Here’s a tip: If you find yourself talking to a graduate student, resist the urge to ask him or her, “So, when are you going to be finished, anyway?” It’s a question graduate students hear often, but trust me, there usually isn’t a brief answer.

There are about 10,000 graduate students here in College Park, and we occupy a middle ground between undergraduates and faculty. We teach classes and also take them. We grade papers and have ours graded. It can be a jarring experience to lead a discussion section about the New Deal in the morning and then realize at a graduate seminar later that day how little you actually know about the topic.

If you’re an undergraduate, you may think of graduate students as younger versions of your professors. We have more hair and newer clothes than profs, but you probably wonder why we’ve chosen to spend so many years preparing for a poorly-compensated job as a professor. Why am I doing this? First, there is a love-of-the-game aspect: I actually enjoy history for its own sake. Second, I worked for four years in the “real world” between college and graduate school, and it was not very much fun.

If you’re a faculty member, you hopefully think of graduate students as future peers, although some of you may think of us as exploitable labor. As a left-leaning friend of mine keeps reminding me, the university works because grad students do. Currently, an organization of optimistic graduate students is laboring to grow the organization Maryland Teachers and Researchers. They’re attempting to secure collective bargaining rights, an initiative I’ll be adressing in the future. Some graduate students are excited about the possibility of unionization but others are not, and both the pro and con positions have reasonable arguments.

Indeed, differing opinions about graduate student unionization are to be expected because graduate students are a diverse population. Some of us became graduate students immediately after college; others took years off. We’re from all 50 states and many foreign countries, bringing with us varying viewpoints. I have no idea what it’s like to be a graduate student in physics or criminal justice, because the nature of the work that we do – including our classes, our research and our positions as teachers or research assistants – varies greatly. Even within my own department, graduate students carve out very different experiences based on the specialty they choose and however they manage to cobble together funding from year to year.

I am a graduate student who writes a column for The Diamondback, and I’ll be writing about university issues as well as topics in higher education. I cannot really provide a “graduate-student perspective.” I can only provide my own perspective, which is one among many. If there is an issue that you’d like to see discussed in these pages, e-mail me and let me know. And as for when I’m going to be finished with my dissertation, um, well, I’ll have to get back to you.

Jeremy Sullivan is a doctorate candidate studying American history. He can be reached at sullivandbk@gmail.com.