I'll bite: Hard science TA's and RA's often repair equipment; it's part of our science. If you want a silver spoon, don't go to grad school. Science is all about dangerous chemicals, semi-safe experimental equipment, and 4am drives down gravel roads in old vans with a nice steep drop on one side. Guardrail? Ho ho ho. Fixing the computers is just the tip of the iceberg. Plus, where else could you get on-the-job experience with a PDP-8?
And if she liked and trusted the person who asked, she would add that yes, it was kind of a lot to deal with: her outward affect was bright and capable, and that was no illusion, but equally real was the yawning pit of exhaustion inside her. She just felt so tired sometimes. And because of everything her parents asked of her, she was ashamed of being tired. She could not, would not let the pit swallow her up, as much as she sometimes wanted it to.
Needless to say, that meant that the Braekbills student body was quite the psychological menagerie. Carrying that much onboard cognitive processing power had a way of distorting your personality. And to actually want to work that hard, you had to be at least a little bit screwed up.
...I'm worried I will leave grad school and no longer be able to speak English. I know this woman in grad school, a friend of a friend, and just listening to her talk is scary. The semiotic dialetics of intertextual modernity. Which makes no sense at all. Sometimes I feel that they live in a parallel universe of academia speaking acadamese instead of English and they don't really know what's happening in the real world.
Within a couple of weeks of starting the Ph.D. program, though, she discovered that she'd booked passage on a sinking ship. There aren't any jobs, the other students informed her; the profession's glutted with tenured old men who won't step aside for the next generation. While the university's busy exploiting you for cheap labor, you somehow have to produce a boring thesis that no one will read, and find someone willing to publish it as a book. And then, if you're unsually talented and extraordinarily lucky, you just might be able to secure a one-year, nonrenewable appointment teaching remedial composition to football players in Oklahoma. Meanwhile, the Internet's booming, and the kids we gave C pluses to are waltzing out of college and getting rich on stock options while we bust our asses for a pathetic stipend that doesn't even cover the rent.