The toughest part of graduate life

Category: Education

As a fresh graduate student, you enter into a new world full of possibilities, you have a brand new project to work on, the environment is full of enthusiasm, and you are ready to test all ideas brewing in your head. Well, you are a research student now, so start reading between the lines, when someone says “a new world full of possibilities,” is not equal to “full of positive possibilities,” it is balanced with downsides. That’s how life is, right? I assume, nobody who has a potential to enter a graduate school is naïve to believe someone who paints a rosy pink picture of the graduate life and says that nothing can stop you now from success. On the other hand, it is not wise to get intimidated or depressed if someone advices that all you face as a graduate student is constant rants from your supervisor and seniors, failed results one after the other, unaccepted publications, spending nights and weekend running PCR machines, writing dissertation, and the depressing list is never ending. Both these advices are, respectively, the extreme positive and negative aspects of a graduate life. If someone has advised you in a similar fashion, simply ignore and get on with your work. What matters is how you look at it without considering what your colleagues, closest friends, and parents might think or say. So, the toughest part of your graduate life will be restraining mental and emotional struggles. Throughout your graduate life, you will experience frustration, depression, self-doubt, pressure, constant evaluation, failure, academic politics…now, I am depressed because of that last item on the list! My answer is simple, try to enjoy every moment of grand success, grand failure, or grand boredom in these years. Saying is simple but living it could be challenging. Say, if I apply the strongest Murphy law and give you scenarios, such as if you always mess up your 7-day long experiments on the 7th day; you did not lock the −80°C freezer properly, destroying expensive protein kits, valuable DNA, RNA kits, cell lines, and experimental samples for everyone who work on your floor; your lab-mate who joined at the same time you did published a paper and you still couldn’t; your desperately needed sole first author publication gets rejected in the last month of your PhD; or you are halfway through writing your dissertation and your computer and a part of the backup system crashes down clearing all and only your data…what would you do? (Let me be clear, none of this happened with me) would you go in depression or have a nervous breakdown telling yourself repeatedly how unlucky and doomed you are, and then go on telling a new graduate student that graduate life is nothing but hell? Or consider it as a small part of life or as one of the biggest blunders you made in your life and try to move on. Accepting it and moving on sure will be difficult but that is the correct thing do, not because I am saying or someone told me or your loved ones told you to make you feel better, but because the rational side of your brain tells you so, which is often overshadowed by the limbic side. I am talking science here, so you will have to believe me. If your brain doesn’t tell you that way, then it’s time to train your brain. Let’s picture the worst possible scenario—you tried your best but always ended up with negative results, you were a regular student, you wrote a good dissertation and you got a PhD, but it does not hold any value in a competitive world. What now? It truly depends on how you look at it. Graduate life is special; it gives you the most valuable education you will ever require, that is experience and not a parchment with printed letters “PhD.” Therefore, troubleshooting any experience that lowers your spirits during your graduate studies will be your biggest achievement. Make sure you succeed in it. Someone once gave me the greatest advice that helped me through my graduate life and it is a gift for everyday life—always keep yourself busy with something. Hobbies are not at all overrated. I would like you to suggest the same, keep yourself busy in the not so good times in your graduate life, even if the thing that interests you the most is collecting rocks…go out and do it as often as you can. Keeping a hobby will not take away the gloomy experiences but it will definitely train your brain to keep going no matter what, which will help you to identify positive aspects from your gloomy experiences.