Top 77 Grad Quotes
#1. My odyssey to become an astronaut kind of started in grad school, and I was working, up at MIT, in space robotics-related work; human and robot working together.
Michael J. Massimino
#2. You know what I'm great at? Trivial Pursuit. What good is that gonna do you in life? It has the word 'trivial' in the name. The game is basically telling you that you pursue trivial things. Trivial - as in not important. Trivial - as in maybe you should've gone to grad school.
Christian Finnegan
#3. In this knowledge-worker age, it's now increasingly tied to doing well in school so you can get into better grad schools so you can get better jobs - so the pressure to do well is really high.
Stephen Covey
#4. I was a grad student at UC Berkeley when I bought my Apple II and it suddenly because a lot more interesting than school.
Andy Hertzfeld
#5. I'd say I've gone to grad school for comedy being on 'Community.'
Gillian Jacobs
#6. I always wanted to live in L.A. The other thing that always inspired me was movies; that's why I'm here. I always wanted to be a part of the movie business and make movies. That's why I went to AFI grad school for filmmaking.
Jeff Vespa
#7. I have a simple algorithm, which is, wherever you see paid researchers instead of grad students, that's not where you want to be doing research.
Larry Page
#8. Literature could turn you into an asshole: he'd learned that teaching grad-school seminars. It could teach you to treat real people the way you did characters, as instruments of your own intellectual pleasure, cadavers on which to practice your critical faculties.
Chad Harbach
#9. I hadn't realized quite how intense the first few years of grad school would be. When you're being assigned 40 books a week ... there's not much room for novels.
Lauren Willig
#10. When I moved to Los Angeles, I was straight out of grad school, and I didn't have a single credit to my name. I knew one person in town - another actor whose name is John Billingsley. I just had to audition and audition and audition. I was plugging away for 15 years. So I earned my stripes!
Darby Stanchfield
#11. The lesson of the Funk Dog: You can forget what it used to feel like to feel good about life; feeling rotten - or just a low-grad funk - seems normal and therefore acceptable. I just don't believe that God intended for any of his creatures to be petted with sticks.
Jill Conner Browne
#12. I knew personally many figures in this novel: Harold Urey, who greeted me at the grad students reception at UCSD in 1963; Karl Cohen, my father-in-law;
Gregory Benford
#13. I want to qualify for the Tour Championship. Being a Georgia Tech grad, playing at East Lake would feel like home.
Matt Kuchar
#14. The classification above is based on a 2011 presentation by MIT grad student David Hernandez for my cosmology class. Because such simplistic taxonomies are strictly impossible, they should be taken with a large grain of salt:
Max Tegmark
#15. I think we'd all hate to be the one who gets declared undateable by one's entire grad-school population based on a couple of told and retold stories.
Carolyn Hax
#16. If you imagine someone with 100 percent determination and 100 percent intelligence, you can discard a lot of intelligence before they stop succeeding. But if you start discarding determination, you very quickly get an ineffectual and perpetual grad student.
Paul Graham
#17. My percussionist boyfriend graduated and went away to grad school a few semesters later, but not before he introduced me to the most amazing thing I'd ever experienced. No, not sex (I'm a lady; I don't write about that) but something just as good: the World Wide Web. It
Felicia Day
#18. I first tried a novel when I was 14. First finished one when I was 16. First started working on stuff that had a chance of being salable in my early 20s, then didn't write much fiction at all because I was in grad school.
Harry Turtledove
#19. I thought that I wasn't an essayist because I just didn't see myself in a lot of the essays that were popular at the time. That's why I joined the poetry program in grad school.
John D'Agata
#20. I think my parents wanted me to be whatever I wanted to be. But I do remember them - when I first moved out to L.A. - sending me applications to grad school for teaching.
Riki Lindhome
#21. My brand is good storytelling. I really want [my company] Hillman Grad Productions to be associated with great stories, interesting characters; things that are three-dimensional and feel honest.
Lena Waithe
#22. In 1975 I decided that there was no future in flying (airline jobs were impossible to get, and who wants a job where you are judged only by seniority?) and headed off to grad school.
W. Richard Stevens
#23. I was hugely impressed ... was the ultimate example of a man who knew what he didn't know, was perfectly willing to admit it, and didn't want to leave until he understood. That's heroic to me.
I wish every grad student had that attitude.
Randy Pausch
#24. I spent many years in grad school in English, so I've read a lot in a variety of genres. But adventure fantasy is my bread and butter as a reader, and probably always will be. So it's only natural that I came to that genre as a writer.
Saladin Ahmed
#25. When I interviewed at Yale, the admissions committee asked me why they should let me into the program. I looked at them unblinking and said, 'Because I'm going to change the world some day. And I'm giving you the chance to say, We knew her when.
