Doctoral Dogma

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Life as a doctoral student sucks. It doesn’t suck in the ordinary nobody loves me suckiness (does that word even exist?) level. No, it takes sucking (pardon my vulgar language) to a different level, a level where you are the lowest form of life in the world. I mean even bacteria have more fun. They are practically immortal. They have sex almost every 20 minutes. They can live on almost anything. And they have the coolest of names. Chlamydia. Nocardia. Vibrio. Contrast that with an average doctoral student. He is a mouse (although even a mouse would be offended to be compared to such a lowly being) like creature, most often with spectacles and irritating habits like trailing off in the middle of a sentence into vague silences. Their only sex appeal lies in their detailed knowledge about how two proteins fold exactly around each other. You get the picture.

What do such specimens of the human species do when a beautiful woman goes up to them and talks? To digress a little, such events do not happen in the real world. The probability of such an event happening, according to knowledgeable sources in the Mathematics department across the road, is 0.00. In fact, apparently, this is the only known event in the world that has such a perfect probability of not happening! So let me add the rider, in a hypothetical world, to the above scenario.

Continuing with the hypothetical situation, the said graduate student will first start perspiring. His pulse will be racing because hormones are being dumped into his blood, leading to rapid changes in his metabolic profile. He starts blushing. When he opens his mouth, either no sound comes out or else mumbled and garbled words pour out, which of course do not make any sense. If that beautiful woman still has any sense she would leave. However, if she is one of those rare beings, who for some insane reason either enjoy tormenting such innocent geeks, feel pity for such lowly life forms or genuinely like disheveled and bespectacled nerds, she will stay and talk further.

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