Monday, October 22, 2007

An Accurate Description

Sadly, I'm still under a deluge of grading I have to do for the class for which I am a TA. My poor neglected, blog . . . oh, and the readers, too.

To tide you over, an anecdote from a conversation I overheard today:

Two other people (grad students? professors? post-docs?) were having a conversation in the bio department galley while I heated my lunch. I'm guessing their research involves ecology or zoology in some form because they were discussing tramping through forests that had bamboo across the path, so it sounded neat.

Well, that was until they revealed their goal. They were looking for signs of bushdog habitats. The best signifier of this? Scat. Feces. Poo. They flew off to some exotic location just to traipse through the forest looking for animal turds.

Isn't that exactly what you imagine for your life? Spend however many years earning a bachelor's degree, then umpteen more for that PhD, all to figure out whether or not some animal took a dump in the woods?

On the other hand, this doesn't seem like an inaccurate description of being a TA, so perhaps I should not judge.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

LOL.

On the other hand, think of it this way: the poop hunt was merely an excuse to go to the exotic place. And get paid to go there.