A Contact Sport Personal contact is the essence of life in a legislative office or campaign headquarters. To be effective, you need well-honed social skills, such as the ability to read expressions, gestures and voices. Politicians habitually speak sideways, so you must watch for nonverbal clues to see what they really mean to say. Another necessary skill is a knack for avoid ing needless personal conflict. Intra mural tong wars erupt not from philosophical debates but from fights over who gets to use the one working word-processor in the convention trailer.
Graduate school does little to nurture personal skills.
It may even retard them. The rest of your waking hours went to teaching-assistant duties and seminars. Your class discussions focused on probit analysis and other topics of great importance to scholars and great obscurity to the rest of humankind. You seldom spoke at length with anybody beyond the university. Even if you conducted research interviews, your exposure to your subjects was brief and artificial.