PhD women all around me

This week I am suffering from some academic jealousy.

First, we found out last week that Trish has been accepted into the highly competitive management PhD program at SMU. While I can’t imagine being interested in the subjects she’s studying, I am a little jealous of her going back to school. Not that I would actually give up any of my disposable income to go myself–it’s a very unfocused jealousy 🙂 .

This is more than balanced out by my pride–I am already going around introducing her as my “hot PhD student wife”. This, of course, replaces my old description of “my hot, smart wife”, since PhD student implies not just smart but also organized and competitive (at least for this program.)

Here’s the short description of the program:

Doctor of Philosophy in Business Administration (Management)

The primary objective of the Sobey Ph.D. Program is to develop successful researchers for academe, the public sector and private industry. The program focuses on the behavioural aspects of organizations and management, and encompasses areas of study that include Management, Organizational Behavior, Organizational Development, Organizational Theory, Human Resources, and Industrial/Labour Relations.

Wow, reading that, I’m really glad I’m not doing the program. More power to her, I guess.

She can keep me as a househusband when she’s a professor and a highly paid management consultant. I think I could adjust to that lifestyle, so long as I had a high speed net connection, and allowances for books, comics, cds, etc.

Then, to keep the PhD jealousy going, I got a letter this week from an old friend who is currently working on her PhD. The letter includes this passage, which I have lightly edited to remove personal details:

I had some museum research to do for my dissertation, so I flew to London and spent a week there. Then I flew to Sicily, where I stayed for a week. Then I flew up to Florence, which was a quick stop and then onto Rome. …. After the week there, I went on to Athens.

There were 20 grad students and two professors and we basically went all over Greece. Two and half weeks in Athens and Attica, one week on Crete, ten days in the Peloponnese and a week in northern Greece. It was incredible. We saw pretty much everything. And because we were with the American School, which is a very well-respected foreign school and is responsible for some very important excavations in Greece, we got to go everywhere. We went INTO the Parthenon, and everything else on the Acropolis. In fact, we got to go into pretty much every temple and museum we could have wanted to climb into. It was extraordinary.

Well, I wouldn’t want to do her PhD program either, but the whole flitting around Europe thing sure sounds great. And I love the idea of touring classical sites with highly knowledgeable people.

More jealousy, this time more for the adventure than the academics, but still…

Maybe the solution is that once I am Trish’s kept man, I will also have to get a travel allowance. Then I can take Sarah on adventures while Trish is doing her conferences or whatever. I could get into that. And I have a suspicion that Sarah is going to be the adventurous type.