Good jobs have barriers to entry.  Sometimes these barriers are natural (not everyone is capable of writing a novel or being a leader) and sometimes they are artificial (not everyone is born in the right place or to the right parents).  Many well-paid jobs requiring very specialized skills are protected by — among other mechanisms — the requirement that applicants have an advanced degree.  For some people, the substantial costs of acquiring one of these degrees are worth it, for others they are not.  Because graduate students’ experience varies greatly across disciplines, across departments, and across individuals within a specific department, it’s hard to make useful generalizations about it.

Surviving Your Stupid Stupid Decision to Go to Grad School, nevertheless, does a good job capturing and satirizing important universal aspects of the graduate school experience: the insecurity, the low or nonexistent pay, the whims of advisers and committees, the potential for wasting what could be productive and happy years, etc.  Because the book is targeted at people already in grad school, its purpose is not to inform, but rather to entertain and also to reassure people that some of the more absurd parts of grad student life are, in fact, widely experienced.  No serious advice is given until the epilogue, which manages to say what is perhaps the single most important thing that a grad student can hear: don’t just sit there, take control.

Surviving is very funny in places, but for my taste it tries too hard.  The hit rate for jokes is not that high; one hopes that Ruben — who, according to the back cover, has a stand-up comedy act — doesn’t quit his day job. I read it on a plane flight; not just any plane flight, but one with my three and five year old boys, and without my wife.  As anyone who flies with kids can tell you, it’s not a good time for heavy reading.  An undistracted reader could polish the book off in an hour.

One day soon, I am going to leave this book in the lab where my grad students work.  Then I am going to walk out, chuckling in an evil way.