I found that example weird, probably because it's the one I had the most experience with, having been a grad student at two different universities. (I don't have enough familiarity with the other examples to know if they're weird or not.)

I don't know any grad student (outside perhaps a first-semester master's student) who has delusions about what a professor does. First off, they know academia is publish-or-perish, they've been told it every day, and they're prepping for it right from the get-go, with qualifying papers that are going to turn into their dissertation which is going to turn into their first academic book -- the first of many they know they're going to need to write. And they know that it also involves a lot of face time with the students, since as grad students they spend a lot of face time with the professor. And they know about the teaching because they're having to do it too now, as barely-paid lecturers.

> "Then I’d send ‘em to my advisor Dan"

Did those students not have advisors?

Sorry, I got the point of the article, and it was fine, but this whole anecdote felt off.

That anecdote was about undergrads who thought they wanted to be professors.

So it was. I swore I read grad students. I guess my eye skipped on after "In grad school..." and filled it what it imagined. Ignore my comment above, then.