Mike Hewner's Homepage

This post has no particular purpose…I just ended up writing a few paragraphs about being a grad student in an email and thought you might be amused:

Once the whole pirate/ninja internet meme plays itself, I think graduate student positioned to be the next sexy job of the decade. A graduate student is like ninjas and pirates all mixed together. We’re the hard-drinking hard-fighting lords of the night and we never sleep. We look snappy in longcoats, black long underwear and oversized hats, though it is difficult to tell because we are indeed masters of disguise. We know tons of secrets man was not meant to know, a fact which we will drukenly brag about when we have even the tiniest amount of rum. We sail the high seas of academe, seeking whores and honor and grant money (which for various grant accountancy laws must be buried on deserted islands).

The only thing that grad students really lack in an enemy. But technology will soon enter the stage when we can again build evil robotic nuns, the ancient sacred prey of the graduate student. How do I know this? Indisputable paleontological evidence proves that what we think of as “dinosaurs” were actually a race of evil robotic nuns created and subsequently destroyed by insect graduate students who started their degrees in the late-Paleozoic. And you can be sure that when the nuns come back they will itching for a rematch.