Rabi

I spent eighteen months as a graduate student in physics at Columbia University, waiting unhappily for an opportunity to work in a laboratory and wondering if I should continue in physics. — Sidney Altman

A graduate student who is still learning courses is not really taking a maximum advantage of a research university's offerings. He should already be finished with course-taking, as he would then be able to shape his own taste about what is a good subject for research work in the graduate school. — Chen-Ning Yang

I spent the first few months of graduate school pretending to be a student of theoretical physics. This required no great acting skill beyond the effort to appear unperturbed in the face of the inexplicable, which is as far as I can see one of the central tasks of adulthood. — Barbara Ehrenreich

Needless to say, that meant that the Braekbills student body was quite the psychological menagerie. Carrying that much onboard cognitive processing power had a way of distorting your personality. And to actually want to work that hard, you had to be at least a little bit screwed up. — Lev Grossman

And just as simply as that, it was over. She was no longer a student in the local town. She was a graduate. An adult. She thought she should feel something. Older.Wiser. But she felt nothing but a strange emptiness. An inner knowledge that she was now on the edge of the nest, ready to try her own wings — Janette Oke

Surveying the way viruses have been discovered in the past, I came to the conclusion that I could use my technology that I developed as a graduate student - DNA microarray technology - to create a chip that would simultaneously screen for all viruses ever discovered, and furthermore have the built-in capability of discovering new viruses. — Joseph DeRisi

The message from the Technion when I was a student was: 'You will be so good that when you graduate, everyone will want to hire you.' — Dan Shechtman

With the threat of failure looming, students with the growth mindset set instead mobilized their resources for learning. They told us that they, too, sometimes felt overwhelmed, but their response was to dig in and do what it takes. They were like George Danzig. Who? George Danzig was a graduate student in math at Berkeley. One day, as usual, he rushed in late to his math class and quickly copied the two homework problems from the blackboard. When he later went to do them, he found them very difficult, and it took him several days of hard work to crack them open and solve them. They turned out not to be homework problems at all. They were two famous math problems that had never been solved. — Carol S. Dweck

A paradigm is a powerful theoretical and methodological framework which defines the working lives of thousands of intelligent and disciplined minds. And paradigms do not attract the loyalty of such minds unless they 'work'. One of the first things a graduate student learns is that if there is a discrepancy between the paradigm and what he or she has discovered, then the automatic assumption is that the paradigm is right and the student wrong. Just as a good workman never blames his tools, so the diligent student never blames his paradigm — John Naughton

The Canadian graduate student was now hysterical. — Victoria Bruce

Your zeal to face life's rough and tumble, your ardor to accept the responsibilities of adulthood is hardly congruent with the aspirations of most graduate students ... ' He shook his head of disagreeable hair. 'I need not tell you,' he deplored, sinking to paralipsis, 'that there resides in almost every one of 'em the unconscious desire not to grow up. For once the academic goal is attained and the doctorate irradicably abbreviated after the name, the problem of facing the world is confronted. The subtlest, most unremitting drive of the student is his unconscious proclivity to postpone the acceptance of responsibility as long as possible. — Millard Kaufman

And if she liked and trusted the person who asked, she would add that yes, it was kind of a lot to deal with: her outward affect was bright and capable, and that was no illusion, but equally real was the yawning pit of exhaustion inside her. She just felt so tired sometimes. And because of everything her parents asked of her, she was ashamed of being tired. She could not, would not let the pit swallow her up, as much as she sometimes wanted it to. — Lev Grossman

IN 1953, STANLEY Miller, a graduate student at the University of Chicago, took two flasks - one containing a little water to represent a primeval ocean, the other holding a mixture of methane, ammonia, and hydrogen sulphide gases to represent Earth's early atmosphere - connected them with rubber tubes, and introduced some electrical sparks as a stand-in for lightning. After a few days, the water in the flasks had turned green and yellow in a hearty broth of amino acids, fatty acids, sugars, and other organic compounds. "If God didn't do it this way," observed Miller's delighted supervisor, the Nobel laureate Harold Urey, "He missed a good bet. — Bill Bryson

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 would not say I am looking for God. Or, I am not looking for God precisely. I am not seeking the God I learned about as a Catholic child, as an 18-year-old novice in a religious community, as an agnostic graduate student, as - but who cares about my disguises? Or God's. — Mary Rose O'Reilley

Students are suffering under incredibly high tuitions and high student loan interest rates. They graduate from school, and they're having a very difficult time finding a job. They don't feel as though there are honest leaders who are listening to them, and who will be a part of the solution. — Tulsi Gabbard

There was a golden period that I look back upon with great regret, in which the cheapest of experimental animals were medical students. Graduate students were even better. In the old days, if you offered a graduate student a thiamine-deficient diet, he gladly went on it, for that was the only way he could eat. Science is getting to be more and more difficult. — George Wald

As a graduate student Nathan Nunn, now a Harvard economist, began to compare different economies in modern Africa, and he found that the countries that lost more people to the slave trade were also the poorest countries today. How — Christine Kenneally

The "thesis neurosis" has begun: the student abandons the thesis, returns to it, feels unfulfilled, loses focus, and uses his thesis as an alibi to avoid other challenges in his life that he is too cowardly to address. This student will never graduate. — Umberto Eco

He was a sleaze, a nobody, a former graduate student of English studies. — Jonathan Franzen

Jocelyn Bell joined the project as a graduate student in 1965, helping as a member of the construction team and then analysing the paper charts of the sky survey. — Antony Hewish

