What aspect of graduate student life surprised you the most?

[mandarin.orange]

The extent to which so many professors are disinterested in teaching, mentoring, and training graduate students.

 

So. Much. Word. I mean...WOW. This has shocked me as well. Though, I can see more the constraints that these R1 profs are under in terms of research trajectory, so I kind of get it.

 

 

The extent to which fellow graduate students are disinterested in teaching, mentoring, and training undergraduates.

 

...aaand, yeah. I...feel myself becoming this, but the pressure of research and publication are real and scary. Actually, I love the mentoring and training aspect in lab and am glad I've had that experience in grad school with some great and committed undergrads. But I go to war on negotiating my teaching load, in ways I never thought I would.

[orangeglacier]

Similar to the negative ones listed so far, most grad students seem to have very limited interest in any fun social events/hobbies and just define themselves solely by their work, which is depressing.  Also most people try to avoid teaching work, when I find it one of the most rewarding parts of being a graduate student.

 

I'm also surprised how easy grad school is.  All of the classes seem to be less rigorous versions of classes I took as an undergraduate.  Then again, a lot of my free time comes from the fact that I'm not very invested in research (ultimately the reason I'm leaving with a master instead of staying for a PhD)

[tspier2]

Just how much time I am giving up.  I haven't seen my close friends in forever, and I just spend time studying and reading stuff and doing papers.  I suck at time management and I try to just balance going on dates, and writing papers and doing homework.  This semester has been really bad for me I haven't read anything lol I just kind of go with it. Other than that I wasn't surprised by much.  I think I went into grad school with a undergrad mentality, I thought it would be a ton of parties and mingling with people and having fun.... It's not.  People literally just want to do a bunch of work and be boring, everyone is married or in relationships... Basically grad school kind of sucks, don't do it if you don't absolutely have to! It sucks to watch all your friends do fun things with their lives like travel, go to Marti Gras, move to new states, have babies, get married, buy new cars, and just do FUN stuff and you are writing a paper about something that you will likely never use again.  I love grad school, I love what I am doing but I wish my life was more fun than it is. 

 

How upset would you be if I told you I got to do all of the work for grad. school AND still got to attend the Mardi Gras parades? Just another perk of living in New Orleans. 

[dr. t]

How easy it is to take on more side projects than you can actually handle.

[LittleDarlings]

How upset would you be if I told you I got to do all of the work for grad. school AND still got to attend the Mardi Gras parades? Just another perk of living in New Orleans. 

I am majorly jealous! Maybe next year I will get to go but I doubt it because it falls right around midterm time lol so maybe after graduation? That is awesome though I should have went to school in the South 

[TMP]

Similar to the negative ones listed so far, most grad students seem to have very limited interest in any fun social events/hobbies and just define themselves solely by their work, which is depressing.  Also most people try to avoid teaching work, when I find it one of the most rewarding parts of being a graduate student.

 

I'm also surprised how easy grad school is.  All of the classes seem to be less rigorous versions of classes I took as an undergraduate.  Then again, a lot of my free time comes from the fact that I'm not very invested in research (ultimately the reason I'm leaving with a master instead of staying for a PhD)

 

I felt this way when I was a master's student when I looked at the PhD students.  Now as a PhD student, I understand now why PhD students are that way.

[Marst]

How terrified I can be of having time to (and no excuses not to) work.

[Monochrome Spring]

I was surprised at how much my perspective on "needing a PhD to be happy" changed once I got here and saw what it would get me. I still really want one, and am motivated to get one; but I've also realized that there are many things in my life that are priorities over my degree, if need be. 

[aberrant]

That you can potentially be friends with anyone in the university, even if he/she is the higher up.

 

That most of the time you can call your PI / professors by their first names,

 

That some grad students can change his/her personality dramatically after the first or second year, whether that be for the good or bad. And it may or may not be something you can handle.

 

Otherwise, nothing surprised me at all as a graduate student.

[jujubea]

I know!  I'll be making less than 3 grand less than my first accounting job, which seemed fine to me at the time, but 20 grand less than I am making right now, so I don't know how I'll make it!

....Word. This scares me. For the first time in my adult life I will be partially dependent upon someone else (my SO), and I will be making $60k less than my last job.... GoodNESS what was I thinking?!

