Make It Stop!

How to make your grad student stop talking about their thesis

A Guide for Friends and Family

As a companion piece to the previous post, 'How do you converse with a grad student?', today I give you a short guide on tactics to make your grad student for the love of all that is holy stop talking about their damn thesis.

I am guilty of this. My brother and my best friend both have waved the white flag at some point and begged me to stop nattering on about the 1349 Statute of Labourers or Skeat's manuscript transmission schematic of Beues of Hamtoun. As one doctorate student wrote, "Who'd have thought that singular devotion to one idea for a span of years would result in a declining ability to relate to everything else in the world that isn't that one idea? Crazy, right?"

So, here is a list of (kind) ways to get your grad student to talk about something else -- anything else, please -- without just cutting them off and giving them a gag order on the subject they love (and sometimes hate).

1. The 'Wrap It Up'. When they've been monologuing long enough that you have begun aging in dog years.

"Okay, you're losing me. Can you finish your point in a couple sentences?"

2. The 'Head Them Off at the Pass'. When they get that gleam in their eye and take a deep breath and you know they are about to launch into a detailed explanation you don't want to hear.

"Wait, before you start: can you give it to me in three to five sentences?"

Okay, 1 and 2 are basically the same, but the "sum it up in three sentences" approach is my favorite. It lets me finish my point and you get to change the subject in short order; everyone wins.

3. The 'I'll Settle for a Slow-Down', aka The Yellow Light. When what they were saying started off really interesting, and you did want to know about it, but now they're waist-deep in a bog of details and are throwing around phrases like 'urtext edition' and 'strontium isotope analysis':

"I need you to dial it back a bit. Give me the outline of your idea."

4. The Diversion. When you just can't handle one more history lesson.

"Hey, have you seen the latest Game of Thrones episode*?"

Works every time.

*As before, this can be substituted with any recently popular book, film, or TV series. 

The Question Game

How do you converse with a grad student?

A Guide for Friends and Family

Illustrated with strips from PhD Comics

There are a handful of questions that I get asked every single time I run into someone outside of the university setting. These are, almost universally, questions that are awkward to answer. But I get it: people are trying to show interest and connect, and I work on an obscure topic in a tiny field, on texts that no one encountered in high school or picks up casually for fun. So what are these questions that people should avoid? And more importantly, what can they ask instead?

1. Are you seeing anyone yet?

Did you know that graduate student marriages have a 30% higher chance of divorce than marriages where neither partner is in grad school? It's not a relationship-friendly endeavor. If I somehow find the time and energy to start seeing someone, I’ll be so pleased to be with them that I’ll happily and voluntarily tell you all about them! In the meantime:

And also:

Instead: What fun things have you done with your friends lately?

I will have many, many good stories if you ask me this.

2. When do you think you’ll be finished?

 

Instead: What’s the most interesting/entertaining thing you’ve come across in your research lately?¹

^1.A Variations include: ‘Read any interesting articles lately?’ Or, ‘What was your last paper on, in layman’s terms?’²

^1.B This is not recommended for many STEM subjects, because it can be a lot harder to explain what they are doing without the field jargon and (2) because they have to be much more secretive about their unpublished work than most medievalists do.

² Most grad students are very prepared to give short, one-minute versions of their latest work to a general audience. We actually have workshops and competitions for this on campus. Plus we have to be able to do this for a lot of grant applications and job pitches. And, as student teachers, our other job is to make our subject sound exciting to people who probably didn’t do the reading and don’t think it’s exciting.

One of the few benefits to doing a humanities degree (because it certainly isn’t the availability of funding or the state of the job market) is that most of the things I work on can be boiled down into fairly relatable material. After all, research in the humanities is, essentially, the study of humanity, and being human is universal common ground. The best thing about working in medieval studies is that most of the stuff I work on is hilarious, gruesome, or both simultaneously. And, working in literature, one of the few conversational skills I have is that I can rework most of the dry stuff I read about into a narrative. And almost everyone enjoys a good story if I promise to keep it brief.

3. But what’s the point of studying medieval literature? Isn’t this completely irrelevant?

Here's the thing: No one likes being told that the thing they love and have devoted their life to is worthless. Even if you say it as a joke. The best response when someone tells you they have made a career choice that you completely disagree with is to smile, nod, make a general "Oh, mhmm" noise of mild interest, and move on. Shake your head over it when you get home.

