Even if you conducted research interviews, your exposure to your subjects was brief and artificial. As I remember New Haven, graduate students' main contact with the outside world consisted of getting mugged. Although students in law or business school also suffer social isolation, these institutions offer remedies such as group projects and summer jobs in non-academic work places. People in Ph.D. programs have less access to these opportun ities. Talking with Robert Dahl does not prepare you for talking with Alfonse D'Amato.
Graduate school does little to nurture personal skills.
It may even retard them. Mr. Chips Visits Animal House Graduate students often dwell amid urban squalor and always live with ABD-angst, the dread of an unfinished dissertation. But the university. has its pleasures, including plenty of quiet places in which to study and write. And those of us who crave structure can find it in the academic hierarchy-topped, of course, by the departmental secretary. People from scholarly backgrounds may thus have a hard time fitting into campaign headquarters.