Life of a Grad Student in Engineering

[liammo29]

Curious to see what kind of flexibility and workload people are seeing as grad students in engineering? Sense of how many hours per week, time off, time to have a hobby, do you feel like you have a life besides research etc.

 

I am open to hard work but have heard horror stories of no sleep, weight gain, 80 hrs per week, no life but research etc, and this really doesn't appeal to me.

 

Thanks for your time.

 

 

[compiler_guy]

Joining...

[liammo29]

Thanks for yor help......

[TeaGirl]

80 hrs per week? 12hr days 7 days a week? I don't think that is physically even possible. I'd be comatose by hour 60.

 

I'd say treat it like a full time job while keeping flexibility. If you have to, schedule down time and fun activities that you have to go to (either with friends, school clubs, sports, etc.) to avoid being sucked into nothing but research. During my MS I found that the best thing was to plan what you wanted to get done each week (aside from coursework) and get it done. Extra time is free time.

 

Honestly, at the height of my MS thesis writing combined with teaching and setting up an big experiment, I'd say I was putting in about 35-40 hrs per week. Some weeks more, some weeks less. However, when I work, I work. I tend to not waste time while working. I think if you prioritize and are motivated and efficient, you can make your working hours productive without wasting time, and still manage to have plenty of time left over for fun activities and relaxing your brain. I think this work rhythm will do well for my PhD.

[liammo29]

Yeah I know! I have a passion for research and am never want to stop learning, but 80 hours a week! Thats insane.

 

I like the sounds of the way you approach it. I agree if you set out clear roles/responsibilites than you will attend them. Around 40 hours sounds perfect and I like the idea of working towards a goal not an hour count. I find in industry so many people's goal is 5 o clock or the next vacation. Was the beginning of your MS for classroom oriented (similar to an undergrad) and then the last part your MS thesis portion? Is a masters typically 2 years or 1 year?

[ghanada]

I have done a Masters in EE and now my PhD in BME. I can tell you it is absolutely what you make of it. If you want to take your time, pay more money, and cruise there is nothing wrong with that and it is very doable. Some people just work/study all day and have 0 life. I prefer something in the middle. But all will work.

 

For my Masters I knew I wanted to get into a top notch PhD program so I wanted to be a superstar. I probably put in 70-80 hrs/week to get through all my coursework quickly. However, I was well balanced and had a good amount of free time and screw around time sprinkled in. That way I was able to spend 1 year full time working on my MS thesis which ended up being about 200 pages long. However, I am getting multiple publications out of it and it was key to getting me into some great PhD choices.

 

Anyways, now that I am finishing my 1st year of my PhD I can say that I probably average around 80-90 hours of "work" a week. I use the word work lightly because to me it is more like play. I love my research, love my projects, love my advisor, love my labmates, love my school. I work lots of hours and very hard, but I am not stressed at all. I don't really have deadlines and my adviser doesn't care how many hours I put in. He works in a completely different building so I could take weeks off at a time if I wanted and nobody would really care. But I honestly wake up everyday excited to get into work and I leave every night sad that I have to catch the last bus home. I would rather work 80 hrs/week doing something I am passionate about and find both fun and rewarding than work 40 hrs/week doing something I hated. You know that old saying, "do what you love and never work a day in your life"? That is how I seriously feel.

[HappyEngineer]

I have done a Masters in EE and now my PhD in BME. I can tell you it is absolutely what you make of it. If you want to take your time, pay more money, and cruise there is nothing wrong with that and it is very doable. Some people just work/study all day and have 0 life. I prefer something in the middle. But all will work.

 

For my Masters I knew I wanted to get into a top notch PhD program so I wanted to be a superstar. I probably put in 70-80 hrs/week to get through all my coursework quickly. However, I was well balanced and had a good amount of free time and screw around time sprinkled in. That way I was able to spend 1 year full time working on my MS thesis which ended up being about 200 pages long. However, I am getting multiple publications out of it and it was key to getting me into some great PhD choices.