Instead: Hey, have you seen the latest Game of Thrones episode*?

*This can be substituted with any recently popular book, film, or TV series.

Of What a Strange Nature is Knowledge

I bring you this scene from last night's standard Tuesday hang-out, because I realized that it encapsulates a typical beer-o'clock conversation with my Oxford friends, and the folks back home are always asking me what the average Oxford experience is.

Scene: An average Tuesday, ~21:00. A chemist, a theoretical and an experimental physicist, a computational biologist, and a medievalist sit around the common room drinking. The chemist has just noticed that the experimental physicist's very hideous 'art' joke that has been gracing the common room for some days, a sort of robotic-looking monster figure constructed out of cardboard, Sellotape (Scotch tape), and a fair amount of consumed wine, has gone missing.[1]

Chemist: Oh, no, Chris, someone has thrown out your creation!

Theoretical Physicist: Or, receiving no love from its creator, it has taken off on its own and is wandering around college, terrorizing the finalists.[2]

Experimental Physicist [in a false, gravelly voice]: At once as far as angels ken he views / The dismal situation waste and wild, / A dungeon horrible, on all sides round / As one great furnace flamed. [Everyone laughs].[3]

Chemist, turning to Medievalist: Oh, speaking of which[4], season three of Penny Dreadful is now on Amazon. 

Computational Biologist: I haven't seen that. Is it good?

Theoretical Physicist [in tone of patient correction]: No, it's dreadful.[5]

(Chemist rolls eyes, Computational Biologist makes small "cheers" motion with his beer.)

Chemist: I enjoy it. Dracula's finally appeared on scene. And it's nice that the bride of Frankenstein's monster finally has more of a role.[6]

[Medievalist nods in approval.]

End scene.

------------------------------------------------------------------------
Annotations:

[1] St John's College has an 'artist in residence'. We get a new sound artist every Hilary term and a new visual artist every Trinity term. It's a bit like those families living in 19th century mansions that would pay someone to live as a hermit on their grounds in the medieval folly they constructed, just to add to the Romantic æsthetic. These artists are almost always more of the experimental, post-modernist sort. As a parody of the artists-in-residence, the graduate students hold an unofficial, unsanctioned 'spoof art night', where we make terrible art (think finger painting, theses put into interpretive dance, toothpaste splatters on t-shirts, etc.) and attach little cards next to each piece with a short paragraph explaining the deeper meaning of our art. We then dress up in a creative interpretation of black tie and drink boxed wine while going around 'admiring' each others' artwork. That's the event at which this cardboard robot creation was made.

[2] First reference to Frankenstein. Also, after just one sentence, this is the first movement of the conversation into surrealism, which is where most of our conversations quickly end up.

[3] The person talking, instead of quoting Frankenstein, quotes Paradise Lost, which is a text heavily referenced by the monster in Frankenstein, and thus more suitable for impersonating the monster. And he chooses a quote that applies to the idea of his artwork wandering around college at night. Because of course everyone can quote (and recognize quotes from) Milton and Shelley.

[4] Notice that the words 'Frankenstein' and 'Mary Shelley' have never once been mentioned (or even 'Milton' or 'Paradise Lost'). It is assumed that everyone will know the references without having to explicitly say the names, even if none of you study anything remotely resembling 19th century literature (or whatever topic someone happens to skip to).

[5] Oxford is the Land of Puns and Dad Jokes. You can hardly open your mouth without someone making a pun off of what you say.

[6] It is also the Land of Pedantry. It is Frankenstein's monster, not Frankenstein.

Surprising Statistics

Last post about mental health for awhile and then I will go back to happier subjects.

My friend went to a meeting a couple weeks ago about students with disabilities in Oxford and came back with some statistics that surprised me. Obviously [citation needed], but he is someone whom I very, very much trust when it comes to accurately representing data to the best of his knowledge, and who doesn't like giving out numbers unless he has found a peer-reviewed article to back them up, even in day-to-day conversation. Basically, he's the model grad student. So, here goes:

According to the World Health Organization, one in four people will have a mental or neurological disorder, globally. One in four. That means that 25% of the people you know. And yet we still continue to heavily stigmatize mental illnesses and the US government wants to remove insurance coverage for mental health as part of their reformation of the Affordable Care Act.

