Top 5 Ways Grad School Prepares You for Parenthood:

1) Multitasking.
Grad School forces even the most adamant one-thing-at-a-timer to learn the art of multitasking. For example, more often than not, any kind of food is eaten while reading, studying, walking to class, sitting in class, writing papers or grading papers.

For a new parent (stay-at-home moms, especially), any kind of food is eaten while feeding the baby, burping the baby, rocking the baby, entertaining the baby, or praying the baby will stay asleep for 5 more minutes.

2) Prioritizing.
The Grad Student must learn to prioritize tasks and complete them accordingly. While in many other professions this prioritization might depend on the relative importance of each task, in Grad School, it generally depends solely on the official deadline of said tasks. Consequently, tasks without official deadlines often go unaccomplished.

This is why, since Will was born, I have somehow managed to get all the necessary grading done for my Spanish classes, but I still have tons of Thank You notes to write for the many, many gifts we received celebrating his birth.

I blame this mostly on one simple point of confusion: Everyone knows that newlyweds get a full year to send Thank You notes for gifts, just as friends of newlyweds get a full year to send such gifts. But what is the official deadline for newly-parents???

As I said, tasks without official deadlines often go unaccomplished. (I am trying, though!)

3) Irregular Eating Habits.
See "Multitasking." This example assumes, of course, that you manage to eat at all.

4) Limited Time with Friends and Family.
This is related to the problem of official deadlines and prioritization. In terms of importance alone, most Grad students would easily rank friends and family far above the tedious work of Grad School. However, returning that phone call or getting together for that dinner doesn't carry an official deadline, so it often gets put off a little longer than it should. In a way, then, friends and family are being conditioned for the future parenthood of the Grad student as much as the Grad student himself (or herself).

Fortunately, though, your average friend or family member is much more likely to comprehend the demands placed on the parents of a newborn than those placed on a Grad student, unless they themselves have chosen at some point to endure the masochistic nightmare that is Grad School. It's much easier to imagine why a new parent with a screaming baby doesn't answer the phone than to imagine why the same person, staring silently at a blank computer screen, won't return your calls.

So with new parents, friends and family start to preface emails and voicemails with ever-so-kind concessions like, "I know you're really busy, so you don't have to call me back right away...." It's really quite touching.

5) Sleep.
Grad school not only adequately prepares you for the lack of sleep you'll experience as a new parent, it actually over-prepares you.

Grad school makes it possible at 5:30am, having gotten only 3 1/2 hours of sleep that night, to think, "It could be worse. I could be writing a 20-page paper in Spanish on the use of Lacanian linguistics as a basis for a Feminist reading of One Hundred Years of Solitude."

In other words, it's much easier to feed a baby on one-hour spurts of interrupted sleep than it is to write coherent strings of theoretical jargon in a foreign language.


Top 1 Way Grad School Doesn't Prepare You for Parenthood:

1) Coffee.
While doctors agree that a "moderate" amount of caffeine is harmless during the 40 weeks of pregnancy and the many months of nursing that may follow, this allowance is nowhere near the quantity necessary to support the caffeine addiction one likely will develop in Grad School. Therefore, it is recommended to put at least one full year between finishing Grad School and getting pregnant in order to sufficiently wean oneself from this oh-so-tasty drug.