From doing my Master's, I've come to discover that academia is a weird and puzzling world, with at least one bizarre paradox: On the one hand the business of creating knowledge is deadly serious and more formal than a tailcoat tuxedo. At the same time, because the work in question is specific and extremely specialized, the communities of scholars in any given area are small, intimate, and, oddly enough, pretty casual. So eavesdropping on or participating in academic endeavours yields some amusing tidbits of conversation...
Prof: If we get through the first part of this course and still believe in the reality of what we're doing, then in the second half we're going to...
And from a workshop I attended some time ago...
"It's amazing to me how much we lie to students when we're teaching them"
"You shouldn't have titled your paper that"
"If I hadn't given it that title, no one would've read it"
"I’m not going to get rich in [this discipline]. I don’t even make my living in [this discipline].”
“Yes, I demonstrated this point in a paper I wrote in the Journal of [This Discipline] in 2004… but no one read that paper, not even I read it”
If I could give any advice to anyone interested in working in academia, it would be to go to a small conference - people are relaxed and open, and it'll give you a good idea of the nitty-gritty nuts and bolts of your discipline. It's really where all the action happens, even though it may not seem momentous from the outside.
