You only miss feeling superior to your lost boyfriend, you don't actually miss him ,and you dont really trust the second , with good reason

You're twenty five years old . There a lot more interstng things to do than overanalyze your own motives.. Open the wndow and take a deep breath. Thats the smell of freedom.

Don't even consider settling down with one person for at least three years- enjoy your life and the multitude of men out there as well as the blessed solitude.

doesn't necessarily equal high emotional intelligence. We've all known that person who is off-the-charts brilliant with books and numbers and charts and stuff who couldn't figure out how to interact with actual human beings if their life depended on it. Just because you know that you have grand thoughts doesn't mean you know enough not to go around spouting that information. Intelligence does not equal self-awareness does not equal a sense of humor.

That said, the amount of venom spewed at 20-somethings/grad students here frightens me. You want to know why we're so fucked up? It's because for 18-22 years, we've had a clear path or direction. Then, suddenly, no one is there telling us what to do anymore, and it freaks us out. So some people shit, some get off the pot, and some go to grad school. Don't you remember that feeling? A little empathy, please.

LW, I don't know if you're obnoxious or not, because I've only read one two-page document out of your life. Dude, just go out and spread the love...I mean the love for your fellow man, not romantic love. I have to agree with the people who've told you to be on your own for awhile. Now, if only I could take that advice myself...

99.999% of them carry an insufferably smug air of superiority over the rest of us unwashed, Bachelor's Degree only masses.

Somehow being accepted into a program to complete a Master's of Arts degree in Asian Studies with a focus in Nepali Basket Weaving gives one carte blanche to act like an elitist prick.

Once again: grad student defenders, please rent a DVD of "Good Will Hunting".

That psuedo-intellectual prick with the ponytail in the first bar scene, who gets shown up by Will Hunting?

Yup: that's a graduate student.

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Full disclosure: I'm currently pursuing an MBA after earning my B.S. several years ago. Many, many insufferable pricks who care more than Armani suits than tackling the world's economic problems...though there are the occasional down-to-earth students in the program. Like me, of course. (hahaha =)

The people portrayed in this letter give us many opportunities to poke fun at them. All the sadder, because sometimes love comes only once in a life...and how can they tell if they're missing the big chance?

It's easy enough to laugh and move on to the next article, acid wit at the ready. But for those actually in the situation, the trivial can seem dire indeed.

Having been to grad school in Washington DC -- where the concentration of Trust Fund Babies (TFBs) is like New York and Boston/Cambridge kinda high (though DC TFBs are poorer than NYC of Boston. getting say an average wage from the fund), they do exist and are quite noticable.

Grad school students, in law school in this case are divided into three/four economic/social groups - the TFBs, the Straight Throughs (High School -> College -> Grad Program[s]) who are often also TFBs, the have-worked (those who held down a job for a while before grad school -- actually outside MBA and JD programs a limited group) -- and the evening program (working their way through (which includes some of the have worked). I managed to be in the have worked/working my way through group.

It is fair to say that there is a very big difference between the TFBs and the rest of the grad students. First, their psychology is very different -- they don't really need money, they go on semester abroad programs, they talk about public-interest work and criticize the working crowd for selling out to big law firms (since we need the money to say in school, that breeds a lot of resentment.) What really causes a lot of resentment is the tendency of TFBs, both conservative and liberal to score interesting and significant jobs, say on the Hill or in NGOs or in the Media which require someone to work as an intern for a year or two, then for very very low pay for another 3-5 years, before getting an OK paycheck. This filters out many of the non-TFB segment of the population. I would point out that this population of key policy roles, journalism, Hill Staff, political appointees, etc. with such a high proportion of TFBs or people from very comfortable middle class backgrounds, is, I think, a very BAD THING. It creates a group of opinion formers who have little idea of how the majority of the population live -- what it is like to worry, really worry about how to pay the bills, the mortgage, etc., to stay up at night wondering how to pay it, to have to calculate how to get from one month to the next on what is left in your bank account, to know that if you lose your job, there wont be a deposit in your checking account anyway. To be very comfortable is to think that spending a few months Inter-railing or Euro-railing from youth hostel to campsite in Europe is slumming it, or to be able to toss it in and go to China for months is normal -- and it is not.

Now that said, there are relatively few TFBs in grad programs outside the three cities I named (plus San Francisco) so the posters also illustrate another disconnect - the TFB resentment is very much a a feature of those four cities.

This has nothing to do with the letter, but .. bitter much?

This assumption that there is a plethora of TFBs in certain cities or Grad programs is beyond maddening! I found far more trustafarians and Gold Card babies as an undergrad in a state school than I ever did in graduate school. None of them had the stamina to make it into Grad school. As for smug jackasses, I've found them everywhere from coffee shops and classes to this thread. In my personal experience I found the highest number in the Art and Art History program at the school I was in, which made my switch into sciences academically difficult, but emotionally satisfying. Fortunately, I've worked very hard to remember that my experience was based on a limited N number, and I live with the hope that other art programs out there aren't filled with smug, talentless hacks with parents to mooch off of.

Just sayin.