After thinking hard about my life, and talking with a bunch of former grad students, I’ve realized, pretty much the sweetest phase of life is being in grad school. Oh, there’s good stuff about being a real adult too, like owning a car that doesn’t need the alternator replaced every four months, and not having to explain to undergraduates that the course textbook is the one listed under “course textbook” on the syllabus, which is the thing on the class web site labelled “syllabus”, but most of the good stuff now was also good stuff then, and back then we didn’t have to pay off student loans. This is what inspires me to open a Grad Student Fantasy Camp.
Fantasy Camps are one of the two remaining growth sectors in the American economy, the other being podcasters doing complete rewatches of Star Trek. Fantasy Camps give a chance to do something great like pretend to be a baseball player or astronaut or Let’s Make A Deal host and then go home to add a bunch of new acquaintances that further diffuse the notion of “friend” on your Facebook. Here’s why and how Grad Student Fantasy Camp will work.
Who wants to attend Grad Student Fantasy Camp? Anyone who’s not satisfied with their academic career, which is everyone who went to grad school after 1992, when the last tenure-track position in their specialty was filled. Remember those teaching assistants dressed unconfidently and trying not to do the homework for you while explaining where you went wrong in recitation sections? They all spend this time of year sighing at the window while thinking of the days the biggest weights on their mind were when to maybe start studying for something called “quals”. They’ll pay nicely to feel like that for even a week.
And! The Grad Student theme lets us turn that into a brilliant pricing strategy. Whatever the actual cost is, we’ll say the price of the camp is, like, eight times that. But on “acceptance” to Grad Student Fantasy Camp the customer-student also gets tuition assistance, covering the cost of the first day in exchange for “work” as a TA. They’ll feel like they’re getting such a deal, whatever they actually pay.
The assistance offer gets “renewed” every day, up until the final day of camp when the student is notified the department has enjoyed your Grad Student experience as much as you have, but you should really be getting on with your thesis now. The student then defends a ritual thesis to an advisor, whom they pick on arbitrary grounds the third or fourth day, and three people the student never saw before or will see again, their committee.
The TA work will be grading “student assignments” themselves composed by a Markov chain generator so that there’s a limit to their madness. The grading is done in green pen, to make this legitimately challenging work, because humanity has never solved the problem of making a green pen that successfully writes.
Grad Student Fantasy Camp needs facilities, but by having it either in summer or over winter break we can rent out an actual college or university campus, or just count on not being noticed by the grad students teaching real summer courses. This way the Fantasy Camp gets the necessary buildings and a library that uses the Library of Congress Catalogue System For Crying Out Loud, What Is This Dewey Decimal Nonsense.
We’ll need faculty, to be advisors and committees, and to hold lectures that students can attend the first couple of days before they retreat to “work” on their “theses”. For them we hire adjuncts, who get not just pretty good per-hour pay but also the healing dignity of students who reflexively call them “Doctor” or “Professor” and wouldn’t dream of sending them e-mails addressing them by a contraction of their first names and filled with text-y abbreviations. Of course, to satisfy the students’ need to feel like they’re back in grad school, the faculty will have to seem older than even the students are, but that can be done by the faculty looking generally disapproving of things, and having every document on the class web site (proudly HTML 2.0 compliant) be a download in Rich Text Format.
For the social side of the experience, we’ll encourage students to hang out, reading the good bits of texts — not books, texts, maybe even volumes — from the GV, HS, PN, or maybe even the QC sections of the library while swapping stories about Electrical Engineering undergrads. After the second night our faculty starts inviting groups of students to bars around campus, sharing wild tales of intrigue in the University Senate and leading contests to see who can read without cracking up the longest from furious e-mails in which Brian Leiter threatens bloggers with defamation lawsuits. Around 2 am staff will remind students that there are perfectly good simulation or strategy games or text-based RP MOOs that aren’t going to play themselves. Of course we’ll have guitars at the ready just in case.
Graduation will be heartbreaking, but a sweet chance for a good department dinner at the brew pub where students and faculty promise to stay in touch. Maybe they even will a while, but — and here’s why Grad School Fantasy Camp will succeed — the tug back to campus will last, and bring the customer-students back, maybe several times a summer. I kind of want to go to it myself.
Interested? Please contact the admissions office, care of our confusing and unsearchable web site.
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