Why Permanent Head Damage?

When I was but a a wee one, sitting in an undergraduate intro course that I somehow ended up taking my senior year of college, a very wise Professor launched into "the talk."  This wasn't about the birds and the bees, or even the gentle conversation with struggling students about switching their major to something easier.  No, this was the graduate school talk.

"Take a good, hard look," my Professor warned, "at what graduate students coming out of your intended program look like, because graduate school is all about breaking you down and molding you into someone new.  You want to make certain that you want to be the sort of person that comes out on the other side."

Graduate school, he intoned, was a process of production. It did something to you, trained you to think a certain way, broke you down and built you back up.  And as a graduate student you needed to be intentional about that.