Surviving the grad school grind and burnout
A clever expression of my love of science, or a sign of being in the laboratory too much? A little of both.
I’m insanely busy in the lab, writing up almost 5 years of data for publication, while still doing a lot of experiments. This means I work 10+ hours a day and come in to lab on weekends (I was in lab during the entire thanksgiving holiday.) I’m not mad about this, but this is not the norm. I’m working so much because I solved a major problem with my project. Yes, I’ve been working 60+ hours a week for months, but truly believe that the solution is worth my time. Plus, I want to save the next graduate student in our lab all of the problems and headaches I faced during my PhD. I’ve pushed past our lab’s area of expertise (P2X receptors) and I want to see things through.
That being said, if you ask me, we only have 35-ish hours of amazing productivity; going over that gets you diminishing returns. Worse yet, it’s easy to get burned out, especially in science.
The point of graduate school is to learn new things, and science is hard. An experiment can fail because of something outside of your control (a biologically/chemically impossible experiment) or because you’re using bad reagents, or maybe you did something wrong. In the beginning, you may not know what the problem is, so you start troubleshooting and repeating experiments with different conditions. For better or for worse, this is part of the scientific process, but for graduate students, the clock is always ticking and we’re under pressure to generate positive data.
Constantly repeating experiments and and failing to generate data will mess with your head. You can easily start doubting your abilities and start fearing/hating certain experiments. All this negativity builds up, and as a grad school survival tip, you need to find a positive way to unwind. For me, its exercising in the mornings. Even as I write this, I’m on my exercise bike and waiting for DNA sequencing data to analyze. Exercise isn’t something I’m willing to sacrifice in order to get a few more data points.
I’m also part of a student organization at USC called PGA, and we try to put on events at least once a month to help students get out of lab and socialize/relax. It sounds weird, but in graduate school, what you do outside of lab can be as important as what you do in the lab. The USC graduate student government also puts on events for all graduate students. I highly recommend that all grad students try and attend a few social events every semester, they’re a fun, easy way to socialize. Having a strong network of support (friends, mentors, colleagues) can help you get through rough times.
Some other rules/thoughts I have:
I work from the moment I wake up (5-6am) until I get home (7-8pm) but as soon as I get out of lab, I’m done. No email, no late-night analyses, lab time is over.
I rarely respond to emails immediately. It’s a weird habit, but I usually only respond to emails the next day, in the morning. Emails can be overwhelming, especially if you have a lot of experiments to do and are under a lot of pressure. Taking 15 minutes to write the perfect 3-sentence response is a totally normal grad student thing to do by the way.
Occasionally, I choose to do chores/errands during a weekday, instead of coming in to lab. Being a researcher sometimes feels like you write science a blank check for your time; if experiments are going bad, spend more time in lab to fix things, but if things are going well, spend more time in lab to get ahead. With this mentality, it’s easy to skip a haircut, an oil change, or even a doctor’s appointment because you feel like you’re too busy, but I try to reciprocate when necessary. In the grand scheme of things, missing a few experiments won’t destroy a project, but not taking care of yourself will affect your productivity/creativity.
I only write in the morning. I feel most energized/creative in the morning, so I try to block of that time for blog posts, writing grants, emails, and reading papers/books. I look through papers in lab, for example when troubleshooting and redesigning things, but to really process a paper, I need to be on my exercise bike, focused only on the task right in front of me.
I reserve the evenings/weekends to physical-type of tasks, like inoculating colonies, performing minipreps/DNA cleanups, DNA gels, PCRs, etc. I also play podcasts and music out loud while doing this. Obviously, you don’t want to make a mistake, but these experiments don’t require laser-sharp focus, and become routine with experience, especially if you’re good at planning/setup.
I start every entry in my lab notebook with at least one positive advancement I made in lab the day before. Even if everything failed and I didn’t get any data, at least I can say that I explored a possible solution and determined that I try something else. Graduate school and research are a marathon, and you can’t prevent unforeseen bumps in the road, but you can control how you deal with them.
Try to take advantage of the freedom of grad school/academia. Yes, it’s a stressful time, but that doesn’t mean you can’t take care of or invest in yourself. For me, that means starting this blog, taking business classes, and building new equipment for lab. For other people, it might be combining their love of art and science (see twophotonart.com)
It’s easy to feel overwhelmed in grad school but remember that this is an inherently stressful time: there is a lot of uncertainty in terms of your work/career, and looming deadlines that are out of your control. There’s no one-size-fits-all way to do graduate school; do what’s best for you.
