Inquisited.com

In graduate school, you don’t receive a salary for teaching classes and doing research, you receive a “stipend”.

This is amusing because the only other time I’ve heard the word being used in any context was in my senior Japanese history course, where the Samurai warriors, we were told, received annual “stipends” from their Daimyo overlords for services rendered on the battlefield and elsewhere.

To put things in perspective, the Samurai, who were respected for their chivalry and placed at the top of the feudal Japanese social hierarchy (with the peasants, artisans, and merchants below them in that order), nonetheless lived very spartan and impecunious lives.

Incidentally, this is rather reminecent of grad school as a whole, where masters and PhD students technically exist in a higher academic strata than the undergrad masses, but get worked several times harder and paid miserably for research work that arguably goes further in establishing their daimyo’s advisor’s career than their own.

And as I weigh the pros and cons of getting a PhD myself, I can’t help but feel that going to grad school again is going to put me on the short end of a very long stick. It’d be at least 4 years of my life committed to solving somebody else’s problem before I can ever begin to broach my own.

Unlike the Samurai of old, you can’t just wander off to become a ronin (a masterless warrior). For better or worse, no such thing exists in the academic world.