Business Cards

Unless you are a publishing God/ess (Read Jonathan z. Smith, any of my supervisor's or Douglas/Foucault back from the dead) don't hand out business cards.

Here is one of the unspoken codes, grad students may not be more professional than their peers. Sure your papers can be (and probably are) better, you can be smarter, more eloquent or anything. But our mutual poverty if meant to level the playing field. If your school sees you handing out business cards, they will assume they pay their grad students too much. Subsequent funding cuts will occur next year and will be conveniently blamed on the Conservative Government.

It's like wearing Prada shoes or an Armani suit not from goodwill or Ebay (you can tell because they are pre-scuffed or do not fit quite right). Unless you are a law student with a job or an MBA student, business cards will make people think you reach too high or think too much of yourself (which is something considering we hold conferences refferred to as "The Learneds"). People rarely want to contact grad students for anything other than to get us to do drudging slave-like labour. A business card makes you look too expensive, that you might expect pay for "valuable work experience."

If you must hand out business cards, do so reluctantly, saying your supervisor made you print them so you could use them to recruit for his or her research, since their name will be on the card too. Same with all things of value, joke how you found your nice shoes on Ebay for 5 dollars plus shipping, or how your Armani suit was actually your uncle's, a high powered lawyer who gave up the lifestyle to do organic farming and no longer has need for the suit.

A final note, do not use them to pick someone up at a bar. This only works at bars frequented by lawyers, doctors and business people, as such your card will be competing with those of people who actually have salaries and whose degrees are not followed by the caveat "candidate." However, the card may be used to pick up other grad students at conferences and local pubs, it must still be done with the complaining, but hopefully your demure charm and self deprecating humor about the card will play down your inherent nerdiness.