Sarah Thebarge
#26. I've always been a relatively big history buff. In college, I took a lot of history courses, and when I was in grad school, I liked to audit them.
Scott Snyder
#27. I wish I had the luxury of time to read and write like grad students do. That sounds pretty awesome. When I was writing my first book one of my friends was going to grad school at the same time and I heard a lot of stories about drinking, too. I feel like everyone was having affairs.
Jami Attenberg
#28. Are you in the military?"
"No, I'm a grad student. I used to be a boy scout, if that helps.
Anna Durand
#29. Grub Street Writers is the reason I've stayed in Boston. I started teaching for Grub back in 1997, when founder Eve Bridburg, a Boston University M.A. alumna, as I am, kindly gave me my first job out of grad school.
Jenna Blum
#30. As frustrating as my time in grad school felt, it also helped tremendously because it challenged me to figure out what it was I thought I wanted.
John D'Agata
#31. Since I got out of grad school at NYU, I've always done as many plays as I can.
Marin Hinkle
#32. What kind of grad student do you take? I never take a straight A student. A real scientist tends to be critical, and somewhere along the line, they had to rebel against their teachers.
Lynn Margulis
#33. And Lopate's anthology helped a lot too. It came out the same year I started grad school, and I remember the book's publication feeling eventful and celebratory. It got a ton of attention for giving voice to this form that had sort of slipped between the cracks. That was exciting to see.
John D'Agata
#34. MERCER USED TO PASS THE TIME, during his post-grad months of flipping burgers out on Route 17, by polishing his opinions on life and literature for that future date when they would grace the pages of The Paris Review.
Garth Risk Hallberg
#35. Only a four-hundred-year-old vampire would wonder if a grad student could understand procrastination.
Chloe Neill
#36. I did a lot of theater in college, and I knew that not many people make it, but I just figured, 'Well, I really want to try acting while I'm young, and I don't ever want to look back and say that I never gave it a try.' I fully figured I'd be back in grad school - probably for psychology.
Hank Azaria
#37. I was trying to release emotions, exercise emotions, and then I entered the art world. Even after grad school, some of [the earlier works] were still lingering in my head. I realized there were some pieces where I felt that I had to respond to the criticism.
Kalup Linzy
#38. The decision to move to the second post-college city (or suburb, or town), however, is usually made independent of friends. No matter if you do it for love, career, family, or school, the second move is on your own terms.
Rachel Bertsche
#39. I was an undergrad math major and a grad student in computer science. I'm hugely introverted, not atypical of math majors.
Judith Faulkner
#40. I went to college, grad school. I got an M.B.A., had a really cush corporate job. But I was just bored stiff. I didn't fit that mold.
Dean Karnazes
#41. I think the book that really kind of woke me up a little bit when I was starting to write was 'Winesburg, Ohio' by Sherwood Anderson. I was in grad school at Brown, going for an M.A. in creative writing. Those stories seemed to me to be doing away with pretty writing.
Tom Drury
#42. My grandma leaned out the backseat window, pointing at the cops. "Just so you know, I had no part in this! Ask anyone. They'll all tell you: I hate crime."
"Well, we won't mention to them how you 'forgot' to pay for those slippers at Wal-Mart, now, will we?" my mom hissed.
Emily Cassel
#43. I'm not a Dickens guy. In grad school I had to take at least one course on the Victorians, so I took The Later Dickens, because that was what there was.
Lev Grossman
#44. Other people do better going on to grad school and others yet are naturally inclined and do just fine without any formal training at all. Everyone is different. The only things I think are imperative are focus, determination and hard work.
Toks Olagundoye
#45. When I finished grad school, I sort of fell into journalism. Someone mentioned that there was an entry-level job at the Reuters News Agency. I applied, and, to my amazement, I got the job.
Wolf Blitzer
#46. After college, I moved to Breckenridge, Colorado, and went snowboarding every day. I didn't know what I wanted to do, but I knew what I didn't want to do. So I applied to grad school for writing, and I just gave it a shot and took it from there.
Kaui Hart Hemmings
#47. Some Poor grad student pressing on the flanks of a hamster and out comes a doctorate on the other side
Robert M. Sapolsky
#48. I went to grad school in San Francisco, and then left for New York City with my eye on Broadway. I had saved $5000, which seemed like a lot of money in my mind ... until I realized it was going to take $2500 to get to New York and then the first and last month's rent.
Anika Noni Rose
#49. I ran through most of college and ran through most of grad school. When I was writing my dissertation for my Ph.D., it was literally the only hour of the day that I wasn't working. It was nine months of torture, but I made sure I got out to run.
Jane McGonigal
#50. I felt a little lost as a student. At Iowa, I felt as if I had gotten into this program that was going to save me, and so I moved myself across the country for grad school and yet still didn't have a home. It was upsetting. And I know that's a common feeling.
