Hello all. I just finished grad school and thought that my ideas on the extremely odd and time-consuming experience that is graduate education might help those who are thinking of going to or just starting grad school.
So, you are graduating/just graduated with a Bachelor’s and are thinking of/were just accepted to graduate school. You are probably smart. You have to be smart to go to grad school… but not as smart as some people think. Grad students do/say some pretty dumb stuff and we definitely don’t know
everything (try asking an organic chemist who the 4th president of the United States was). You really don’t have to be a genius to do well in grad school, just smart enough to learn a lot about a topic and contribute something original to it. The topic can be anything (e.g. physics, oceanography, English poetry, super hero studies, circus performance-ology etc.).
You may be asking yourself,
“if so many people are smart enough to go to grad school, why don’t more people hold advanced degrees?” Well, it is really time consuming. You don’t have much of a life for the 2 to 14 years you are in graduate school. You are taking classes, reading research paper after research paper, teaching, grading, conducting your own research, and, finally, writing out everything you did while making it sound meaningful to as many people as possible so that someone will decide it is interesting enough to publish. Also, you don’t get paid much for all this work (and in some disciplines it is standard to actually pay out of pocket to go to graduate school). So, if you want to have a life and a good paycheck after graduating with your Bachelor’s, graduate school isn’t for you. But for those that still feel that graduate school could help you obtain your life/employment goals, I have found that graduate school boils down to three main things.
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1) Sucking it up
As a graduate student you will have to suck it up and suck it up often. You are constantly going to be doing things that you don’t want to and you just have to do them. You also have to do them with a pleasant enough demeanor that you don’t piss off the people who decide whether or not you graduate. If your research contains
a field component you will be uncomfortable very often. Field work is really fun, but it is also really hard. Everyone doesn’t do field work for a reason. For example, if you just got to your study site and are jet lagged and sick—suck it up, get out there, and do your research. If a third of your body is covered in a rash from whatever poisonous tropical plant you had the misfortune of brushing up against—suck it up and do your research. If every muscle in your body is screaming from carrying a backpack that weights 2/3rds your body weight through dense jungle for the last month—suck it up and do it. If it is pouring rain and you are freezing your ass off as you stand on a small boat—suck it up!
You get the idea. You came to do a job and you can’t let anything get in your way.
Once you get back from the field (or if you finished some experiment in the lab) you will hopefully have a plethora of samples/data that would take you approximately 5.75 years to analyze if you worked a reasonable 40 hours per
week. But those are just this season’s samples/data, so SUCK IT UP and analyze them in the 6 months you have before you go collect/generate more. Sleep can wait. It will get very, very, very monotonous as you do the exact same thing to each of those 8,000 samples, or as you spend more than a week simply formatting a data file so that it is in a usable form, or as you do any of the other countless repetitive and mind numbing tasks that are an integral part of research (this includes most field work as well). If you can’t stand doing the same thing over and over (and over and over and over), then science might not be for you. Suck it up!
You will often feel that you aren’t smart enough to be in grad school and will be constantly told that you are wrong. Suck it up. You are probably smart enough and sometimes you will be wrong and that is okay—I was once told that graduate school mostly exists to make graduate students feel dumb so
that we aren’t complete asses about how much we know about our subject (humility=good, ego=bad). Other times the people who called you wrong will actually be wrong (but you probably shouldn’t call them wrong back because they have tenure). Additionally, I think that most graduate advisors have either forgotten what it was like to be in graduate school or think that feelings of inadequacy are a rite of passage. As a result, they have a tendency to pile on copious amounts of work or insinuate that you are either not working hard enough or are mentally lacking for not instantly understanding something or knowing what to do. Suck it up, prove them wrong, and remember that advisors can have bad days too (from what I have heard, being a graduate advisor can be pretty demanding too).
