Graduate School is like a Bad Zombie Horror Film

The other day as I was riding up to campus on the bus with too little sleep at the end of a long semester.  Despite struggling to stay awake, I started fixating on all the ways that graduate school is like a bad zombie flick.

A scene from a bad zombie movie flashed before my eyes:

"Don't you get it!?  they are trying to eat our brains!  they are zombies!  Their definitional operation and epistemology might be better, but they are trying to accomplish the same thing.  well be like the living dead!"

"I don't know..."

"Remember John?  He was like the living dead when they finally passed him out of here with his dissertation!"

"Dissertation," he responds in monotone,  his eyes glazed over with a vacant look. 

"They got you too!  Dude we have to get out of here!"

Alas, like most things academic someone beat me to it. But the beauty of academia is that someone has almost always invariably gotten started on your idea, and you get to build off of their hard work.  So I am happy to reaffirm that some scholars have asserted surviving your first year of graduate school can be likened to surviving a Zombie Apocalypse(Meyers, 2011). 

And you know you are PhD when you search your computer files for the rest of that zombie screen play, and it returns the Zimbardo prison study.  SIGH.

Prepare to have your brain eaten, and your head PhDed (a.k.a. permanently head damaged).