"To Find a Good Job": A Typical Narrative of Graduate Students' Social Scheduling

Using the theoretical perspective of sociology of time, this paper integrates the descriptions of 6 graduate students about their postgraduate years into a fictional case, showing a typical day, one year and entire three years of daily life, and then explores the social persecution behind the time schedule: Going to graduate school is to find a good job. This poses a dilemma for universities to ask themselves: Is a university a vocational training institution or a community for the pursuit of academic ideals? No matter how the administrators of various universities choose or locate on the continuum formed by these two ends, the graduate students who are squeezed by the institutional time of the university and the time of the company in the market have already made their choices in line with the times, and there is a trend of homogeneity and flushing in action. The behavior and collective choices of graduate students have been already quite in tune with consumerism. Universities strive to be "first-class" for academic ideals, and all kinds of school-running behaviors are fully indexed, which is exactly similar as the struggle of college students "to find a good job".