 

Anyways, now that I am finishing my 1st year of my PhD I can say that I probably average around 80-90 hours of "work" a week. I use the word work lightly because to me it is more like play. I love my research, love my projects, love my advisor, love my labmates, love my school. I work lots of hours and very hard, but I am not stressed at all. I don't really have deadlines and my adviser doesn't care how many hours I put in. He works in a completely different building so I could take weeks off at a time if I wanted and nobody would really care. But I honestly wake up everyday excited to get into work and I leave every night sad that I have to catch the last bus home. I would rather work 80 hrs/week doing something I am passionate about and find both fun and rewarding than work 40 hrs/week doing something I hated. You know that old saying, "do what you love and never work a day in your life"? That is how I seriously feel.

Okay, we got a badass here!

[ghanada]

Okay, we got a badass here!

 

haha verrrrrry very far from a badass, but I appreciate the Neil deGrasse Tyson reference! Also, re-reading my post I hope it didn't come off as snooty or arrogant in any way. If it did, I apologize. I also said I wanted to be a "superstar" because I was previously a super-slacker in undergrad and had far far below a 3.0 GPA so I had a lot of work cut out for me knowing I wanted to get into a PhD program. I just wanted to emphasize that it is completely reasonable to put as many or as few hours as you want and get through a Masters or PhD. And I know 80 hrs/week seems insane to many people, but hopefully they know that 80 hrs/week in grad school is such a different experience than 80 hrs/week in "real life". This includes classtime, meal times, coffee breaks, walking all around campus, listening to talks, interspersed happy hours, obligatory youtube watching, etc. It is really more of a lifestyle rather than a job. But they should also know that it is completely possible to love working 80 hrs/week and not be scared of the number of hours that many put into their degrees. 

[tip3r]

There are many different ways of getting through graduate school and not all of them involve working 80 hours a week. I personally, cannot focus on one project at a time. I have to work on at least one other side project. The side project could be learning a new programming language, building a website, building some electronic gadget, working on my car etc. The only real requirement for my side project is that it HAS to be in a field different from my graduate research. At times when the work load is high to meet deadlines or something I spend less time on my side projects, but to be honest I don't think that really helps meet the deadline. The side projects keep me from going insane.

 

My point is, if you are the type of guy that needs some extra curricular activity, you will probably be more successful in graduate school if you allocate some of your time to those activities. It's all up to you.

[emmm]

And, sadly, not all graduate school experiences involve 

 

coffee breaks, walking all around campus, listening to talks, interspersed happy hours, obligatory youtube watching, etc. 

 

Mine seems especially lacking in coffee breaks, happy hours, and youtube...

Heck, you might as well throw walking around campus in there as well...though I have made an effort to do more of that (to avoid the weight gain someone mentioned above)

Edited April 7, 2013 by emmm

[TeaGirl]

Interesting perspectives.

 

@liammo29

My MS was a 2 year thesis option. I actually started research on my thesis in my second semester and spent 1 1/2 years as an RA working on it. It was good because I got a lot of publications out of it, even though it took more time than a coursework option would have.

 

Just to elaborate I want to mention that I like separating my work from regular life to an extent. It's the type of person I am. I love what I do and research, but I need time to do things/activities that I also enjoy besides school and feel like I have a life outside it . Otherwise I get upset like something is missing.

I also happen to be very goal oriented and I can't relax until I'm "done." Since in real life you can never really be "done", I feel if don't set goals for each week to feel done, I can slip into working around clock and I start getting stressed and going crazy. I rarely pay attention to how much time I spend. If you need to get task A done, it doesn't matter if you spent 2 hours or 20 hours as long as it's done before the deadline.

I just plan ahead and by now I've got a good idea of what is a reasonable amount of work I want to get done within a week, and I work at it efficiently without wasting time because I'm working toward the goal of relaxing, so I don't take a lot of coffee breaks or do much chit chat

 

It's just something that works for me.

[jacket24]

I'm just finishing up my first year as a thesis based master's student. I'm not sure if my experience is typical since I sort of fell into my assistantship position as soon as I started grad school but I average around 20 hours per week in the lab/analyzing data and 20-30 hours on classes and studying. Although I'm sure some students work on a much more regimented schedule, the way I manage my time is largely dependent on what I have on my plate at any given time. My adviser has been very understanding in terms of not demanding an unreasonable amount of lab work when projects and exams are looming.

 

Having said that, the end of this semester has been killer and I'll be lucky to escape it with what's left of my sanity. I plan to focus heavily on my research this summer since I will not be taking classes and hope to finish up and publish my work in December.