Balancing Research and Classes

[SymmetryOfImperfection]

I am a graduate student in physics. Currently, I have a relatively heavy graduate courseload of 3 graduate level physics classes, along with TAing for 2 classes. I am also doing research which I've started over the winter break. How many hours should I be putting in at the lab?

[TakeruK]

I did my (astronomy) MSc in a physics department -- we had fewer classes but they still took a lot of time. During my first year, I think the rough time split was about 20 hours/week for coursework (attending lectures, doing readings, doing homework) and seminars (journals club etc.), 10 hours/week for TAing and about 10 hours/week on research. But somehow, I really did not get significant research done until May (i.e. the summer). I suspect a good part of that is due to my inexperience at balancing research and courses in my first year of grad school. 

 

In my current PhD program, courses are worth X units each, where X is the number of total hours per week we are expected to put into the course (attending class, readings, homework). We have 3 classes per quarter, each worth 9 units -- so nominally, I spend 27 hours on coursework. Full time status is 36 units and the last 9 units are registered in a "research course" (not an actual course). I also spend about 3 hours per week in seminars, so on paper, I am working 39 hours per week with about 9 hours per week on research. Fortunately, there is no TA requirement in our first year. However, I try to do more research because our quals are research-based and are only 7 months away now!! 

Overall, I think for our first year that is course-heavy, somewhere between 20% to 30% of your time on research while taking courses is probably good, depending on how much TAing you have to do. I know that in my MSc, I made more progress in the first few weeks of summer than I did all year since having solid full-time research is way more productive than sneaking in a few hours here and there between classes or assignments or marking. If you are not sure though, I think an honest talk to your advisor about expectations might be useful, if you are comfortable with that! I try to schedule weekly meetings even though I might not have that much progress to report (so it might just be a 10 minute meeting) but I think it's important to regularly touch base with my advisor(s) and it gives them a chance to say something like "hey, you should probably try to do a bit more next week" if they think I am falling behind, instead of suddenly finding that out a few weeks before my quals!

Edited February 5, 2013 by TakeruK

[Eigen]

So for my cohort, first semester was 3 classes, plus about 30 hours a week in the lab. We all had differing amounts of TA work, so that made more or less hours in the lab, by a bit.

 

My friends and I generally did a normal work day in the lab, with a few hours while we were in doing problem sets, projects, etc. And then we did the majority of our studying in the evenings/nights.

 

Since then, some of our more recent cohorts haven't been in the lab almost at all their first semester, and sparingly in the second.