 

I CANNOT live on a graduate student stipend in my 30s...which seemed luxurious in my 20s. 

 

There are a lot of opportunities for free food that I've been missing out on quite a bit. 

Free food, eh? What are the free food opportunities I should look out for when starting school?

 

This is why I'm excited for grad school. I love reading, writing, grading, and studying. For me, school is fun, while going to parties is extremely boring. You have only reaffirmed my commitment to go to grad school!

...haha, my thoughts exactly when I read that post! 

[GeoDUDE!]

Free food, eh? What are the free food opportunities I should look out for when starting school?

 

 

 

Lectures, workshops ect always have free food. Also, anytime you are helping out with something you tend to get food. Also, like at least in my town, they have a bunch of apartment recruitment things where they have like pizza to meet new roommates, and sometimes I go even though I'm not looking for an apartment. Yes, you might say thats unethical, but, they almost always order more food than needed, so its not being wasteful. 

[stillalivetui]

I was surprised at how social it turned out to be. We drink...a lot.

[eeee1923]

How lazy I have become, that is what surprised me the most.

 

I know exactly how you feel. With every degree I've worked towards my motivation level keeps dropping just a bit.

[SymmetryOfImperfection]

From BS to MS, not much surprised me. From MS to PHD, huge changes. It is really hard to get to know ppl in the department, especially in a big interdisciplinary program where you really aren't anchored to any one department.

[mandarin.orange]

I shouldn't really be surprised, but I've had a jarring reminder of this the last few weeks: the extent of financial misinformation that grads get from their departments, and universities, is staggering!

 

And enough grads accept all this, to the extent that it really fosters a culture of acceptance, "wait-and-see," and/or sincere belief that the university has our best interests at heart. 

[Cookie]

That it never feels like I work enough.

I have no other duty besides research, and the freedom to pick whatever topic to tackle and how much to get done is sometimes scary.

[juilletmercredi]

Some of these have already been said.

 

1. Professors, even the good ones, seem unprepared or unequipped or uninterested (or some combination of the three) in giving graduate students good career/professional advice. Many of them are pretty good academic and research advisors; they can talk to you about the minute details of your projects, and give you guidance about ways in which to go in a thesis or seminar paper. But as far as actual explicit guidance about what it takes to get professional employment post-graduate school - either as an academic or otherwise? At best, they are clueless about how to provide this information to their students, or just don't think about it; at worst, they actively avoid it because they think they don't have to, or it's unnecessary, or think that a student's concentration in post-graduation outcomes is unnecessarily mercenary (yes, I have heard of students whose advisors believed this way!) I had an advisor who I consider to be great - a great mentor, a great person. But most of what I know about academic professionalization I learned by reading online and books about the academic world. My department almost never had any workshops about finding academic jobs, much less things like how to publish a paper, how to submit conference abstracts, how to network at conferences, or why any of these things were important. Towards the end of graduate school, they started offering a few more of these kinds of things because of student complaints and demand. But it still wasn't enough!

 

So the learning opportunity here is that you might be on your own with respect to finding out what the conventions are in your field and what will make you competitive as an applicant. You may have to explicitly and persistently ask your mentors for this information, or you may have to seek it out elsewhere. But make sure you do it, because you don't want to look up in year 4 or 5 and realize that you're uncompetitive for academic jobs.

 

2. How much I would change as a person, and how much things that weren't important to me became really important to me later on. Part of this was simply growing up - I was 22 when I started my PhD and 28 when I finished. But part of it was the transformative process of the PhD. It changed me in ways I didn't expect. For example, someone commented that their fellow PhD students seem to be more or less obsessed with their work and not given to socializing; then someone else said that's why they are excited for graduate school because they think parties are boring while reading, writing, and studying are fun. While I wouldn't have said parties are boring, when I first started grad school I felt the same - I thought it would be amazing because I loved to read, write, take classes, and study, and would have chosen to do them in my spare time at 22.

