Geeks hit Broadway

Who would have thought that science grad students could make it to the stage on Broadway... Well maybe predictably the NY times reviewer found it tedious and started with saying who cares about word problems and who cares about the play and then seemed to try to use as many GRE words to show that he is smart. You can tell he also never really hung out with us science grads

Elliot and Molly meet uncute at the university computer lab, and soon he is offering to work up a data-mining algorithm to help her with her experiment about the binding of yeast proteins. (I know, pretty hot, right?)

That is pretty hot! I met my partner in the physics TA office and he tried to help me learn to love Green's functions, and now tries to help me on a daily basis with determining the correct statistical methods that I should use to analyse my data. I think the main thing that the reviewer missed about the culture of grad school and academia is that your research is your life, and someone coming in and not only being interested in what you do, but wants to help you (without the likely hood of getting an authorship on a paper), shows that they care for you... or at least think you're really cute, or happen to be the only girl they see outside of the course for non-majoirs that they have to TA. Grad school love is similar to any other love, but instead of quoting Shakespeare, they quote XKCD, instead of writing a sonnet they write a data analysis program, instead of reading Daniel Steel novels, they read PhD comics. A romantic dinner in Grad school is when someone brings you a pre-heated cup of ramen noodles or makes sure to grab you some of the leftovers from the seminar because they saw you weren't there. I haven't yet seen the play, and I hope I get the chance too, but I have a feeling that the audience for this might not include the reviewer, and may be limited to people who probably can't afford to trip to Broadway, the graduate student. I wonder if NSF has a grant that might fund a field trip...