A Grad Student's Guide to Carnival
Me and the freshman from the other page have one thing in common: we have never been to Spring Carnival. If you’re a first year Master's student, you need to lock in, because there’s a good chance your program (which also has a 1 in 5 chance of having the word “AI” in it) runs for three semesters. This means that this might be your one and only chance to participate in Carnival as a student. If you’re a Ph.D. student, why are you reading this? Go back to your lab, bitch. If you did your undergrad here and came back for more, fuck you for being smarter than me.
The trick to enjoying Carnival is to never forget the cardinal rule of graduate school: you are Old. Your age doesn’t matter, and I would like to point out that this is the only context in which you get to use that phrase. You could be 21, freshly out of undergrad, and younger than current seniors. Doesn’t matter. You are Old. The faster you accept this, the higher your chance of being able to enjoy yourself. Being Old shifts how people look at you for doing certain things because you’re expected to have some of your shit together. A good example of this is day drinking. Be a responsible adult: hide your vodka in a water bottle, and be discreet about it. You are past the age where people will trust you enough to take a swig from it, anyway.
This leads to the next point of Carnival. How do you bond with the undergraduates here? For the first time, you might have to interact with the half of the school’s population that you’ve managed to avoid. Fortunately for you, I have spent the better part of the year working undercover at this awful campus publication in order to figure them out. My research has led me to one one conclusion: they are people too. They might be a bit smarter or richer than you, but that doesn’t change the fact that you should treat them like you would a normal person. If you want to be friendly and get some good memories from this event, be yourself! Being mean to people has never led me astray. Don’t let self-doubt get in the way of you walking up to a teenager and telling them that their parents don’t love them, or asking if they’re “supposed to look like that.” People will find you hilarious.
That being said, if you're a student in a short program, you don’t really have the option to be able to bounce back from a terrible semester. That means that if you’re already stressed out, you might feel the urge to skip out on everything, and not even waste an hour strolling on the lawn admiring the commotion. Listen to that urge. When your time comes, you’ll want to rest assured knowing that you got through graduate school without a single “B”. Nobody has ever laid on their deathbed and gone, “Man, I wish I had done more things.”