Lego Grad Student’s work draws cult following.
Lego Grad Student’s plastic creations expressing soul’s torment draw cult following
There exists a cruel irony, a negative feedback loop of sorts, to the trajectory of those who enter graduate school. To commit to the highest levels of academia requires a particular disposition, a certain sense of self that has for the most part been rigorously dependent on lifelong excellence as a student. “And then you go to a place where you think you’re supposed to thrive as a good student, and you feel like you’re failing left and right.” So says Lego Grad Student, or at least the man behind the online phenomenon that sums up the graduate student experience in its own delightfully, if not depressingly, unique way.
For the past year and a half, Lego (who wishes to remain anonymous) has through social media juxtaposed the whimsy of a childhood toy with themes of adult disillusionment and existential dread. Photographs, often beautifully composed, depict a recurring Lego figurine, simply dubbed “the grad student,” within entirely Lego built setups replicating academic habitats, while a concise caption encapsulates some form of hyperbolized hopelessness of grad school life.
The result is always darkly funny, and according to his online following — Lego’s Twitter and Facebook combine for nearly 100,000 followers — deeply relatable.
In one, the recurring grad student stands in a library, while the captions reads, “Sifting through the library’s basement stacks, the grad student cannot tell whether the musty smell is from the old books or his withering soul.” In another, the grad student presents a PowerPoint presentation in class. Its caption: “Coming to a particularly flimsy slide, the grad student nervously watches dozens of eyes stare at the work of a fraud.”
The somber humor originated as a clever twist on real life. The real-life Lego, now a Bay Area postdoctoral fellow, had always wanted to become a professor, only to endure an “existential sledgehammer to my soul” after facing the realities of graduate school.
After a “horrific” meeting with an adviser in the spring of 2016 yielded harsh criticism of his dissertation work, Lego sought a distraction. “Then I had this realization that I forgot how to have fun, which is a weird thing to say maybe. But I felt like I had lost all my hobbies,” he says.
He “instinctively” returned to his childhood hobby of building with Legos, eventually constructing a simple scene of a Lego figure hunched over a toilet in a bathroom. Then, he built three more scenes to create a familiar backstory: a grad student who was sick to his stomach after a disastrous meeting with his adviser.
“I realized I have this bank of memories now from the last five years of grad school that could be an interesting pool of ideas to deal with,” Lego recalls.
Soon after, Lego Grad Student was born. After initially posting captioned photos of these first scenes on a personal Facebook, Lego created official social media accounts in June of 2016 and quickly spawned a following.
“I never did this with any expectation that people would find it or care about it,” he says.
Yet the project has only grown alongside some 150 unique posts of its perpetually dejected yellow protagonist. Lego has provided an unexpected source of comfort and solidarity for people, especially other grad students, suffering under the weight of their stresses. The creator was even invited for his own public talks at two universities.
“Every week I think I’m finished,” says LGS in his small South Bay apartment, where thousands of Lego pieces are organized in boxes and Ziploc bags. “I always think I’m out of ideas. I don’t have a long list of things I want to portray, but what I usually come with is just a concept of some event that happened or some feeling that you can have.”
Each post, always photographed by Lego himself, typically follows a formula: The grad student protagonist occupies the focus, and the caption (usually the essence of the humor, and often the hardest part to perfect) adheres to a specific, concise grammatical structure.
Then the presidential election came, and Lego Grad Student underwent a change.
On Election Day itself, a post showed the grad student at a voting booth in front a large Lego-built American flag backdrop, with a caption that read, “Today is going down in the history books. Please vote if you have not already.”
The next day, Lego abandoned a caption altogether in a quietly poignant post, depicting no grad student, but the same American flag from the day before now shattered into a heap of Lego pieces.
“I had no interest in doing Lego Grad Student anymore,” the creator says. “It felt like such a dumb thing to waste my time on given how I felt about the world.”
Yet the project has continued, and Lego has used its distinct form as a surprisingly and often brilliantly effective voice in response to the past year’s whirlwind of political news.
The Lego American flag has remained a recurring and powerfully expressed character, usually in posts immediately following events such as former FBI Director James Comey’s firing or the white supremacist rally and protests in Charlottesville, Va. Meanwhile, other LGS posts have promoted Puerto Rico relief efforts and, most recently, illustrated the effect the new tax plan will have on grad students.
“I just kind of had this feeling that if I had this platform, it felt almost irresponsible for me to proceed with Lego Grad Student as if nothing had changed,” he says.
But the grad student character has remained the focus, even while the Lego creator himself recently completed his doctorate program. The angsty burden is still there —the final steps toward graduation were only “a series of anticlimactic moments” — and as a postdoc and beyond, catharsis will likely be hard to find.
The project, Lego says, will continue for the time being, though he predicts it will run its course eventually. In the big picture he hopes it might help combat the stigma, especially in grad school programs, toward acknowledging hardship.
Even if it’s through photos of a blocky plastic world, he says, “I really hope that people feel less alone in whatever struggles they have.”