Rob‘s third post in his Grad School series is up, here. It highlights such stark truths as:

• At the end of 6 years, if you haven’t published enough / gotten enough grants / done a good enough job teaching, you are fired.
• Once you are “fired” by a university, no university of higher or equal rank will ever accept you for a job again.

As he comments on his list of what professors do all day:

Notice how “researching” or “planning science” isn’t on the list. If those things happen, they are squeezed in between all the other obligations. As a fellow student Tanya Crenshaw told me, “If research was like football, grad school would be a grueling boot camp that trains you to be the best quarterback you can be, and as soon as you graduate, you are hired into the position of head coach.”

Worth a read for grad students.