Um, what?
> The campus newspaper had just published a little profile of the stand-up-comedy-performing grad student, and my adviser happened to read it. Over the next 10 minutes, I learned that my hobby was an embarrassment to the department, that there was no way I could properly focus on biology, and that every negative lab result I ever produced was a direct result of telling jokes at night.
What the...? This doesn't sound remotely like my department, or indeed, any department I have ever heard of. Is this a biology thing? At GMU we would have adored that kind of student.
After reading the above two quotes, I got a very strong sense of "there's probably another side to this story". It's so completely alien to my personal experience as a PhD student and later as a professor that I have to wonder if it's really true. And my experience watching other researchers, including, yes, at least one stand-up comic.