A Typical Day in Graduate School
by Mason A. Porter

(based on a true story)


This morning, I woke up at a time that I thought was 7 minutes before my alarm
 would go off.  Although these extra few minutes of tossing and turning were 
quite tempting, I decided to get up anyway.  That was my first mistake.  I was
 hoping that for some reason this day would be better than most.  Perhaps it 
was, in the spirit of Ivan Denisovich.  Of course, he was imprisoned in the 
Gulag Archaepelago, so that sums things up pretty nicely.  

I showered, got dressed, and brushed my teeth in that order, so things 
actually were looking up this morning.  I'm not just being pessimistic.  This 
day had a chance to be a good one.  Sometimes I lapse a bit and get the order 
wrong, so I was exhbiting an unusually high pre-caffeine alertness index.  I 
blared Loreena McKennitt from my boombox for a while since the housemate I 
like was already awake and the other two were presumed to be.  A few minutes 
later, I was finally out the door.

It was about 35 degrees outside---suprisingly warm for October.  I trekked all
 the way to Stella's, where I usually go for my daily caffeine injection.  
People weren't people smoking there today, which was unusual for 10:00am in 
the morning.  Normally, I needed a gas mask just to enter the place any time 
after 9:15.  The cashier charged me the standard post-9:30 price for my iced 
coffee---no way in Hell was I going to wake up half an hour earlier just to 
save a quarter.  It wasn't worth it.  Since there were so few people there 
today, I got fewer stares than usual.  People normally question whether I know
 what I'm doing when I order iced coffee in cold weather.  They just don't 
understand---it tastes so much better that way!  Some people have the 
intestinal fortitude to question my sanity aloud, but most people just mutter 
among themselves and glare at me.  (It's even worse when I order iced tea with
 cream.  One waitress veritably gave me the Evil Eeye once!)

I completed the circuit to Rhodes Hall, the 6th floor of which has been my 
second home ever since I became a graduate student.  I checked to see whether 
the New York Times had arrived.  The clock showed 10:15 to my eyes, and it was
 not unusual for the day's paper to have not arrived by that time.  I was 
disappointed, but I didn't think much of it.  I rode the elevator to the 6th 
floor, and entered room 657, where I will spend the next several years of my 
life.  As usual, my first sight upon entering the Center was that damned 
poster of Ricky Martin!  One of these days, Kim would pay for posting that by 
her office!  I walk into the office, casually sipping my iced coffee, and I'm 
immediately confronted by that monstrosity!  Realizing that I was way too 
tired to support sustained anger, my mind moved on to other things.  Even 
though the NY Times hadn't arrived yet, maybe the Cornell Daily Sun would be 
resting merrily on the CAM couches.  No such luck!  My day would have 
to start with e-mail.

My three new e-mail messages were fairly typical ones for a weekday.  There 
was one from some guy in Beijing who wanted to join my lab as a postdoc.  
Another one?  What was up with that?  I was in a decent mood, so I decided 
that I'd let him down easy even though all my friends wanted me to be as 
vicious as possible in the hopes of screwing his life up.  If I had read his 
message only an hour later, he might not have been so lucky.  The second 
message was from advisor.  Why was he so dependent on me?  Phone calls every 
day and e-mails every other day?  Who does he think he is, my mother?  In the 
interest of minimizing my time at Cornell, I responded kindly to that message 
as well.  Hopefully, I'd retain the patience to do this throughout graduate 
school.  The third e-mail was from some random EE graduate student at 
Berkeley.  He had to prepare a presentation for tomorrow, and he had written a 
nonlinear ordinary differential equation he wanted me to solve by then.  Who 
does he think I am?  By that time, I was starting to feel a little ornery, so 
I just wrote to him that it was trivial even though I had no clue how to 
analyze it.	 

