Balancing Research Assistantship and academic work

[jchen25]

I'm going to enter my first year of graduate school at Penn State Fall 2019 and have just been offered a Research Assistantship that will begin then as well. It will be approximately 20 hours/week. I just wanted some perspectives or past experiences that people have had in regards to balancing school and work.

Thank you!

[Adelaide9216]

Following.

[Teaching Faculty Wannabe]

36 minutes ago, jchen25 said:

I'm going to enter my first year of graduate school at Penn State Fall 2019 and have just been offered a Research Assistantship that will begin then as well. It will be approximately 20 hours/week. I just wanted some perspectives or past experiences that people have had in regards to balancing school and work.

Thank you!

I will also be a new RA/PhD students and in order to balance it all, I chose my classes to be two days of the week so I can then focus on research the other 3 days instead of having to go back and forth between the two. I know this may be hard to do sometimes, but this is my strategy.

[displaynamesarehard]

To be honest I still haven’t found an ideal way to balance all of my responsibilities (I’m a TA and and RA), but one thing I have been doing is using Trello to keep track of all my projects and tasks, and then plan out my tasks at the beginning of every week. I also use an app called Toggl to keep track of how many hours I’m spending on my RA and TA work. I find having set tasks is less overwhelming to my brain, instead of saying “now spend 5 hours doing this” I can focus on accomplishing something and I’m more productive. Then timing the tasks allows me to make sure I’m spending the right amount of time on each project each week.

[Teaching Faculty Wannabe]

On 4/9/2019 at 4:54 PM, jchen25 said:

I'm going to enter my first year of graduate school at Penn State Fall 2019 and have just been offered a Research Assistantship that will begin then as well. It will be approximately 20 hours/week. I just wanted some perspectives or past experiences that people have had in regards to balancing school and work.

Thank you!

Also, having multiple planners is useful. I have a physical planner where I write everything down, then I have a digital planners. I use google calendar for events going at school or just in my life. I use the iStudiez Pro app for my school work, such as assignments, classes, and exams. I think I will use this for my TA position and maybe RA as well. I then have this physical notepad where each page has the seven days of the week where I can write out what I need to do for that week.

It sounds chaotic, but you gotta do what you need to in order to stay organized and have everything planned out.