November 2008 Archives

The definition of “funny” in graduate school is quite sarcastic. However, if you do not seriously seek fun in graduate school, I am pretty positive that you will find graduate school very entertaining.

Personally, I think being in graduate school is a social experiment. Often time I enjoy watching graduate students “pursuing” their educated goals with different, but not really innovative though, approaches. For me instead of rigorously focusing on ‘the big goal,’ I, to escape mundane graduate student’s life, rather enjoy observing the environment surrounding me on day-by-day basis.

Most of courses provided in graduate school’s levels are discussion-based, so that students are supposedly allowed to scholarly express their ideas toward subject matter in classes. However, this could be also very entertaining since there are many students with diverse backgrounds discuss such the same topics with different interpretation. Sometimes, I feel like my follow graduate students are digressing, but, after listening to them for minutes, I just realized that we they are just making arguments on exactly the same topic with particular perspectives. So, I enjoy seeing myself drawing ideas generated by people whose background and perspectives are varied.

Besides fun in discussion-based courses, embarrassing guest speakers could be another harmless, but enjoyable, hobbies. Graduate students so benefit the learning the guest speakers, and basically students can learn more from the ill-prepared than from the well-prepared. For example, ill-prepares speakers could be buried with flooded questions left unanswered. This reminds me of how harsh the reality is and encourages me to prepare myself very well when I am going to give a talk.

All in all, graduate school fun is not necessary involving caffeine intoxication or suffocating sleepless suffocation; it does not have to be sarcastic or ironic. Instead, the fun is about indulging in learning mistake from the others and absorbing good academic and social culture for future use. However, most of time, watching people doing mistakes in graduate is academically, educationally funny.

How to flourish in graduate school? This is not a question, but it is such very huge agenda, and there many things to be sought for understanding before jumping right into this agenda.

There are a myriad of advice and suggestion about how to survive graduate school. I, however, personally, have never complete taken put my faith in those. For I believe that there are no inclusively complete recipe for living graduate student lives. So, what I usually handle myself in graduate school is to combine those available recipes with my own personality and my goals of life - to live happily.

There are only three objectives that I would like to achieve while living my graduate student life are (a) to stay healthy, (b) to enjoy my life, entertaining, and (c) to work in order to fulfill the graduate school’s requirement. However, the objectives (a) and (b) by far outweigh the (c). I strongly believe mental and physical health is very important; that is why (a) is the first priority. And I also believe that every life on earth deserves a very quality time of living happily, then it would be a very misinformed if we forego out happiness and enjoyment just because we serve our life with academic reason. Finally (c) working hard - this is a very collective term - is very rewarding in the long run.

I would like to compare studying in graduate school to working in real world environment. I don’t want to claim that one of them is tougher than the other since they are also tough in difference point of view. When working, we have to remind ourselves that we are working toward “something” that usually takes us up to 6 years of suffering. Short-term, intermediate-term, and long-term goals can be differently achieved with different requirements. It is acceptable to allow yourselves to get punished for the purpose of achieving goals, and, moreover, it is very important to reward yourselves when you conquer such intellectual quest.

All in all, don’t live life so seriously because you cannot quite it anyway.

It is said that humans are social creature - I definitely think so. However, there are also diverse preferences among them regarding socialization. Speaking of socialization, I used to attend the IST’s beer club ones, but it just turned out disappointing because I felt not very fitted in. Many of IST graduates students attending the beer club are white or American born, and they, except me, have lots vocabulary and common things to share, the American way of life. Therefore, I was looking for an alternative, and I finally found one: The international student club.

Located at Bucke building, the club initiates many international agendas, offering a variety of conversational topic to all the participants. Regularly, we have an official coffee hour session on Thursdays’ evening. Moreover, we also have international films hours. And these two events very encourage attendants to express and discuss their culture perspectives regarding the issues/agendas emerging from the films and the conversation.

Anyway, please don’t be offended, State College, last year, was voted for one of the most livable colleges. However, I feel State College’s atmosphere and livelihood are less welcoming to international students who speak with strong accents. Unfortunately, it seems to be the only way that allows international students to feel safe to mingle is to socialize at international events. I hope that State College could be a better to live. Hopelessly.