In general, you will constantly feel like you can’t do everything that you have to. Your graduate advisor will be demanding results/papers, your students will
be demanding your time, the instructor of record for whatever class you are serving as a teaching assistant for will be demanding that something be graded immediately, and, on top of that, you have your own coursework and research to complete. Suck it up and do your best. At the end of the day you can only do so much and something might not get done. It won’t be the end of the world and you shouldn’t beat yourself up about it. But try and spread the thing that doesn’t get done around so you are not completely lacking in one area.
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2) Thinking on your feet
Graduate school/research will constantly be throwing you curveballs, spitballs, screwballs, fastballs, knuckleballs, Vulcan changeups, and any other pitch that exists (plus some that don’t). When these issues/opportunities arise you have to fix/take advantage of them. You will usually have to adapt to a situation without any notice and your ability to do so will determine your success in academia.
The obstacles that will directly impede your research are endless. Basically, if something can go wrong or break, it will. Essential equipment will break and 
you will have to figure out how to fix it when all you have are zip-ties (note: zip-ties were actually a very important part of my dissertation and saved me in so many tight spots that I probably should have dedicated my dissertation to the inventor of zip-ties); important things will accidentally be dropped over the side of the boat and you will have to figure out how to continue on without it (unless you can free dive 2000 m down to retrieve it); etc. So get a Swiss Army Knife, watch some old episodes of MacGyver, and keep telling yourself that you can do it.
But the things that you will have to adapt to aren’t always obstacles to be overcome. Sometimes you will be out conducting routine measurements at a field site and notice an anomaly 
that, if you keep tracking and measuring it, could make for a groundbreaking research article. Basically, you will have to be creative and flexible. Your dataset is never going to be perfect and you will have to troubleshoot what you actually managed to get anyway, so don’t be so rigid in your research plan that you don’t opportunistically sample interesting phenomenon or follow up on weird lab results that might lead to something original.
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3) Making sure you are happy
Grad school is very stressful and very hard (see above) and it can be easy to work so much that you forget to do things that make you happy. It is also important to find happiness in what you do and to surround yourself with people that you enjoy as you plod along the seemingly never-ending trek that is grad school.
Hopefully you pick/picked a project that is really interesting to you. If not, try and change your project or try to switch into a lab that studies something you are interested in. If you don’t love your research project (and I mean LOVE, as in having weird and confusing dreams about spending the rest of your lives together) it will be near
impossible to suck it up and you won’t be motivated to think on your feet. I am not saying you should just throw in the towel at the first sign of frustration or difficulty with your project, but remember that this is going to be your life for the next 2-89 years, so you better be passionate about it.
Remember to do things everyday that make you happy. Crank up your favorite tunes and sing along if you are working in the lab late at night, write code with friends to counteract the loneliness that can arise from endless days spent in front of your computer, watch cute puppy videos on YouTube in between classes. Whatever floats your boat (as long as it is legal). Also remember to get enough exercise as that increases happy thoughts. The only blues in your life should be the music that you crank up in lab.
I really think the most important thing is to periodically reflect on why you started grad school, if it is helping you reach your goals, and if you are still happy. Your life goals often change as you age (e.g. I was convinced I was going to be a garbage man when I was 4 and a comic book artist at 10) and
working 24×7 can interfere with other aspects of your life that you didn’t realize was important to you. If grad school is not helping you achieve your dreams or if it is permanently interfering with your happiness in such a way that changing up your project, lab, or routine can’t fix it, then it is okay to throw in the towel. That doesn’t make you weak, it makes you strong enough to change your situation to something that is healthier for you. Prioritizing your happiness is the most important thing and no one can say that you didn’t give it your best effort.
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Well, those are the three most important things I have found necessary to succeeding in graduate school (and life, really). There are a few other things that are helpful too (e.g. like making sure that you write professional and courteous emails), but those things tend to be in the typical advice lists for grad school and are just kind of common sense anyway. So as you find yourself drowning in graduate student responsibilities and don’t know how to make sense of the madness that is now your life, just remember that, while your smarts got you where you are, your ability to suck it up, think on your feet, and, most of all, make sure you are happy will determine your ultimate success in graduate school.
Stay tuned for how to navigate a postdoc.
Peace and puppies!
Jesse