The postgraduate is the angel of the academic world, we agree. They're between worlds – mediators between the world of full-time lecturers and the netherworld of the undergraduate. They teach – they often take seminars – but they are not a real part of the teaching staff. They study, it is true, but they're not entirely students, either.
They have a sense of what they want to achieve: an academic job, an academic career, but they know that there are very few such jobs, and very little chance of a career. They've fled from the world into academia, but they know they will most likely find themselves back there, as though they'd entirely dreamt up their postgraduate lives.
Will they be workers in the world, dreaming of being postgraduates, or postgraduates, eternal postgraduates, who are dreaming of working in the world?
And then there is the torture of study itself. It's not enough to want to escape. Not enough to hole yourself up and dream. How many postgraduates fail to complete their dissertations! How many of them stumble in their studies, and fail to get up? How many of them fail their exams?
And for those who pass? For those who work their way to an MA or a PhD? There are barely any jobs in the universities. There's barely anything for which to apply. Now it begins, the time of horror, when you and every other idiot's competing for a job. Ah, what horror, when you learn it is the same skills necessary to get on in the world that are necessary to get on academia!
But here we are among them, the angels, the postgraduates. How slim they are! How tall, all dressed in black, and smoking their cigarettes! How intense they are, talking of their work, and weighing up the conference speakers. How focused, talking of ideas and only ideas …
Lars Iyer's Blog 