John D'Agata
#51. This made him a grad student, and grad students existed not to learn things but to relieve the tenured faculty members of tiresome burdens such as educating people and doing research.
Neal Stephenson
#52. When I was a grad student at MIT, I had a chance to become friends with the Viking Mission's chief scientist, Dr. Gerald Soffen. Viking was the first Mars lander looking for signs of life on Mars.
Peter Diamandis
#53. I'm sleeping with a Harvard grad," I said.
"The Emory of the North," Becker said.
Robert B. Parker
#54. And one of the hidden secrets of science, passed down from a few rare teachers to their grad students, is how to avoid flushing new ideas down the toilet the instant you hear one you don't like.
Eliezer Yudkowsky
#55. If start-up activity is the true engine of job creation in America, one thing is clear: our current educational system is acting as the brakes. Simply put, from kindergarten through undergraduate and grad school, you learn very few skills or attitudes that would ever help you start a business.
Michael Ellsberg
#56. The most fun thing about doing the show is that, as a nerd, the fun has been in learning and having it be like a grad school for me, every day. Every moment is a new experience. Every conversation is a new gain.
Steven Yeun
#57. One of the reasons why I went to the Yale School of Drama is because I felt that I was acting off of instinct, but sometimes that is not reliable. When you're not feeling it, what do you do? So, going to grad school was about getting the tools to just use my instrument to the best of my ability.
Lupita Nyong'o
#58. As an actor I kind of do. I started out doing voice overs in the mid 80s when I was in grad school.
Thomas Haden Church
#59. Compared to the typical Zim/Chomsky-spouting grad school clown, a trucker with a screaming eagle hat is a paragon of political nuance.
David Burge
#60. In the acting community in New York we call 'Law & Order' 'grad school,' because everyone eventually does a 'Law & Order.' My first one was in 1995, which was a year after I got out of school. Matthew Blanchard was the character's name.
Dallas Roberts
#61. When I say that I went to grad school in Iowa City, people often assume that I went to the famed writers' workshop MFA program at the University of Iowa. I didn't. I got a master's in journalism.
Chelsea Cain
#62. Oh nookie in the stacks.Figures you're the type to have that fantasy, grad school and all.
Chloe Neill
#63. My brother is an electrical engineer and went to computer science grad school at Stanford, and he'd tell me stories about the happy hours he'd organize.
Alec Berg
#64. There are the relationships you make. All of the friends I made in grad school are the closest ones that I have.
Alfonso Gomez-Rejon
#66. My grandma raised her eyes to the heavens, put her hand on her heart and sighed dramatically. "Dear God, one day let my family love me for my soul instead of my remarkably elegant possessions, my shoe box full of cash, and my outstanding high-interest-rate back account...
Emily Cassel
#67. I studied at UC Santa Cruz before going on to do a grad program at UCLA. Santa Cruz was like an awesome hippie summer camp. I got to take a vacation from reality and hang out on beaches and in forests.
Aaron Koblin
#68. I'm talking to anyone who has been dumped - have not gotten the job you really wanted or have received those horrible rejection letters from grad school. You know, the disappointment of losing, or not getting something you badly want. When that happens, show what you are made of.
Jill Abramson
#69. Out of grad school, I worked as a tech writer for a while before going into computer coding for a living.
Richard Powers
#70. I'm experimenting in public. At the design grad schools, these are people sitting around in groups, putting their work on a wall, analyzing it and putting it back in a drawer. I think there's little risk in that.
David Carson
#71. I remember getting out of grad school and coming to New York and not wanting to get a teaching job because I wanted to work on my own, to develop my own ideas. There isn't that time now. Artists are exhibiting while they are still in grad school. There isn't that safety cushion.
Brice Marden
#72. I grew up in Washington State and then eventually found my way back to Iowa City for grad school.
Chelsea Cain
#73. I am fairly certain that I was the first Seven Sisters grad to eat duck liver chased with a Diet Coke in the lobby of a federal penitentiary. Then again, you never know.
Piper Kerman
#74. My family couldn't be more supportive. They're worried and they're always in my business, and my mother does send me grad-school applications every now and again.
Ana Ortiz
#75. When I was finishing grad school, the hot new PC was the IBM 286. Bulky. Immobile. Expensive. I touched-typed easily and quickly, but nevertheless, I realized that the machine was a chain.
Jane Lindskold
#76. I did work at Planned Parenthood between college and grad school. For me, anywhere that I worked or anywhere that I've come to know intimately is a great place to set a story because it's a place where you know all the details already, and you don't have to make them up; you can just borrow them.
Lauren Holmes
#77. I went to grad school with the grand plan of getting my Ph.D. and writing weighty, Tudor-Stuart-set historical fiction - from which I emerged with a law degree and a series of light-hearted historical romances about flower-named spies during the Napoleonic wars.
Lauren Willig
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