8 Tips After 8 Years of Grad School - For All Years
8 Tips After 8 Years of Grad School - For All Years
- Mental Health is important. An article last year found that graduate students are 3x more likely to experience depression and anxiety than the national average. Even if you are not diagnosed with depression your mental health is still important. Do what you need to do to take care of yourself.
- Past-self is your best friend or worst enemy. Your past-self who said “I don’t need to write that down” or “I’ll put this out of the way so I won’t lose it” can be your worst enemy. Try to have present-self help future-self.
- Find a work-work balance. Yeah, I said work-work. Find a way to balance experiments with journal clubs and reading papers and classwork. It is harder than it sounds and everyone has a different method. Find yours.
- Try to give yourself credit. I leave work everyday saying I accomplished nothing. Don’t be like me. Give yourself credit even if what you did today was change media and respond to that one email. Something is better than nothing and not every day can be 100% productive.
- Advocate for yourself. The beauty of graduate school is that you can cater it to your experience. It also means you can get lost sometimes. Advocate for your needs whatever they are.
- Time doesn’t matter. This is a positive and negative. The positive, if that experiment doesn’t get run until next week, it isn’t going to change the world. Graduating in October when you thought you’d be done in May, also doesn’t really matter. But because it doesn’t matter it also means things can get pushed back The. Time. And weekends and holidays don’t really mean anything.
- Graduating will take longer than you expected. Literally everyone I’ve talked to has pushed back their expected graduation date. That doesn’t mean you shouldn’t set goals. It’ll never happen otherwise. It just means to remember things get pushed back and it is okay.
- You are not an imposter. Ever said “Why did they let me into grad school?” Anyone? Yeah, me too. Imposter Syndrome is real, even Time Magazine acknowledges it. But you do deserver to be here. You were accepted for a reason. Keep your head up.
Amanda Labuza