Reflections on Graduate School (end of year six)
People say that graduate school is lonely. You’re starting over, classes are smaller and you take fewer. Almost no one lives on campus. Even if you have a large lab, you may start with only one other student, and they might leave to go work, especially after enduring a year of a meager stipend. People you know are getting married, having kids, and continuing down life’s path. You don’t have much money to travel to see old friends, and even if you budget for it, it’s difficult to justify time off – during the semester, your weekends are the most productive time (either in lab, or going to the grocery store), and during summer it’s time to actually get some work done around here!
But after a while you find your groove, and you find some friends, and things aren’t as lonely. For a bit.
But everyone takes a different amount of time in graduate school, due to a complex interplay between student, advisor, funding sources, and God Almighty who bestows experiments with success or failure. So soon your friends start to leave, and what used to be a groove feels like a rut – but you’ve already invested years of your life. It wasn’t a financial decision to begin with, but to leave now would simply be a waste (sunk costs aren’t a thing – this isn’t, after all, an economics Ph.D you’re pursuing). With each friend or labmate who leaves, the pressure to be more productive grows, as does the feeling of fear that when you’re finally ready to find work, you’ll have spent so much time in graduate school everyone will look at your resume and say, “it took that long, just to accomplish that little?”
So it turns out that the end is lonelier, and harder, than the beginning ever was. Then, you were young, without fear. Now, you’re old, comparing yourself to your peers who already have full careers and families.
I haven’t accomplished too much since I proposed my thesis. I hope my friends and family don’t think less of me, because of this.