But that’s grad school. You take a tiny corner of the universe that a professor finds fascinating and bury your face in it, looking up only occasionally to steal unattended bagels.

At the end of two months, I felt ready to announce my discovery to the world. “Residues 103, 107, and 109 are unimportant!” I wanted to cry from the hilltops. “Unimportant!” But a journal article never quite coalesced, and I moved on to a different lab, and now exactly zero people know about my discovery—which, had I ended up publishing the results, would have been exactly the number of people who cared.

Surviving Your Stupid Stupid Decision to Go to Grad School

Adam Ruben

He is not wrong. In fact, he is totally right.