This study examines the metaphors relating to the attitudes of students of the art painting education department towards post-graduate education and the concept of the "academician". A total of 81 students participated in the study who continues their education at a university in the Western Mediterranean Region of Turkey in the 2017-18 academic year. Of the students in the study group, 48 were female and 22 were male. This research refers to the mixed research design that combines both quantitative and qualitative data. In the collection of the data, the students were first asked to fill in the blanks in the sentence "An academician is like..., because...", for the purpose of identifying their metaphors towards the concept of "academician". Then, the attitude toward Postgraduate Education Scale, which was developed by Konokman and Alici [8] was used. The acquired metaphors were analyzed in a content analysis that is a qualitative data analysis, and the responses provided to the attitude scale were analyzed with the t-test and one-way analysis of variance, which are inferential statistics. As a result of the study, 46 metaphors were acquired for the concept of "academician", and these metaphors were gathered in 5 categories. These categories were named "guide", "information goldmine", "impressive", "fair", and "innovative". Considering the attitude toward Postgraduate Education Scale, it was determined that there was no significant difference (.35>p) between the genders of the students. A highly significant difference was found (.00<p) between the attitude of post-graduate education and the status of wanting to pursue post-graduate education.