When I was an impoverished graduate student, I would sometimes spend $20 or $30 on a T-shirt or accessory I didn't need or even particularly want. What I craved was the purchase, not the thing itself. Of course, a sense of not being deprived may fill an emotional void without ruinous consequences. — Siri Hustvedt

I'm considered something like a graduate student and we get credits for mentoring incoming students. I definitely got lucky with my first assignment — Kristen Day

A very loud popping sound echoed across the seminar room. Each graduate student gazed in complete and utter shock as they realized that Professor Emerson had snapped the whiteboard marker in two. Black ink spread across his fingers like a starless night, and his eyes ignited into an angry blue fire. — Sylvain Reynard

I got involved when I was a graduate student at UCLA when UCLA was the first site on the net. — Jon Postel

depletion and climate change. For the older generation it's easy to misunderstand the word 'student' or 'graduate': to my contemporaries, at college in the 1980s, it meant somebody engaged in a liberal, academic education, often with hours of free time to dream, protest, play in a rock band or do research. Today's undergraduates have been tested every month of their lives, from kindergarten to high school. They are the measured inputs and outputs of a commercialized global higher education market worth $1.2 trillion a year - excluding the USA. Their free time is minimal: precarious part-time jobs are essential to their existence, so that they are a key part of the modern workforce. Plus they have become a vital asset for the financial system. In 2006, Citigroup alone made $220 million clear profit from its student loan book.2 — Paul Mason

As a graduate student at Oxford in 1963, I began writing about books in revolutionary France, helping to found the discipline of book history. I was in my academic corner writing about Enlightenment ideals when the Internet exploded the world of academic communication in the 1990s. — Robert Darnton

If students don't think that you care and can relate, especially as they get older, they tune you out. I didn't get it in my classes at the graduate school of education. I got it intuitively from my own experiences as a student. — Pedro Noguera

Indeed, the graduate student lifestyle maintained no clear distinction between weekday and weekend, a blending together of work and play that culminated, though it often let one accomplish extraordinary amounts, in the gradual erosion of the ability ever to feel free of the obligation to be working. — Jenny Davidson

The arts significantly boost student achievement, reduce discipline problems, and increase the odds students will go on to graduate from college. As First Lady Michelle Obama sums up, both she and the President believe 'strongly that arts education is essential for building innovative thinkers who will be our nation's leaders for tomorrow.' — Arne Duncan

There was one thing more than any other that turned this New York, liberal, Jewish, Columbia University graduate student away from modern liberalism: its use of moral equivalence to avoid confronting evil during the Cold War. — Dennis Prager

Rose," Alberta said, leaning toward me. "I'm going to be blunt with you. I'm not going to give you lectures or demand any explanations. Honestly, since you aren't my student anymore, I don't have the right to ask or tell you anything."
"You can lecture," I told her. "I've always respected you and want to hear what you have to say."
The ghost of a smile flashed on her face. "All right, here it is. You screwed up."
"Wow. You weren't kidding about bluntness."
"The reasons don't matter. You shouldn't have left. You shouldn't have dropped out. Your education and training are too valuable - no matter how much you think you know - and you are too talented to risk throwing away your future."
I almost laughed. "To tell you the truth? I'm not sure what my future is anymore."
"Which is why you need to graduate."
"But I dropped out."
She snorted. "Then drop back in!"
"I - what? How?"
"With paperwork. Just like everything else in the world. — Richelle Mead

I started doing science when I was effectively 20, a graduate student of Salvador Luria at Indiana University. And that was - you know, it took me about two years, you know, being a graduate student with Luria deciding I wanted to find the structure of DNA; that is, DNA was going to be my objective. — James D. Watson

In the advanced practice, the relationship between the Zen master and the student becomes very terse. The Zen master will expect things of the student because the student is in graduate school. — Frederick Lenz

If a student takes the whole series of my folklore courses including the graduate seminars, he or she should learn something about fieldwork, something about bibliography, something about how to carry out library research, and something about how to publish that research. — Alan Dundes

I trust that a graduate student some day will write a doctoral essay on the influence of the Munich analogy on the subsequent history of the twentieth century. Perhaps in the end he will conclude that the multitude of errors committed in the name of Munich may exceed the original error of 1938. — Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr.

With the accent, it's an internal dialogue that Southerners have with themselves. We kind of carry around that shame, that feeling of being inferior to the North. I think I did lose some of the accent for a while. Because when I was a graduate student, I was terrified at having to get up in front of a roomful of smart New York kids. — Bobbie Ann Mason

Every great achiever overcame the greatest obstacles. — Lailah Gifty Akita

I really enjoyed Princeton as a graduate student. — Brian Kernighan

Syrian-born graduate student in Wisconsin who became biological father of Jobs and Mona Simpson, later a food and beverage manager at the Boomtown casino near Reno. — Walter Isaacson

Eight months later, having left Columbia, I was studying physics in a summer program and working in Colorado when I decided to enroll as a graduate student in biophysics. — Sidney Altman

Life itself will protect you. You will graduate to living a better life than you have ever lived till now! Your treatment and patience has paid off! You are life's own student and have seen life from all the angles. You have come full circle and now it is time to rejoice. Say you are absolutely fine and it will be granted to you! — Sanchita Pandey

An old joke has an Oxford professor meeting an American former graduate student and asking him what he's working on these days. 'My thesis is on the survival of the class system in the United States.' 'Oh really, that's interesting: one didn't think there was a class system in the United States.' 'Nobody does. That's how it survives. — Christopher Hitchens