Can graduate school be funny?

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.