The thing that makes you exceptional, if you are at all, is inevitably that which must also make you lonely.
—Lorraine Hansberry, To Be Young, Gifted and Black
There is one thing that is absolutely of the utmost importance during graduate school: your health and well-being.
Research life often comes with a self-sacrificial attitude and a culture about the best scientists who only care about their science. What this type of culture fails to admit, though, is that sustaining this kind of all-work-all-day attitude and the associated habits that it necessitates is pretty much impossible.
One of the hardest things about doing a PhD is that you need to be your biggest believer. If you’re lucky, you’ll have an amazing, supportive advisor who will congratulate you on your successes and encourage you through the tough moments. But chances are that you’ll need to find positive feedback from small successes and lab mates who can reassure you that you’re on the right track.
There will be moments where you have creativity, flow, and self-confidence, but there will also be moments where you’ll doubt yourself. Hang in there — it gets better as you learn more and gain more experience. Remember that you’ve gotten this far in your education (which is already really far!) and that everyone feels this way at one point or another, even if they don’t show it. Recognize that you know some things, but you can’t possibly know everything. Being a scientist means living at the very edge of our knowledge and knowing what we don’t know. Humility and mindfulness will serve you and your community far more than arrogance.
During graduate school, I saw a therapist. Not only was graduate school hard, but I was also dealing with various personal issues in my life and needed an extra listening ear.
For many people, therapy is very helpful. If you don’t want to dive into therapy, there are various other options. Practicing yoga or meditation works for many people, and studies have shown it really does help.1 If you’re a bit nervous about either of those (or tired of hearing people talk about how great they are), even just giving yourself some space to relax, take deep breaths, and/or journal can go a long way. Ask a friend if they want to have coffee or go for a walk. If you’re really struggling, cue some friends or family into what you’re going through. Nobody can face it all alone.
Weekly check-ins with your lab mates or advisor
Sometimes you may need to create your own spaces for feedback. In my PhD lab, we set up a brief weekly meeting with all of the graduate students where we could check in with each other about our projects and share advice and encouragement. It was a great way to get positive feedback and identify areas where I could make changes to my project. We met over lunch, and discussed the following things:
■ What has happened with your project in the past week?
■ What isn’t working, or what would you like help with?
■ What are your goals for the next week?
This sort of weekly check-in helped us feel accountable for making progress, but in a very low-risk way. We created a culture where we could give each other feedback without sounding too critical or pessimistic, which is really important.
If you have a good relationship with your advisor, they could also be involved in this conversation, or you could have a similar check-in with them. Either way, establishing a way to share your progress and troubleshoot difficulties in your experiment will improve both your quality of life in the lab and your science.
Talking about the big stuff
In graduate school, I often carpooled with one of my lab mates. At the end of the day, we’d often joke: Is today a pro-academia day, or not? We took a mental tally of all of the days that we left feeling defeated versus the days we left feeling refreshed and optimistic. The usefulness of this exercise wasn’t the final tally at the end of our PhDs, but the practice of reflecting on how we felt. I wouldn’t recommend doing this every day, necessarily, but at least once a week. It might help to think about the following questions:
■ Was I productive this week?
■ Do I still feel like doing research is meaningful?
■ Do I enjoy the physical process of doing this type of research?
■ Can I imagine continuing research like this for another five years?
It’s also important to occasionally check in about the bigger picture topics going on in your lives. What are you doing after graduate school? How much do you want to continue doing research? It may help to establish a group with the stated purpose of talking about these topics. You won’t get answers immediately—and there isn’t one correct answer for what you should be doing with your life—but the practice of reflecting on your own values and expectations is invaluable.
Work-life balance is a phrase that gets tossed around a lot. Essentially it means: Do you have some sort of life beyond work? There are decades of research on efficient work habits and numerous different self-help guides and opinions on it. Although it’s tempting to think of ourselves as superhuman, scientists are not immune to having physical bodies that respond to stress and overworking.
When you start working in a lab, you might find that many people work more than forty hours a week—or at least, they are physically present in the lab for more than forty hours.2 Whether or not they’re actually getting anything done in those extra hours is another question. Studies on people’s working habits and outputs suggest that productivity drops after fifty hours a week, with very minimal additional gains for each hour after that.3 I suspect this rule is just as true for scientists, if not more so, because there are limitations on how much intellectual labor one can do.
