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183 pages, Paperback
First published March 19, 2015

Delight on the tiny frames of misery: ‘Deep down a Phd student is like a cocker spaniel looking for affection’. Jeanne’s self indulgence is funny because is true. Grad school is a tantrum. She starts her PhD so enthusiastic and full of ambition that the fact she is not funded (aka as a gentle rejection) doesn't seem to bother her at all. She is genuinely determined to become an academic rockstar, but ends up as a miserable secretary exploited by the French bureaucracy.
The mortal cocktail of Kafka and Schopenhauer seem on point for the depressing ride into the depth of snobbery and professional procrastination. I guess by the end of the book, Jeanne Dargan has ‘the charm of a lunatic too absorbed in their studies to care what other people think’… (yes, this is what charm looks like in academia).

Yet these pages are small glimpses of an even darker future in post-covid times. So to all my peers applying (2020 = historic record on number of applications) to underfunded PhD programmes (half of them closing their gates for Fall 2021. Thank you, pandemic!, ), this might come across as a nice gift before rejection letters season (if they bother sending them). This year is quite sad for those of us who still believe that being the only POC in the classroom meant something. I wish to find a graphic novel on academia that disrupts whiteness. I mean, where is the pompous discourse on diversity? The bias of faculty toward whiteness? The discriminatory funding that does not consider those who are born in the wrong country? What about international students applying just to get a legal reason to leave behind their broken national economies?

It is an exhausting and ridiculous game, but Tiphaine Rivière puts things into perspective. In the meantime, I will go back to GradCafe and try to figure out how to gracefully jump into a ship that is sinking.