Pretty soon after commencing the dissertation phase of a graduate program one finds oneself down a rabbit hole, and later in a burrow of his own making. The student is still surrounded by a cohort of fellow hole-diggers, with whom he has much in common, and social life in such a context can be heady, tending towards baroque. But the narrowly focused character of one’s own research displaces the huddling tribalism natural to the course-work phase, and each student becomes more idiosyncratic and myopic.