My e-mails weren't very exciting, so after browsing the Web for
 a while, I looked at the digital clock at the upper right corner of the 
screen to see if I had killed enough time.  It was 10:45, so I decided I'd 
walk a little early to my 11:15 quantum mechanics course.  My other choice was
 to wait and grow numb as the elevator stopped at every floor.  Not to mention
 the people who would hold the blasted elevator door open so that they could 
finish their gossip!  They arrive every morning at 4:30 (when they violate all
 the people pulling all-nighters with their hideous country music!), and keep 
yapping at each other until they leave the premises around 2:00 in the 
afternoon.  After that, I'd have to deal with a sea of undergrads trying to 
drown me in my attempt to make it to class.  No, I would have none of that!  I
 would leave early and chill out right outside the classroom until the people 
in the previous class had dissipated.  Despite the bland e-mail messages, 
things still were going reasonably well that day.  I successfully avoided the 
human traffic on the way to class, so I wasn't shoved nearly as much as usual.
  Moreover, no random people walking the other way hugged me, which had 
happened almost every day for the last month.  I hate it when people do that! 
 What is it with Cornell students?  If that stuff had happened back home, 
somebody would have a knife in their throat by now.

The day became all-too-typical, however, when I arrived at Rockafeller Hall 
for my class.  For some reason, there was a different professor lecturing the 
previous class.  Additionally, it didn't look like she was much older than I 
was.  Perhaps the regular professor was sick and one of his graduate students 
was taking over today.  The flu had been going around, and they weren't 
offering flu shots until tomorrow, so it was certainly plausible.  
Additionally, the people sitting in the classroom were different.  Strange.  I
 was starting to become confused, a feeling to which I was not accustomed.  
Glancing at the people waiting outside the classroom, I noticed that they were
 the ones I expected to be sitting inside and that none of the people in my 
class were around.  A remote region in the back of my mind registered that 
something was amiss, but I ignored it and entered the room anyway.  I sat 
down, because the class was terminating.  Quantum mechanics would be starting 
shortly, so I chilled out in one of the desks, contentedly sipping my iced 
coffee.    After a couple minutes, I didn't see anybody from my class, so 
perhaps something was wrong.  There wasn't a clock in the room, so I walked 
back and forth on the first floor of Rockafeller for about five or ten minutes
 in the hope of finding a clock and figuring out what time it was.  Could I 
have come to class an hour early?  I didn't find anybody I knew, but I finally
 decided that I had indeed done this.  Were we supposed to turn our clocks 
back last night?  I crashed early, so it's possible that I could have missed 
that.  I had gotten charged the post-9:30 coffee price at Stella's, so perhaps
 the woman behind the counter had made the same mistake.  I had spent lots of 
time staring at the clock on my computer screen, so that had to be it.  I 
walked back to my office, making a point to stare carefully at the clock.  It 
was 10:10 am; I had been off by an hour the whole day!  So much for things 
working out well.  That means that my alarm sounded (since it was still set to
 do so), and that it went the full eight hours.  Hopefully my housemates 
wouldn't be mad.  I really wasn't in the mood for a fight today.

Back at my office, I read the NY Times and Cornell Daily Sun, and then read my
 e-mail.  No new messages.  Damnit!  Eventually, 10:45 am rolled around again,
 and I headed back to Rockafeller Hall for quantum mechanics.  Upon returning 
to my office at 12:15, I again had no new e-mail messages, much to my 
disappointment.  I guess I was going to have to do work.  I would have gone 
home early, but I figured I should be around for CAM Coffee Hour, since I was 
always up for free junk food.  I spent the next three hours alternating 
between trying to get a program called AUTO to work, checking to see if I had
 new e-mail, and playing chess over the Web.  While I was trying to do work, I
 spent the majority of my time flinging verbal abuse at my computer.  
Unfortunately, it didn't hasten my progress at all, but since I thankfully had
 had the foresight to ask for an extension, I didn't worry too much.  I was 
fairly tired, so I crashed on the couches in the hallway that were next to the
 elevators for about an hour.  One of my friends kindly woke me up in time for
 Coffee Hour.  Hopefully, there weren't too many witnesses to my public 
sleeping.  I'll never know.

I finally made it home around 5pm.  It had been a typical day after all.  
During my stay at Cornell, there would be 1460 other days like it.  The extra 
one was for leap year.