Tuesday, November 2, 2010

Loverboy Was Wrong -- I'll Be Working ON the Weekend. Oh, and the Week, Too...

Screw you, Loverboy. The life of the grad student rarely involves working for the mythical weekend when life is your oyster and you can paint the town red and other such cliches.

It means working through the week in the vain hope that you will have less to work on during said weekend.

I just printed off ten-thousand pages (OK -- closer t0 150) of reading for my Monday night Shakespearean Fetishes course. This is, of course, in addition to the fact that I will also be reading another Shakespearean play before Monday, and somehow attempting to tackle the stack of student papers I just recieved from a bleary-eyed 101 class this morning, as well as reading and commenting on a colleague's paper before Friday's colloquium. (Note to self -- do not overindulge at post-colloquium "Night of Proper Drinking," lest all of Saturday be lost to general unpleasantness.)

6 comments:

  1. Don't feel so bad. Once you get out of school and enter the 'real world' of employment, you'll wonder what to do with all your 'free time'. Then promptly pick up tons of new and exciting hobbies, friends, etc. that will make you wonder where the heck the weekend went anyway!

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  2. I feel your pain. I spend five hours on Saturday and 10 hours on Sunday on campus working on homework/grading. I have the added pleasure of spending this next weekend at a conference. Have I written my paper for said conference? Oh definitely not. That's what I get to do tonight.

    And to verify that I'm a human, I had to type the word "splagg." Splagg indeed.

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  3. Same here: this marks the second weekend in a row that I came to the office. At least I was more productive this time around...

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  4. Assuming that the "real world" (which I thought I was already in, given that although I do go to classes I also earn a living teaching on top of those classes) that I plan to enter is academe, I don't think the workload is going to change all that much. Research, grading, lesson planning, administrative duties -- it will definitely be a full-time job.

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  5. If anything, everybody outside the academy is living in a fake world. Where else would 60-hour work weeks without overtime pay be considered unusual?

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