Jenny has been fretting because all her high school and college friends are married and/or have children, and she’s not even close. I told her that it’s because we were in grad school. Grad school made us retarded.

Don’t get me wrong; I got really good at circuit design and would make an excellent SPICE monkey for Intel or some such, but beyond that, I came out completely useless.

There’s only one reason anyone would go to grad school for Engineering. It’s not to become a researcher or academic – those people go into hard sciences. Engineering grad students are only there to avoid getting a real job. So not only was I confined to the same group of peers for 6 years, those people were the same wayward infant that I was.

Once you leave school, your teachers are the people you meet. Eventually, you learn everything there is to learn from them. It’s important to move often, change environments and find new teachers.

In an environment as insular as a PhD program, people become like goldfish in a bowl, swimming around in their own biological waste.

Change your bowl before you outgrow it.