69. It is lonely.

In graduate school, you spend a great deal of time alone. Most academic work is the product of isolation. Studying, research, and writing are time-consuming solitary activities, as is the miserable drudgery of grading (see Reason 56). A longing for some sense of shared experience is probably what drives graduate students to coffee places, where they sit for hours in uncomfortable chairs, hunched over their laptops or over piles of ungraded papers. There, at least for a while, they can be in the company of others who are as alone as they are.

The loneliness of graduate school stems not only from the nature of the work, but from the way it alienates people from those around them. Much to their surprise, new graduate students discover that there is no intellectual community (see Reason 20) to mitigate the effects of their strange status on campus and in the wider world (see Reasons 30 and 37). They have no comfortable place in the social circles of either the undergraduates or the professors who surround them, and their relative poverty severely limits what they can do with friends who have regular jobs and incomes. The struggles and triumphs of graduate school are of no interest to friends and family members outside of academe. And graduate students themselves are so absorbed in their own work that they have little time or inclination (see Reason 2) to offer support to one other. Loneliness may be the single worst aspect of graduate-student life.