On Surviving Grad School

There’s a discussion floating around the twitters right now about how folks are surviving this current semester. The first response that popped into my head was “mainlining caffeine” which is somewhat tongue in cheek but also somewhat (and sadly) accurate. For years, I have carefully avoided the sweet, siren song of Sweet Lady C. But as my responsibilities have piled up and my time available for sleeping has dwindled, I find myself returning to caffeine in all of its many delicious forms.

But there’s more to grad school than not sleeping and drinking coffee. I find myself constantly amazed at my ability to not only get my schoolwork done, but to actually enjoy it. I suppose that sounds a bit like a humble brag, but it’s honestly true.

(Here’s the humble brag: I can’t believe how well I’ve been doing in my classes).

I could probably succeed in grad school with more sleep and less coffee if I wasn’t morally opposed to gaming the system. That’s the thing about a Master’s Degree. The professor assumes that you want to actually learn something in their class, so they spend more time offering up opportunities for mind expansion and less time testing you to make sure that you’ve availed yourself of said knowledge. There are days where I’m tempted to skip some of the assigned readings, because I know I could get away with it. But then I remind myself that I’m doing this because I enjoy it. What’s the point in taking out student loans to study History if you’re not going to do any actual studying?

(Some might argue that there’s really no point in taking out student loans to study anything liberal arts related, but I enjoy my courses and I am getting confident in my ability to learn from History so as not to repeat it).

With taking the slacker’s way out not an option and the necessity of sleeping at some point so as to stave off clinically insanity,  what’s a girl with a full-time job, lots of hobbies and friends/family/a husband who would like to spend time with her to do? For me, it has been a few basic but important changes that have enabled me to make it this far through grad school.

1. Don’t bite of more than you can chew. This might sound somewhat ironic coming from me, the girl who is constantly over-committing herself. But I don’t think that I would have made it this far without spending at least a small bit of thought power on the subject of feasibility. This means that I never take more than one class a semester (which would probably explain my glacial progress). This also means that sometimes I have to turn down offers from my friends to do fun things in order to stay home and study. Hey, nobody ever said that grad school was all fun and games. Unless there’s a major in fun and games that nobody has told me about.
2. Work smarter, not harder. Ok, maybe that’s a bit too pithy. There’s no way to get around the hard work side of things. But that doesn’t mean that you have to make studying any more difficult than it has to be. I do loads of school work, but I try to get it done as efficiently as possible. I do the vast majority of my readings during my commute (I take the bus, don’t worry I would never read and drive). And I type up a lot of papers during lunch breaks. Making my studies work with my schedule and not the other way around requires a lot of forethought and requires that I not allow myself to do much procrastination. Sometimes this means that I’m done with my schoolwork days or even weeks before it’s due. Learn from my mistake: don’t mention this in class or your fellow students will start to hate you.
3. Learn to read quickly. I’m not sure how you go about accomplishing this one if you don’t do it already. Personally, I developed my elite reading skills by spending most of my formative years with my nose buried in a book. Perhaps the social isolation wasn’t worth it at the time, but I’m very happy these days to be an efficient and thorough reader. I guess that’s my grad school super power — I can do a lot of reading in a short amount of time and still manage to absorb most of the important information.
4. Don’t be tempted to take the easy way out. Every time I convince myself that I don’t need to take notes on something, I always end up regretting it. Do things right the first time, so that you don’t need to do them all over again. It might be a little more time consuming, but it will save you loads of wasted energy in the long run.
5. Know when to give yourself a break. Which is better? Staring at your computer screen for eight hours straight, stopping only to beat your own head against a wall and gnash your teeth over the hopelessness of ever finishing this stupid paper? Or making sure that you’re well rested and that you give your brain the occasional break so that you can work at peak efficiency and spend fewer hours staring at your computer? I know which one I prefer. Which is why I make sure that I give myself enough time to finish my work, so that I can stop and come back to it as necessary. Added bonus: I write better papers when I’m not typing in a panic. This is another reason why I try to avoid procrastination. My final project for my current class is due on Tuesday, but I set aside today to finish it. This means that I can take breaks to do things like work on Christmas Cards and write up self-congratulatory blog posts.