54. “What do you do for a living?”

For most people, this is an easy and straightforward question to answer, but for graduate students it proves surprisingly tricky. When someone asks you what you do for a living, you can answer, “I’m a grad student,” but you will feel less and less comfortable saying this as you get older (see Reason 12). A variation of the same response is, “I’m working toward a PhD in psychology,” but this has a way of alienating your interlocutor even more effectively than the first answer does (see Reason 30). In either case, you have not really answered the question. Perhaps you are living off of student loans, but it doesn't feel very good to admit that. Or maybe you are working as a teaching or research assistant.

Telling someone that you are a teaching assistant does not feel very good either, especially when you are 27 or 30 or even older (see Reason 53). Some TAs—more than likely with a hint of guilt—try to avoid the problem by answering, “I teach at XYZ University.” That sounds better at first, but the almost inevitable follow-up question undermines your attempt at evasion and makes the conversation even more awkward. The fact that such a simple question can be so hard to answer underscores the strange place of the graduate student in the world. It is made all the worse by the fact that this limbo tends to last for an excruciatingly long time.