Amongst Oxford graduate students, that statistic increases to one in two. One in two grad students! Mental health is a huge part of the day-to-day culture here. We are, to borrow the words of a professor in the English faculty, the equivalent of high-performance athletes. And athletes' bodies break down. We do that mentally -- we put our brains through a lot of stress to continue performing at the high level required to maintain our world-top status. With the academic bar getting continuously higher,* universities need better methods to help students' mental health.

*Here is an analogy:

The Crucible

Mental illness and brilliance have long been associated with each other, in social belief if nothing else. The 'mad genius' is a literary trope going back centuries. A fair number of studies have focused on the high prevalence of mental illness in people with high intelligence.

Oxford scholar Robert Burton (1577-1640) wrote the first medical text on clinical depression, The Anatomy of Melancholy. Mental illnesses continue to be a major topic of research at Oxford, and I suspect that part of the large academic interest in them is because so many researchers here suffer from them. I think I know more people who have diagnosed and undiagnosed mental illnesses here than I do people who do not. And people who fall somewhere on the spectrum -- for example, they experience high anxiety and have had panic attacks, but not at a frequency that constitutes an illness. And, as these are invisible disabilities, there is no doubt in my mind that a fair few more people I know suffer from them that I don't know about.

Autism. Anxiety disorder. Bipolar disorder. Clinical depression. OCD. Tourette's. These are the most common amongst my colleagues, though a number of other illnesses affect those around me. And a top-tier, highly competitive environment breeds the sort of situations that exacerbate the symptoms of these illnesses.

The silver lining to this is that, as living with mental illnesses (your own or your friends') is such a prevalent part of everyday life here, I find my college's graduate student body* to have created, by and large, one of the most non-judgemental cultures for people with mental illnesses that I have ever encountered. I wish I could transplant that open-mindedness and sensitivity to the other places I live and travel.


*The administrative departments, however, have an infuriatingly long way to go. 

Small Talk

It is interview season here, a time when all the young high school hopefuls have to come sit exams and be interviewed by the fellows of colleges in hopes of being granted an offer to attend Oxford for their undergraduate degree.

From a previous year's interview in the physics department:

Fellow: "So, do you have any hobbies?"
Interviewee: "Prime numbers."


Yep, that kid got an offer.

The Skittle Observation

I've decided to take this blog in a slightly different direction. While I am still having occasional adventures, mostly what I do every day of every week involves sitting in a library, leaving me little to post here of castle ruins or trips to continental cities (yay grad school!). Then I realized that simply being at Oxford is its own adventure. The fascinating and delightful discoveries I make usually come from the people here, not the architecture. So I am going to start recording some snippets of the people who make up the Oxford experience.

Lewis Carroll, a mathematician at Christ Church College who wrote Alice in Wonderland, based several elements of his book on people and things in Oxford. In no other place have I found this quotation more true: 'You're mad, bonkers, completely off your head. But I'll tell you a secret: all the best people are.' And at Oxford, we're all mad here.*

My first confirmation that I had found my people came to me as I was sitting in the college bar one day in my first months here. It came in the form of Skittles. The bar, you see, sells a small variety of chips (crisps) and candy in addition to a sizable variety of alcoholic beverages (more on unhealthy academic coping mechanisms later). How do you eat Skittles? Most of the people I know back home take a small handful, pop them all in their mouth, and chew. Repeat.

Not at Oxford. As I sat there scanning the room, I noticed that every single person who had purchased Skittles had a different and very precise sorting method. The most commonly preferred method is to sort them out by color, line each color up in single-file parallel lines along the desk, eat off the extras until you have the same number of each color, and then consume them in groups of five (one of each color, but only one color at a time in your mouth) from red to purple in the order of the visible light spectrum. That obsession with detail, that need to sort and classify, is not something that we can turn on for schoolwork or research and turn off when going about our daily lives; it's how our brains process the things around us -- even the little things. It's not a 'oh, there's that one person who weirdly over-sorts their Skittles'. Here, we all are the kids who got teased at school for sorting our Skittles.






*This is an ableist statement, but I hope you'll forgive me. Mental health in Oxford is an important topic that I cannot hope to cover in a single blog post.