Dysphemism for graduate school, which, while often nasty and brutish, is never, ever, ever short. Successes--indeed, milestones of any kind--come only rarely in graduate school, which seems to chiefly involve the painful birth and slow death of ideas combined with the development of a monomaniacal focus on an impossibly narrow subject. No, if you want to have a meaningful answer to the question "So what did you accomplish today?", you should under no circumstances attend grad school.