Am I a Real Person?

The most "real people" I could think of... image courtesy of bittenandbound.com

My wife half-jokes that the end of graduate school is when we become “real people.”  I suppose this is a feeling that many people actually get at the end of college – walking out of the ivory tower, degree in hand, heading out into the world, leaving “growing up” behind, and becoming a full-fledged “adult.”  We didn’t have that.  We instead walked out of one ivory tower and into another, which I imagine is a process that will reflect the rest of my working life.

I don’t know that I agree with her label.  Graduate school is an odd sort of hybrid between “growing up” and being a “real person.”  Sure, you continue to take classes, but there’s an odd sort of independence that begins to grow.  You are given more responsibility and more control over your time as you get further in the program.  I’ve even taken outside projects as a consultant completely unrelated to schoolwork.  Is that when I became a “real person”?  When someone trusted me enough to pay me for my expertise independently of my education?  Or is that moment still ahead of me, perhaps at my dissertation defense?  Or, as many people I know that aren’t in academia would claim, perhaps the lack of a 9-to-5 means we will never be “real people”?  I just don’t know…