Top 66 Graduate School Quotes

Words matter. These are the best Graduate School Quotes from famous people such as Darby Stanchfield, Lev Grossman, Mary Lambert, Maya Lin, Claire Saffitz, and they’re great for sharing with your friends.

I went to college and did theatre. After that, I spent

I went to college and did theatre. After that, I spent about three years in Seattle doing French theater and community theater and sorting it all out. Then I applied to graduate school and got accepted, so I started pursuing my master’s in theatre at the American Conservatory Theatre in San Francisco.
Darby Stanchfield
I went to college at Harvard, then did three years of graduate school at Yale. At both places I studied comparative literature. People find it odd that I went to both Harvard and Yale, and I guess it is odd, but that’s just what people did where I grew up.
Lev Grossman
I was going to be a teacher. I was applying to graduate school when I got the call to do ‘Same Love,’ actually. I was gonna go to Boston University for my masters in teaching.
Mary Lambert
I went through withdrawal when I got out of graduate school. It’s what you learn, what you think. That’s all that counts.
Maya Lin
For a while I thought I would work in museums, so my first job after college was an internship at the 9/11 Museum. I quickly found out that I did not want to do that. So I signed up for culinary school, and directly following culinary school, I went to graduate school at McGill.
Claire Saffitz
I worked hard when I was a consultant. I worked hard when I was in graduate school looking at neuroscience. I worked hard as a teacher. But those are completely different career paths. And the lack of direction is why I didn’t get far enough in any of those things.
Angela Duckworth
For graduate school I ended up going to the University of Iowa, which is, of course, the best graduate writing program in the country.
Elin Hilderbrand
Graduate school is a place to hide for a couple of years.
Michael Eisner
I did go through graduate school and I like to do research, to create something that has a certain objective solidity. The same thing influences my fiction to some degree, because, you know, my fiction is often based on history that I’ve read.
Marilynne Robinson
I was always very aware of the nature of the place where I was growing up in Gulfport, Mississippi, how that place was shaping my experience of the world. I had to go to the Northeast for graduate school because I felt like I had to get far away from my South, be outside it, to understand it.
Natasha Trethewey
I left Egypt in 1969 for graduate school at the University of Pennsylvania. I have been on the faculty at Caltech for 37 years and carried dual citizenship for 31. But my commitment to the country of my birth never wavered.
Ahmed Zewail
I didn’t go to graduate school, where all the important writers seemed to be getting their start. I didn’t pursue getting published in literary magazines. I didn’t even send out countless pitch letters and manuscripts to agents.
Jami Attenberg
I was an English major in college, and then I went to graduate school in English at the University of North Carolina for three years.
Elizabeth Edwards
My father was the child of academics and was probably destined to become an academic himself but vetoed that idea. Bailed, dropped out of graduate school and just went to work for an insurance company. But the house was full of books and music and all of that.
Lorrie Moore
A graduate student who is still learning courses is not really taking a maximum advantage of a research university’s offerings. He should already be finished with course-taking, as he would then be able to shape his own taste about what is a good subject for research work in the graduate school.
Chen-Ning Yang
The truth is when I went to graduate school I would’ve said I was among the least talented of the students, I was certainly the least smart, or less educated. But I worked very hard.
Mary Karr
It was at the graduate school at Columbia University that I first met Wesley C. Mitchell, with whom I was associated for many years at the National Bureau of Economic Research and to whom I owe a great intellectual debt.
Simon Kuznets
I went to NYU for a year and a half, and I graduated from there and then years later went to Columbia for graduate school.
Nicole Holofcener
When I was 22 years old, I thought girls would like me if I wrote a novel. I spent so much time writing that I was thrown out of graduate school.
James Altucher
The great thing about a sitcom is that you’re in front of a live audience, so you really get in touch with what audience reaction is, but also there are lots of elements of film that you’re dealing with, and there’s kind of a great boot camp or graduate school mentality to it, because you’re going to suck.
Topher Grace
A lot of the artists that people equate my work to, I didn’t find out about until after graduate school.
Amy Sherald
In 2006, I made the decision to go after my dream. I was living in Atlanta and had a promising career in marketing, but I took a leap of faith and decided to move to New York, enroll in graduate school, and pursue acting.
Adrienne C. Moore
In graduate school, I decide to write my doctoral thesis on how Italian architecture influenced English playwrights of the seventeenth century. I wonder why certain playwrights decided to set their tragedies, written in English, in Italian palaces.
Jhumpa Lahiri
Getting into graduate school was pure luck.
Paul G. Tremblay
As for facial hair, I think I decided it was a good look after graduate school. I always shave it myself and trim my own beard. I change the look depending on the role. For ‘Million Dollar Baby,’ I had no facial hair. For ‘Men in Black 3,’ I had no facial hair but did wear a wig.
Mike Colter
I went back to graduate school with the clear intention that what I wanted to do with my life was to improve societies, and the way to do that was to find out what made economies work the way they did or fail to work.
Douglass North
I began graduate school in the late 1980s, and my goal was to understand how morality varied across cultures and nations. I did some research comparing moral judgment in India and the U.S.A.
Jonathan Haidt
Travel is the best and probably cheapest graduate school you can buy.
Tom Freston
I like to say that journalism is the graduate school from which you never graduate.
Pete Hamill
I studied psychology and sociology. I think my assumption was that I would go to graduate school, and I don’t know what I was going to do after that.
K. Flay
I’ve always been interested, since graduate school, in why some children wilt and shrink back from challenges and give up in the face of obstacles, while others avidly seek challenges and become even more invested in the face of obstacles. So this has been my primary question for over 40 years.
Carol S. Dweck
I had a professor in graduate school who told us, 'Know

