6

Look for a Job

I don't care if you have a position researching the effects of your genitals on a willing group of test subjects. Look for a job.

Mike Powell/Digital Vision/Getty Actually, that would be multiple positions.

I'm not telling you to get a job instead of studying. Society only exists because brains can learn, but academia is the only part of society that acts like it. Politics, business, and warfare all just play with the toys learning gave them, because arguing, greed, and violence are the childish parts of the species. Learning is how humanity grows up.

Extended education is an excellent way to pursue a passion for knowledge. Unfortunately, some students use it as a bunker to hide from the current employment climate.

Patrick Ryan/Lifesize/Getty ImagesIt's like a zombie apocalypse, except this time the victims are the hordes of bodies desperately chasing the few opportunities to feed themselves.

5

Remember That Research Is the Point of Everything

Academia is where the human race remembers what brains are actually for. Learning is the only reason we're in charge of the planet instead of hiding from tigers, but it's been corralled in universities and made to beg for funding, despite being responsible for all wealth in the first place.

Photos.com/PhotoObjects.net/Getty Images"Ha, I just remembered that I get paid more than the people who invented this globe-spanning technology!"

The human brain is designed to learn, always and forever. That's why baseball statistics is a hobby instead of an emergency anesthetic. The whole point of humanity's extended childhood is to learn and improve its abilities. With academia, that becomes nanotechnology, the Mars missions, and cures for disease. Without education, it's people who can recite the element matrices of all 649 Pokemon, as if being a human tape recorder was a worthwhile thing to do with a life.

Wikimedia commonsThey worked out how to record animals 40,000 years ago, and theirs would gore the shit out of Bulbasaur.

4

Care About the Subject

If you're doing a research degree in something you don't care about, what the hell are you doing. Notice how the sheer gravity of that question has compressed the question mark into a period because there is no possible answer. Entering a postgraduate degree means declaring that you will become the world authority on something. Only a tiny bit of a specific section of a sub-discipline of something, but you will know that bit better than everyone else who has ever lived. Because nobody knew it until you did. You're pledging to permanently expand the sphere of human knowledge by choosing a direction, learning right up to the bounds of understanding, then head-butting them further out with what's in your skull.

Stockbyte/Stockbyte/GettyImages"OOOW GOD HEADBUTTING THE MICROSCOPE WAS A BAD IDEA."

This is not something you can clock into like a day job. If you're prepared to work 20-hour days on something you hate, great! Go get paid for doing that! Universities will let you sign up for a subject without passion because that's how they get highly skilled technical laborers for sub-mininum wage. Ph.D. students work longer hours than submarine nuclear reactors, and under greater pressure. You are dedicating at least half a decade of the most capable part of your life to becoming the master of something. Act like it.

Ph.D.s are where education reveals its true form: not teaching people what we already know, but learning how to learn what we don't. Research is taking on the previously incomprehensible machinery of the universe with 1.4 kilograms of yougoo. It's a lot of work. It's how we build the future. It's why the title of science fiction's most brilliant person is "Doctor." Not "CEO," or "President," or "Major," but "Doctor," because he knows to find and solve new problems by being intelligent at them.

3

Take Command

You are a grown-up, and the very first part of being a grown-up is that nobody will tell you. They shouldn't have to, you're a grown-up.

Pixland/Pixland/Getty ImagesThe Internet can severely damage this process.

2

Teach and Tutor

Some students resent the requirement to teach tutorials as part of their funding package, because that's not a funding package, that's another way for the university to get cheap workers. But just like the rest of your student life, it's actually training. You're learning how to explain things to people who don't understand it. The only skill more vital for scientists is the ability to look cool in a lab coat.

George Doyle/Stockbyte/Getty Images"I don't even have a degree. I just walked in one day. That's why I'm looking at a packet of raspberries."

We're overturning the stereotype of scientists as shy communication misfires, but it became a stereotype for a reason. It's still true of some students. And they still need to learn how to deal with people. It doesn't matter if you're studying artificial intelligence in drone bodies: Until you get those researchobots finished, people who can communicate with others will still do better in every field. And when you do get them finished, charismatic public speakers will become even more important, standing with one foot on a burning drone to urge the human resistance to seize the time machine.

1

Strongly Consider Your Job

You know how you looked for a job at the start? Never stop doing that. Your CV should be updated more often than your haircut. It's not just a parachute, it's a focus for your future. It reminds you that you're actively choosing to learn instead of making money, so you'd better learn as hard as you can. You're in an educational bonus level, a mind-expanding environment unparalleled in all of history. There has never been a better time to fill your mind, or more exciting projects to apply it to.

You'll have an urge to stop checking the job situation because the real world is scary. But just hiding gives the real world time to go find a baseball bat. If you're not planning on coming out of your Ph.D. with a newly invented Q-36 Explosive Space Modulator, you'd have been better off coming out swinging while it was still unarmed. Looking for work may be a soul-corroding exercise in self-abasement, but hiding from it only gives the problem time to drink water and store up barrels of that acidic piss called "lack of experience." Going postgraduate because your degree can't find you a job is like diving because you can't fix your submarine.

Goodshoot/Goodshoot/GettyImages"Yes, Mom, my job plan is still 'find Atlantis.' How did you even get this number?"

If you spend four years doing the bare minimum, becoming the master of finding free coffee and doughnuts in meetings, then those are exactly what you'll bring to the working world. Coffee and doughnuts. To the people who got a job back when you went postgraduate.

Academia can be the greatest place in existence. You've swapped the real world for a chance to learn what you love, always, using your brain instead of beating it to death against bar codes and spreadsheets and sales reports and all the other jobs that only exist because robots aren't quite good or cheap enough yet. But if you don't take that learning seriously, you've swapped the world for nothing.

The better option is to keep learning. A proper degree will help you get a job, but a Ph.D. is how you say "No thanks, I love this stuff." There is no feeling like filling your mind with intelligence you love. Most people don't get to do that. Most people have to train their brain to endure the hours until they get to think about things they like, but they're so tired that those things become Breaking Bad and unconsciousness. Research lets you turn your soul into a fascination engine, consuming the output of human intelligence, living and breathing the very pinnacle of human progress. Then reaching out to push it a little bit further.

Luke also looks at Even More Sexist Commenters, tumbles, and responds to every single tweet.

For more college advice, check out 7 Tips for Not Screwing Up College, Should You Go to College? and The 7 Dumbest Things Students Do When Cramming for Exams.