If you have a good understanding of what grad school actually is, you know it’s not going to be college+, and you’re still excited? Go for it! Just go in with the attitude that this is the start of a career path (not school) with many branches along the way. Most people you’ll work with will act like your options are 1) aim for TT at an R1 or 2) cut your losses and go into industry. Those are both legit paths, but pay attention to what you’re loving and hating about the experience.

Maybe you absolutely love teaching or mentorship or grant-writing or data analysis or giving conference talks or science communication or managing a lab or any of the other billion things you have to be responsible for at some point. There are career paths between the extremes that can let do so the stuff you actually like doing, and they exist both in and outside of academia. If you go in letting yourself get excited about whatever the hell you actually get excited about, you can figure out what the path you actually want could look like and prioritize those things that don’t make you miserable.

• a PhD who voluntarily pursued an instructional faculty track at an R1 where I never again have to backseat the needs of my students and my love of pedagogy behind desperately looking for research funding because publish-or-perish even though o have at bare minimum 3 months a year to devote entirely to whatever research I am excited about in the moment…or play video games if I prefer

Don’t fight, guys. This is academia. You’re both wrong.

I mean, GPT 3.5 consistently quotes my dissertation and conference papers back to me when I ask it anything related to my (extremely niche, but still) research interests. It’s definitely had access to plenty of publications for a while without managing to make any sense of them.

Alternatively, and probably more likely, my papers are incoherent and it’s not GPT’s fault. If 8.0 gets tenure track maybe it will learn to ignore desperate ramblings of PhD students. Once 9.0 gets tenured though I assume it will only reference itself.

Please introduce me to the woman who is doing IVF without first learning about cycle tracking and timed intercourse.

The idea that someone undergoing IVF has not yet tried everything else first is extremely bizarre. It’s wildly expensive and extremely hard on your physical and mental health.

This makes me want to go back on Reddit just to see what r/infertility and r/IVF have to say.

(I say this as I am currently prepping for my 5th freeze-all IVF cycle to make embryos I can’t even put in my own uterus because a doctor did a thing that left me infertile following a miscarriage years ago. Nobody wants to go through this shit. We do it because it’s the next least-worst thing on the list of things to try.)

The ascend power from Tears of the Kingdom. Not so much in my literal real life, but any time someone in a show/movie is being chased or is trapped somewhere or even just stuck in an awkward situation I expect them to just fly through the ceiling and leave all their pursuers with question marks over their heads.