Overview
- Authors:
-
-
Jason Matthew Zalinger
- Myron Oygold: A Graduate Student Struggles is an unflinching, loosely-connected collection of short stories that explores the emotional complexities of surviving through a PhD program.
- Myron Oygold: A Graduate Student Struggles, offers what the academic and literary marketplaces rarely mention: The emotional challenge of what it feels like to begin and ultimately finish a doctorate.
- Told from the perspective of an earnest, yet neurotic young PhD student reeling from a terrible breakup, Myron Oygold: A Graduate Student Struggles, investigates the often absurd, anxiety-producing relationships, experiences, and obstacles that PhD students must overcome in order to complete their studies and find full-time employment in a highly-competitive job market.
- With dark humor and an off-beat style, Myron Oygold: A Graduate Student Struggles, investigates the often brutal, emotional nuances of surviving the experience of completing a doctorate and becoming the professor one was meant to be.
Access this book
Other ways to access
Table of contents (7 chapters)
About this book
What does it feel like to get a PhD? Doctorate programs can be simultaneously exhilarating and demoralizing. However, day-to-day, there is more psychological warfare raging in one’s mind than most people may realize. These stories are written for graduate students. They follow the trials of Myron Oygold, a chain-smoking, Xanax-popping PhD student trying desperately to finish his doctorate, find lost love, and make something out of his life.
Myron’s heart and mind were broken by Ilana Berkowitz as their lives exploded in a mushroom cloud of love and pain. Still reeling from the fallout, Myron begins his PhD in Applied General Studies at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. He’s not sure why he’s there or what he’s doing, but he knows Ilana has moved nearby in Albany, and he thinks he can make some meaning out of his life and find again what he lost in the War of D.C.
However, finishing a PhD is hard for an anxious, neurotic guy like Myron. He encounters many obstacles: His dissertation adviser, who takes research money from the Department of Defense and Starbucks, a mysterious programmer who works in the Department of Secret Computer Science, the surreal iBaby with whom Myron falls in love, a brilliant, talking chipmunk, a Wikipedia conspiracy, and even a therapist named Carl—sent from God in Myron’s time of need. Can Myron ever let go of the past? Can he learn to say what he needs to say? Will he finish his PhD?
These linked stories can be read for pleasure. However, first-year PhD students will find in them a way to reflect upon their own experience. Cutting across fields, the collection can be used in a wide variety of welcome-to-grad-school seminars, from communication studies, literature, and philosophy to engineering and the social sciences.
“Myron Oygold: A Graduate Student Struggles is simultaneously quirky and funny, yet achingly sad. … Myron Oygold is a memorable character, ensconced by despair yet existing in technologically mediatedmoments of joy and hope.” – Shira Chess, Assistant Professor of Entertainment and Media Studies, University of Georgia
“I went to school with Jason Zalinger. … Often dark, at times scary, humorous, and scathing, but always thoughtful, Zalinger’s prose flies off the page. Reading his stories brought back memories of school but also memories of fear.” – Paul Booth, Associate Professor of Media and Cinema Studies/Communication Technology, DePaul University
Jason Matthew Zalinger received his BA in English from the University of Connecticut, his MA in Media Ecology from New York University, and his PhD in Communication and Rhetoric from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute.
