Royal Intelligence: 5 Tips for Surviving Graduate School
As the school year is now in full swing, many are well engulfed in graduate and professional studies. It can be exciting, stressful, fun, miserable, chaotic, and peaceful all at the same time. With school, part-time gigs, a social life, dealing with parents who gripe because you don’t call every single day of every single week, things can get really out of hand really quickly. Not to mention the fact that laundry may fester for 5 weeks because there simply isn’t the time or money to get it done, or that you may only eat once a day for 2 whole weeks until that $200 comes in from the call-center you work for. Investing in higher education can be stressful enough, but pursuing graduate or professional studies can send one over the edge. Many either don’t make it through their matriculation at all, or emerge from the process psychologically and emotionally worn down.
So, in order to combat burnout and prevent you from going crazy, we’ve put together 5 basic tips for surviving graduate school. Applying these tips work for undergraduate studies as well.
1) Invest in a planner/calendar.
Buy a really good planner and write everything down. Record everything you need to do and how much time it will take to do it. For instance, if you workout everyday, carve out time in your calendar to document the time it takes to do so. Highlighting different events/activities in different colors also helps. Doing so will not only allow you to visualize how your time is invested across each day and week, but it will allow you to choose the right time in the day to do such things. Drugstores, Wal-Mart, and even stores like Half Price Books have good planners for cheap. Remember, if you don’t know where your time goes, it will get away from you.
2) Get some sleep.
You need to be refreshed and recharged in order to learn. You’ll also need the energy to be involved in organizations that grow you as a student, intellectual, and professional in your industry. Oh, and the almost non-existent social life, you’ll want to be rejuvenated and refreshed for that as well. Take care of yourself and get some more sleep. Squeeze in those 7-7.5 hours and you should be ready for anything.
3) Eat as healthy as you possibly can.
Sure, eating healthy is expensive. Buying organic foods is not always the best option when you’re a broke graduate student. However, your body will not survive on fast food and Ramen noodles alone. You will have to learn to buy a $.75 apple instead of that $1.50 bag of potato chips every once in a while. With the right research at local grocery stores (assuming your university is not right in the middle of a food desert), you can save more money eating healthier than buying junk food. Also, please understand that you do not have to buy “organic” in order to eat healthy.
4) Exercise
This tip speaks for itself. Engaging in physical activity releases the endorphins you’ll need to keep stress down. You’ll also look and feel so much better. Visit the Mayo Clinic’s site to understand more benefits of regular physical activity.
5) Make Friends
You’ll need a close knit group of individuals who you can trust to have your back through the trying times you'll encounter during this journey. You’ll need each other to get through those long nights when you can’t follow tip #2 because there are 4 papers due and 3, 50 page chapters to read. You’ll need a shoulder to lean on when you and your significant other breakup because the distance is too hard or you’ve suddenly realized that you’re both "going in different directions". You’ll need friends when that one professor is out of their mind and you just want to go home to see your family. The list of when you’ll need people is endless, but trust, you WILL need them. So, make friends.