Things not to do in a PhD

Theorem 946:

Never ever, not even in a desperate attempt to impress your advisor, submit an assignment before time. If you read my last post, you’ll probably know what this post is going to look like. A list of 50 schools. 7 straight hours of solid work. An assignment due Friday (tomorrow, as I write this post). Tuesday morning, I confidently walked into my advisor’s office, all smiles and ready to make him realize I am the best, the most dedicated gem of a graduate student he just found. I knocked at his door, entered with the pile of printouts from last night’s hard work, and looked at him. I had even prepared a little word document with the summary of work I had done, more to show off than anything more.

“So you wanted this data on Friday. I thought I’ll finish it earlier for you to take a look at”, I beamed.

Did he go through those papers? Hell, no. He didn’t even touch them. Instead, listen to what he said-

“Great. I now want you to go through those papers, each and every one of them, pull out the data I am looking for, put it in a table in the word document, classify it, code it, and bring it back to me.”

I could only stare at him in disbelief. He was talking of 10 more hours of work. I don't know which one I felt more, immobilized and paralyzed.

“Hey, thanks for doing those. Good job. How many schools’ information do we have now?”

“50”, I answered unenthusiastically.

“Great. Do the same for the other list too. You don’t mind, do you?”, he handed me a list.

“Of course not. I’ll do it”, I smiled sarcastically, closing the office door behind me before he could assign me more work. It was then that I looked at the list.

The list had 70 more schools.

This is one of those posts I’ll gladly send to PhD comics to make a comic strip out of.

sunshine