If you’re working sixty or more hours a week, you probably don’t have great work-life balance. We’d all love to believe we could work nonstop without burning out, but everyone who works this way will burn out eventually. Even the people who seem like they work all of the time are very likely not working at their full potential. If you’re in lab simply because you feel like you should be there, that’s not healthy.
Striking this balance is deeply important for your mental health as a graduate student and beyond. In a recent survey of graduate students, participants who reported having a work-life balance were less likely to have anxiety and depression.4
Don’t get me wrong: Research can be very demanding of your time and energy, but there is a healthy way to approach it. There are some weeks that you’ll need to work more than forty hours, perhaps because you’re working up to a deadline or because you’re collecting time-intensive data. This is fine for a week or two, but it’s not sustainable for long periods of time. It’s important to recognize when you can take breaks in addition to when you should be working hard.
You’ll be able to strike different balances at different points in your career. Some weeks or months may be really tough, but you’ll also have weeks or months that are more relaxed. Ideally, there isn’t such a huge swing to begin with. Take a moment to recognize what the swings are in your own lab. Do you have really intense weeks at a time? If so, can you also create some weeks that are less intense?
One of the major upsides about doing research is that your schedule can often be flexible. Some weeks may require a lot of your time, whereas other weeks will be a bit easier. Take control of your own schedule and don’t just sit in lab because you think you should be there. I find it really helpful to set goals for the day. These goals should represent your top priorities and what is reasonable to accomplish in a normal workday. Some days, it might take ten hours to get everything done. Other days, it could take six hours. When you’re done with your list of daily goals, go home.
As an academic, you can always be working. Since academic work is largely intellectual and requires a lot of problem solving, it can be hard to find separation. You could sit on your couch and stare at your TV while your brain is actually troubleshooting your recording rig or contemplating why your data didn’t achieve statistical significance. You could be lying on your yoga mat, planning your next day of experiments. It is really important to set boundaries for where you do work and where you don’t. Practice mindfulness about setting these boundaries: When you have a thought about work, acknowledge it, and let it pass. With time and practice, you’ll be able to more readily let these thoughts move on rather than spiral into an intense brainstorming session, during which you are just bleakly staring off into the distance.
It also helps to maintain physical spaces where you do work, and where you don’t. Your bench and desk at lab are clearly places where work happens. Your bed isn’t.5 You might decide it’s okay to do work at the kitchen table or couch. Wherever it is, be intentional about it. Working from home can be a great way to avoid a commute, but don’t do it at the risk of blurring the lines between where you work and where you relax. Places of relaxation are sacred and you need them.
If you’re the kind of person who signs up for a PhD program, I doubt you need to be told that you need to work hard. But there’s a key qualifier here: You get to choose what you work on. The most beautiful thing about a PhD is that it is yours and yours alone. It can be easy to forget that after you’ve spent hours staring through a microscope, or sitting in a lab meeting, or training animals. And it can feel like your advisor makes all of the calls and knows all of the right things to do. But this PhD? It’s yours, really.
Maybe you’ll pour all of your effort into publishing more papers. Or maybe you’ll pour your time into a mix of research, teaching, and outreach. It’s your life, you get to choose. Communicate with your advisor about what their expectations are, so that you can work to meet those expectations and shape your PhD suit your needs.
Ultimately, this also means that you can decide a PhD is not for you. Many people have left their PhD program to go to medical school, to become a science writer, or to pursue any other number of passions. Life is short, spend your years how you choose.
Support for leaving academia
Graduate students who leave academia often find the transition really challenging. The academy tends to have this vibe that it is the only true thing in the universe and everything else is wimping out. This is blatantly false, but it can take some time to unlearn some of those ideas. There are many amazing worthwhile things to do outside of doing research at a university, as we’ll explore in part 4.
If you’re in a graduate program, consider reaching out to likeminded individuals to start a discussion group about different career paths or maybe even one that you’re specifically interested in.6 At minimum, consider opening up to your lab mates about it. Chances are, they’re also wondering if they should stay in academia or not.
If you feel that you need more support leaving your PhD or academia, you’ll find these tags pretty useful: #altac (alternative academia) and #postac (post-academic).7 Many people have left the academy and have pretty strong feelings about it. Many universities have organizations to support students as well. For example, Beyond Academia (https://beyondacademia.berkeley.edu) is a student-run organization at UC Berkeley that hosts an annual conference to introduce PhDs to various career paths. Their website also contains some really useful career resources.