I had a professor in graduate school who told us, ‘Know what you’re good at, and do that thing.’ And I thought, ‘Hands down, I’m an ensemble girl. I’m a fierce ensemble girl. I am dependable.’ I was never seen for the ingenue or the leading lady.
Ruthie Ann Miles
I kind of just skyrocketed out of graduate school.
Yahya Abdul-Mateen II
I was in graduate school. I had a birth control accident and went to get the morning after pill.
Karen Bender
As I was leaving graduate school in 1974, I was recruited to join a fledgling SETI project at the Hat Creek Observatory in California, mainly because I knew how to program an ancient PDP8/S computer that had been donated to the project.
Jill Tarter
I realized that I wanted a Rhodes Scholarship, not because I wanted to go to graduate school but because I wanted to win a famous award. Quitting forced me to realize I was on the wrong track and that I had lost touch with who I was and what I cared about.
Rachel Simmons
I never read detective novels. I started out in graduate school writing a more serious book. Right around that time I read ‘The Day of the Jackal’ and ‘The Exorcist’. I hadn’t read a lot of commercial fiction, and I liked them.
James Patterson
I worked for seven years doing computer graphics to pay my way through graduate school – I have no romance with computer work. There’s no amount of phony graphics and things making sound effects on the screen that can change that.
Greg Mottola
I went to graduate school for directing at AFI in L.A., and I wanted to be a director.
Zal Batmanglij
If you want to be an anthropologist, you need to study physical anthropology specialized in bones. If you want to be a forensic chemist, get a degree in chemistry. Do you want to do DNA work? Get a degree in microbiology. And do well. Study hard and go to graduate school.
Kathy Reichs
I was the first one in the family, on either side, to go to college – much less graduate school.
Powers Boothe
I went to school at Colorado State. I finished my degree in pre-medicine and nutrition with aspirations of actually going to graduate school in medicine, which I didn’t.
Derek Theler
Over my life as a teacher, women have been too quiet. I’m quiet myself. I don’t think I said three words the whole of graduate school.
Marilynne Robinson
For years, I believed that anything worth doing was worth doing early. In graduate school, I submitted my dissertation two years in advance. In college, I wrote my papers weeks early and finished my thesis four months before the due date. My roommates joked that I had a productive form of obsessive-compulsive disorder.
Adam Grant
Imagine if baseball were taught the way science is taught in most inner-city schools. Schoolchildren would get lectures about the history of the World Series. High school students would occasionally reproduce famous plays of the past. Nobody would get in the game themselves until graduate school.
Alison Gopnik
Most of my training at graduate school was geared towards drama, so I feel good about it, and I can do it, but it requires a lot more work from me. I feel like with drama… well, with all acting, really, you need to honor the truth of the situation.
Andrea Anders
In graduate school, I was a student of E.L. Doctorow, and he had us read ‘Moby-Dick’ in a week.
Garth Risk Hallberg