Just a little taste....

So this past weekend was the Sociology and Crime, Law, and Justice Graduate Recruitment Weekend. Last year I had managed to fake my way into having a few schools fly me out for these weekends. It is a pretty cool time. You spend a few days getting pampered with good food and, depending on where you go, some free booze too. Besides having to talk about your research interests about 100 times, it feels pretty good to have people tell you how much they want you to join their program. It is basically a nice ego boosting couple of days.

This was my first year on the other side as I had to help swoon the recruits this year, but in the process discovered a secret reason for these lavish recruitment weekends: It gives graduate students a little taste of the lifestyle we're supposedly working towards. As most people who live paycheck to paycheck know money is always kind of tight. As in, if I go drink some beers (and then maybe some more beers) some night than I might have to extend the amount of days at the end of the month where meals have no danger of being called mouth watering. Even though I repeatedly tell people that money isn't everything, they often counter by pointing out I only say that because I have none. Only time will tell with that debate.

But it's the life we, as grad students, choose to live and part of that is because dangling out there is a career (if we choose academia) that was ranked #2 in the US last year (you'll have to take my word here as I have no citation to document this claim). But every once in a while the higher ups give us grad students a little taste of the good life. So a couple times a year we might get treated to professionally catered meals with open bars, or as in the case of recruitment weekend a $40/plate brunch that would blow your mind. As a side bar here, I might have managed to eat $40 worth of food being that this brunch had everything from an omelet bar to a desert bar covered. As another side bar, it was really strange for me to go to a dinner where there were no trash cans to be found, despite the buffet and open bar. I probably walked around this professor's house for 10 minutes looking for a trash can or recycling bin before I realized that the servers circulating the crowd were on top of it. One of the servers found it pretty funny when I gave her all the crumpled napkins that had accumulated in my pockets throughout the course of the night.

So while the recruits are now gone and it's back to business as usual, it is only 363 days and counting until brunch at the Nittany Lion Inn. And I'm left with one important lesson: Throwing away plates and empty beer cans is hard work, pay someone to do it for you.