Lessons From Grad School

When I started grad school I really had no idea what I was getting into. Part of it has to do with the phase of life I am in (single woman in her thirties). There is this weird thing about our culture where certain life events have become shrouded in mystery. Nobody really talks about the hard parts of it, or maybe the real truth is that people don’t particularly want to hear about those hard parts. All we want are the highlights and the finished product. I have found that incredibly unhelpful. So I thought I’d put together a post of things I have learned from two years of grad school. I think it will be helpful for me to process and insightful for anyone tackling a big project in their life. Anyway, here we go. These are things that have been life-saving for me.

Keep a Rule of Life

What is a Rule of Life, you ask? It is usually defined as a set of practices and relational rhythms. I found out quickly how different grad school is from undergrad. My undergraduate experience was different than most. I did three semesters on campus, took several years off then finished online over several years. So I had a community for the first half or so but didn’t for the second half. I was both on campus and off campus. Aside from my freshman year, I worked 16- 40 hours a week through my undergrad degree. And yet, I was still young enough that it felt easy to compartmentalize my life. When school was in session, that was my main focus.

Grad school has been an entirely different experience. In between work, family, friends, church, and home, I have had to fight to carve out the time I need for the most demanding academic courses I have ever taken. I have both personal and professional expectations and responsibilities placed on me which take as long as they take, and I cannot just hand them off to someone else. And since I started grad school, my life, and the lives of those I love, has been repeatedly hit with crisis after crisis. I thought I was a good project manager from some of my work experience, being an independent author, and being the editor-in-chief of a marketing collective for five years. But managing grad school has been another level altogether.

Here’s what it comes down to, though. The overwhelming temptation for me has been to drop everything else and put school first. To go back on commitments, to set relationships aside, to ignore what my body needs, to do the bare minimum. But I realized very early on that this isn’t just a season I need to get through. This is my life, right now. And I want it to be a good one, even in the midst of stress and struggle and (sometimes) chaos. So right off the bat, I made sure to continue investing in the things and people that were important to me, even if it took time away from homework. The first year I continued volunteering at my church, which was a good decision. The second year I stepped down, which was also a good decision. I have continually made time for my roommate, my family, and a few close friends. I have sacrificed to be a team player at work, to support my boss, and be the best manager I can be. I have invested more time than ever in prayer, meditation, and time with the Lord. And I have taken good care of my body, with strict bedtimes, vitamins, and extra rest when I need it. I work incredibly hard on my homework, but I also let my best be enough. And I am so thankful because I have seen all of this payoff.

Learn to Say No

This may sound like a contradiction to everything above, but it is not. Part of my Rule of Life for grad school has also been learning to say “no.” As much as I have wanted to keep investing in relationships, to be a good employee and manager, to live my life now, I have also had to put up firm boundaries and say “no” over and over and over again. No to social invitations. No to extra hours at work. I have had to fight to protect my study time, my health, and my rest and recuperative time. This is where it has been hardest to do school long distance. It is so much easier to study when all of your friends have to study. It is so much easier when you are in a community that understands the discipline and work it takes. When people don’t see you going to classes and doing homework, they quickly forget you are in school at all. They don’t understand the cost, the discipline, and the effort. You can try to explain it to them, but unless they have been through it, they don’t quite get it. I learned very quickly that nobody is going to protect my time except for me. It is an incredibly lonely experience. Like shoveling trenches in the middle of the night while the rest of the world is sleeping. You really have to love what you’re studying (I do) and be confident about the path and journey you’re on (I am).

Invest in Your Field Now

This is a much happier one. One of the best decisions I have made is to take myself off a book-buying ban for books in my field. Right from the start I gave myself permission to buy extra books, outside of my course material, which my professors recommended, or which seemed relevant to the topics I am most interested in. At first, this felt a little reckless. But I have already seen it bear a lot of fruit, for several reasons.

First, when you enter deeply into a field of study as broad as philosophy, it can be a little overwhelming to know where to start. It’s extremely helpful to have some boundaries and guidelines of where to look for research and further study. I could have just written these books down and either a) bought them after grad school or b) borrowed them from the library. The problem with a) is that I figured out really quickly that the list would be long and buying them all at once would be intimidating. I would probably talk myself out of it. Plus, these are books that could help me along my journey RIGHT NOW. The problem with b) is that underlining and annotating is critical for me working through these texts, and also limited loan times. It’s difficult to predict exactly when I will suddenly want to reference something, or just skim through a chapter or two. When I started buying them, I quickly found that I could pick up the main gist of the book through skimming and then even start using them on papers and assignments. Having physical copies on hand which I can underline and note and pull out whenever I want has been hugely helpful.

An additional reason is that knowing which authors and books I want to buy I can start watching for deals and can snag them at lower prices (philosophy books are expensive).

Be Open to New Ways of Learning

Becoming an expert in a field is a unique journey. I have never plunged this deeply into any subject before, not even writing craft. Each field has its own unique tools and skill sets and it takes time to acquire them and even more time to use them effectively. While it can be humbling to feel like a beginner (especially at this stage of my life), I have learned that getting frustrated with myself does not help. Not only that, but we learn differently in different stages of life, depending on our brain development, life experiences, self-knowledge, amount of time we have, and mental and emotional bandwidth.

One of the best new tools I have discovered is allowing myself to preview difficult texts before diving fully into them. What this looks like is often just reading the opening chapter, and then setting the book aside for a while. I don’t fully understand why this works for me, but there is something about exposing myself to an author’s voice, style, vocabulary, and the basic topic of the book that helps me prepare for a full reading. I think a lot of it has to do with expectations. The second time around I know what to expect and it helps enormously.

Learning different kinds of reading, in general, has been vital. In my primary education, I learned to skim textbooks with large headings and lots of pictures. Learning to skim highly technical monographs, when necessary, is a whole different ball game. It has been equally important to learn how to read deeply and take notes on a text as well.

I’m also learning how and when to supplement my reading with listening, and experimenting with different symbols for annotating in book margins to supplement my underlining. Simply putting an “x” next to things I don’t agree with and a wavy line next to things that I want to chew on more makes it so much easier to navigate the text when I skim back through.

I have learned so much more than those four things during these last two years, both about myself and the world of higher academia. I hope you’ve enjoyed this little peek behind the curtain and maybe it gave you something to chew on.

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Published on May 26, 2024 10:40
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