Grad School Soliloquy, by Rebekah Phillips

In winter the classrooms are always too cold. This isn’t unusual, though. They’re also too cold in the summer. People walk into the building in July wearing shorts; they leave with hypothermia.

Sue says it’s a conspiracy and that our university is run by robots who need to stay cool to function. I say if we’re looking for robots, we don’t need to look as far as the dean or any of the other bureaucrats; we can start with our own professors. If anybody at Augustine University is a robot, it’s Dr. Handler. He can recite every bone in the body, guess bones by touch alone, and speaks Latin as a first language (his parents were doing a social experiment which, depending on your perspective, was an unmitigated disaster), but he has never heard of Beyoncé Knowles or Taylor Swift.

I didn’t think there was a person alive who hadn’t heard “Shake It Off,” but apparently I was wrong.

This just proves that Dr. Handler is not human.

Sue asked me, when I told her my theory, whether I was including uncontacted tribes and sherpas in this very scientific study, but I told her to shove it; she knew what I meant. I totally bet sherpas listen to T. Swift. All the Americans spending their money to trash Mount Everest have got to be bringing the gospel of 1989. As for uncontacted tribes, I think we have bigger things to worry about.

When pressed to expound on his cultural knowledge, Dr. Handler just sighed and said, “What does this have to do with anatomy, Dania?” and I let it go. Grad school is just learning to pick your battles, and I’ve learned not to pick any of them. It’s not worth it. My reading list is about 10 years long, I haven’t had a full night’s sleep since spring break, and I can’t remember the last meal I had that wasn’t pizza eaten over the sink.

Sometimes my students ask why I accepted the teaching assistantship here at Augustine. They don’t actually put it that way, though. They say, “Ms. Winslow, why did you decide to become a teacher?” but it amounts to the same thing. They want to know why I chose to go back to university—after putting in four years of all-nighters and increasing my student loans to the point that I have nightmares about the IRA—just to teach a bunch of freshmen Intro to Anthropology at 8 a.m. when we could all be asleep in our respective beds. Wouldn’t it make much more sense, they ask me, to find a full-time job instead of surviving on a meagre university stipend and weekend shifts at Al-Sheesh, the Mediterranean restaurant down the road? And it would.

So the answer to my students is this: I love it. I love my 10-year-long reading list, and I love Dr. Handler (he can be so cute when he looks at us from underneath his eyelashes, daring us to attempt to pronounce Latin names). I like seeing my students’ faces twice a week, even though they make me cry because their writing is deplorable. On the days I don’t want to drown myself in the bathtub, I’m genuinely happy. It’s mostly true. Show me a thriving, undeniably happy 22-year-old and I’ll show you a fiction.

Carol, especially—although she is not 22, she’s 20—is an un-thriving, undeniably unhappy college student. One of her professors stopped me in the hall last week and told me she’d heard I lived with Carol, and did I know that Carol hadn’t attended classes in three weeks? I am not sure how she knew that I live with Carol—I assume that there is a professorial grapevine, which is great, because it means my professors are talking about me, which means they think of me when I am not in the room with them!—and I am not sure what she wanted me to do about it, but I nodded seriously and told her I’d talk to Carol. I won’t, though. I know exactly what Carol would say: “Who made you my mother? Aren’t there, like, laws against college professors talking to my parents about my academic success?”

This law is called FERPA, which Carol actually knows perfectly well.

The point is, it’s hard enough to drag Carol to her doctor’s appointments; I’m not going to be the one to drag her bony self to class every day. Besides, I know she’s still going to Dr. Dent’s class, and if there ever is a day when Carol does not go to Dr. Dent’s class, it will mean she has died.

I am not entirely certain about my tenses in that sentence, but I’m going to let it go. This is my own personal journal, not something I’m going to turn in to, say, Dr. Handler or Dr. Mitchell. Dr. Handler corrects my grammar on my personal, in-class notes, of all things. He’d probably go nuts reading this journal (for more reasons than the fact I called him a robot and a failed social experiment). As for Dr. Mitchell, she is—to put it bluntly—God. It matters to me that she thinks I am not just some tense-switching 22-year-old girl who has listened to Beyoncé’s “Formation” 72 times in the last three days and has delusions of getting a Ph.D. I want her to think I am the tense-switching 22-year-old woman who sees the cultural value in “Formation” and is definitely going to get a Ph.D. and make Augustine U proud to call her an alumnus. Alumna?

Dr. Handler would know.