The Atlantic's Megan McArdle
believes Ph.D. students are unbearable pricks:
The new graduate student's lack of humility is a stunning thing, perfect, seamless, and unbreakable. They begin issuing their opinions to anyone who will hold still on the assumption that the benighted masses have just been waiting patiently for a clever graduate student to explain How Things Really Work.
Why are grad students so arrogant? According to her "friend" with a Ph.D., the problem is that professors make them feel special... and so taking courses as a first year makes these students feel like hot shit:
For the first time in their lives, the students are treated like adults. They are in the outer circle of an intellectual elite, treated slightly more like members of the club than time-consuming nuisances. Their classes are smaller, and offer actual conversation with some big name professors. . . They start to feel like members of a special elite, privy to secret knowledge, cleverer than the normal run of people.
The new graduate student, bolstered by the opinions of their professors, tends to become extraordinarily indignant at the notion that anyone would challenge them.
I don't know where McArdle's friend went to grad school, but I want to transfer. In my experience, most Ph.D. programs are a little less "Welcome to our elite club, oh brilliant first year," and a little more "Make my copies, bitch."
