42. Your workspace reflects your status.

Facilities vary greatly from one campus to another—and from one department to another—but office space is in short supply on nearly every campus, and graduate students tend to be among the last to be allotted workspace. For students who have not been awarded funding (see Reason 17), there is typically no workspace provided at all. For graduate students so fortunate as to have a desk on campus, it will likely be in a room shared with several graduate students, and just as likely to be without windows. Some people manage to work in these spaces, but the grumblings of your office-mates (see Reason 20) can be as distracting as the environment is discouraging. It is no wonder that graduate students spend so much time dragging their work from one coffee place to another.

This might seem like a minor inconvenience, but you may be in graduate school much longer than you anticipate (see Reason 4), and a dispiriting workspace can wear on you over many years. The subject is lampooned in a promotional video for Adam Ruben’s recent book, Surviving Your Stupid, Stupid Decision to Go to Grad School. (That such a book exists should give you pause.) When you are sitting in a basement breathing stale air and listening to the unrelenting sound of toilets flushing through the wall, your place in the university is made quite clear to you. Moreover, your lowly status is not lost on the undergraduates who come to see you during the “office” hours that you are required to keep as a teaching assistant (see Reason 41). At the end of every day, when you return home to the humble quarters that you probably share with others (because there is no other way to afford the rent), your status is made all the clearer.