Grad school

Liz Klastrup describes in some detail what it's like to be a Danish doctoral candidate.

People don't know as much as they ought about the source of so much modern research. I'm currently reviewing a promising mystery about a geology grad student. Her lover plagiarized part of her thesis (and tried to erase some chapters of her dissertation to hide the evidence). She's got an academic job lined up, contingent on finishing her dissertation by year's end. She's got a week of field work left before she needs to report to her new job. And she's missing a crucial bit of evidence (a hypothetical rock outcrop) that's essential to her entire argument.

She's also worried about a serial killer working in the region. I find this unrealistic: graduate students I've known, facing this kind of research pressure, would dismiss rumors of wandering murderers out of hand, just as they dismiss sleep, friends, family, toxins, illness. If she doesn't find those rocks, it's over anyway. (In the aftermath of a student suicide in my old chemistry department, one student spoke of the loneliness of life when it's just you and the molecule)