 

Now, I still do love those things, but as work. But I definitely don't do them in my spare time (not related to work, anyway - I read, but pleasure books; I write, but fiction and reflective posts). I hated TV in college and I just binge-watched the entire first season of Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt on Netflix. The work of graduate school is so complex and intellectual and mentally intensive that I just needed to decompress in a completely stupid, non-intellectual way, so sometime in my second or third year of grad school I bought a Netflix subscription and started binge-watching Law & Order: Special Victims Unit late at night. I think I watched the first 12 seasons of that show in like two months. In college, I wanted to have deep conversations with friends; now when I socialize with my friends - who are all highly-educated, intelligent, politically active people with challenging jobs - we mostly talk about dumb stuff. I had dinner a couple of days ago with three other PhDs and two lawyers and we chatted about movies and cheap wine and people's appearances. Because our jobs are intense and sometimes you just need to decompress!

 

3. How comfortable I felt despite being a woman of color in a predominantly white department. As an African American queer female scholar I read so much about racism/sexism/heteronormativity in academia, and how uncomfortable some scholars of color/female scholars/queer scholars felt in academic circles, etc. Now, everyone's experience is different, but I can genuinely say that I didn't experience any of that in graduate school. Most of my colleagues were white and straight but also progressive and kind and funny and warm, and struck the perfect note - did not ignore my race, but did not treat me differently because of it. (Gender was not a huge problem because my field is at least half women; and my sexual identity is not readily apparent to people because I am in an opposite-sex relationship, but when I did come out to people they were generally supportive and positive.) I had a lot of interesting cultural conversations with colleagues from different backgrounds (I spent some time explaining my hair to other people - lol! But not in a way that was marginalizing; it was more just like a cultural exchange rather than feeling like a strange curious animal or something). I also felt like there was a lot of support for me because of my race and gender; rather than trying to hold me back, the significant mentors in my life were (and are) actively trying to help me get through because they recognized a lack of black female scholars and genuinely wanted to change that. Most of these people were white.

 

Again, everyone's experience is different - I do know some scholars at other places who felt discriminated against or had issues because of their race, gender, sexual identity or some other personal identity factor. And even with the support, it is tough to be the only one sometimes (I wasn't in one of my departments, but I definitely was in the other one). But...it surprised me how comfortable I was despite some horror stories I heard about before graduate school. And how comfortable I still am, despite being the African American scientist at both of my centers (and one of just three scholars of color; one of the others is a postdoc).

[GhosTinker]

Well unfortunately these are not often things you do consciously or that you can actually influence. But, for example, the paper topics you have in your first year and second year seminars will probably determine to some significant extent what your qualifying papers and ultimately dissertation will be about. The people you choose to talk to will inform the theories you will think about. Some of this will be determined by the topics the particular instructors you had in your intro courses chose to cover in the particular year you took the class (and topics and instructors change from year to year) and who was accessible and available to advise you on these projects when you were just starting out. Not to mention the school you chose over other acceptances you didn't take when choosing grad schools. The luck of the draw will determine that some abstract will get into a conference and another might not, and you might pursue the one that was accepted at the expense of the one that wasn't. You might study language X for your field methods class, but if you'd done it the year before/after you'd have studied language Y, and the project that would come out of it would be very different. A lot of projects come out of work in these field methods classes, sometimes leading to whole dissertations and research programs. Same for experimental methodologies - you need to decide very early that you want to be trained in that, and have the luck of having the right courses offered at the right time, and the right advisor being around and available (for example, not on sabbatical or busy with a sick family member), and even the right research question that is amenable to being asked experimentally using the tools you have available. 

 

In the 1-2-3 year most people are not in a position to articulate their research program -- which is ok and makes sense, because to a large extent that is determined by your research experiences. But by the time you get to 4-5 year and go on the job market, there is not too much you can do to "invent" parts of your profile that don't exist but you wish were there. Not too many advisors will actually have a conversation with you once in a while about how your profile as a scientist is developing (and a lot of people may not want that or be too intimidated) but as it turns out, my profile now as a 1st year postdoc is determined almost exclusively by what I've done in grad school, which in turn was determined to a very large extent by accidents of topics and instructors that happened in my first year. That determines to a large degree the broader research questions I can formulate that encompass (most of) my previous work and the work I want to do in the future (or at least, the work I tell hiring committees on job interviews that I want to do). 

 

This all said, I am of the firm belief that although my research might have been very different had I gone to a different school or had a different independent study advisor in my first year, or if I had not stumbled onto experimental work, etc., it would have been just as good. My character is my character and my abilities are my abilities, so my productivity would have been similar, just that the actual papers and topics (and methodologies, languages of interest, etc) would be different. I think it would have been good either way, just.. different in ways I can't imagine, which is what I mean when I say that early choice points lead to very different possible outcomes.

 

Thank you fuzzy, well said. it brings back so much memory. Although I'm not officially a grad yet, my undergrad years are just like that in essence.

we always think we can grow wise in time, but something unpredictable steers our fate(???) at weird moments, and then it can't be undone.

It's not so much 'regret' as curiosity about what the other versions might be...

but one thing I learnt is that maybe only 1/100 versions is an easy one. That calms my doubts and sustain my hopes.

[SNPCracklePop]

The overall lack of structure and uncertainty that lies beyond the second year.  Experimental setbacks, publication rejections, harsh (at times) criticisms, no clear benchmarks for success, and increasingly looser guidance as you progress.  Kind of like walking through fog that thickens before it clears.  That said, it certainly toughens you up.

[dat_nerd]

The overall lack of structure and uncertainty that lies beyond the second year.  Experimental setbacks, publication rejections, harsh (at times) criticisms, no clear benchmarks for success, and increasingly looser guidance as you progress.  Kind of like walking through fog that thickens before it clears.  That said, it certainly toughens you up.

Couldn't have said it better.

[Cookie]

The overall lack of structure and uncertainty that lies beyond the second year.  Experimental setbacks, publication rejections, harsh (at times) criticisms, no clear benchmarks for success, and increasingly looser guidance as you progress.  Kind of like walking through fog that thickens before it clears.  That said, it certainly toughens you up.

 

All of these!

[happy little pill]

I was surprised by a lot of things.

 

1. How friendly everybody is. I made a few really solid friends in undergrad (I am currently at the same institution for my MA), but I felt like my Master's would be a lot more competitive. There are definitely echelons within seminar discussions of who is going to talk and add value to a conversation and who won't, but my cohort hasn't had any crazy competition, and we're 17 people so that says a lot. It's probably not like that at every institution, but I think that our department worked hard to foster camaraderie right away - we had a potluck at the former GPD's house and everyone got hella schwasted. It was so fun and it has given us a lot of great material to reminisce upon in the not-so-great weeks.

 

2. My writing and my capacity for critical thinking improved dramatically. I assumed that I was at the peak of my writing ability post-undergrad (silly third year hubris) but I am actually embarrassed of my first semester papers and wish that I could do them over again because they would be about ten times better now.

 

3. The closer that you get to the awards person at your SGS, the better your life will become. I've gotten personal e-mails to the tune of "hey you should apply for this" for awards that I didn't even know existed.

 

4. Outlining your papers makes your writing process much smoother. Shocker, I know, but I used to just jump right in and get to writing. Now, I can't even think about writing a paper without a fully formulated outline - it always looks like it belongs on a fridge next to a two-year old's scribbles by the time that I'm done, but I can't deny the results.

[Tall Chai Latte]

The decisions you made early on have big impact on your career later.

How lonely grad school can get, both emotionally and scientifically.

Constantly being judged, and often taking blames for things you have no control over.

Most professors have no interest in teaching and training students.

No one will go to the bat for you unless there's benefit in doing so.

[jujubea]

The decisions you made early on have big impact on your career later.

How lonely grad school can get, both emotionally and scientifically.

Constantly being judged, and often taking blames for things you have no control over.

Most professors have no interest in teaching and training students.

No one will go to the bat for you unless there's benefit in doing so.

Can you elaborate on the "early decisions-big impact later" point, as others have done?

This sounds like an important one...

[SNPCracklePop]

Can you elaborate on the "early decisions-big impact later" point, as others have done?

This sounds like an important one...

 

Advisor selection would be a great example, if not the most important.  That early decision sets in line your advocate, your "boss," your choice of projects or research subfield, your opportunities (publications, funded conference trips, etc.), the professional network you can eventually tap into for your job search, and so much more.  I've personally seen great students leave programs because of poor advisors.  Choose wisely.