The 9-5 Graduate School: Finding Harmony Between Work and Life
Struggling with work-life balance: a case study
In 1791 farmers from western Pennsylvania violently protested a newly established domestic tax being applied to all distilled spirits in a conflict known as the Whiskey Rebellion (Risen, 2013). While George Washington was a strong proponent of peacefully resolving the conflict, Alexander Hamilton was adamant that the protest required the use of federal military force. The tax was among the strongest and last efforts by Hamilton to encourage the federal government to assume states’ debts in order to strengthen the country’s credit and facilitate economic growth.
On January 31st, 1795, soon after the failures of the “whiskey tax,” Hamilton submitted his resignation as Secretary of the Treasury. Historians have cited the failure of the whiskey tax, his disagreement with Washington, and tensions with Washington’s administration over national debt, as major contributors to his resignation (Chernow, 2005). Additionally, Hamilton’s enemies were attacking him in the press, accusing him of corruption and cronyism. At the same time, Hamilton’s frustration and anxiety grew and he became more isolated from his colleagues and friends (Cooke, 1968). It was during this period that Hamilton became embroiled in a bitter feud with Aaron Burr, a rival politician who he believed posed a threat to the country. The feud culminated in a confrontation in which Burr challenged and ultimately killed Hamilton.
The Work-Life Balance
Like Hamilton, many graduate students are competing with multiple worries, concerns, demands, responsibilities, and life stressors. Also, like Hamilton, we may often feel like quitting and moving away from those things that cause us stress and unnecessary anxiety. The purpose of this piece is not to convince you to “tough it out” or to remind you that graduate school is only 5-6 years of your life after which things will become easier (from what I hear, they won’t). Rather, the purpose of this piece is to help you understand how to change your perceptions of what graduate school is and what it is not. In doing so, I hope to help you see that 1) there are strategies for successfully managing your life and work as a graduate student and 2) encourage you to engage and adapt those strategies to your life and circumstances.
As a Latino immigrant and the first person in my family to graduate with a four-year university degree, I had truly no idea what graduate school would entail. I understood that it was necessary for me to pursue my career goals (to become a professor), but I wasn’t sure if it meant more schooling, more practice, an apprenticeship, or something else. This was both a major limitation for me, but also a great opportunity. It was a limitation because I wish I had known more when entering graduate school (e.g., the process of publication, grant writing, etc.); but it was also a great opportunity because I was seeing graduate school with new eyes and no prior assumptions about what I should or should not do. Before officially beginning my graduate work, our university held a graduate student orientation. One of the things I remember from those few days of training was a “secret” that a psychology professor shared. This so-called secret came to become incredibly influential in the way I approached my graduate school career. He said, “treat graduate school like a 9-5 job.”
The 9-5 Graduate School
My family was always big on education, but back home in Honduras educational opportunities were scarce. However, we knew how to work. My undergraduate career was too expensive for any hope that my parents would be able to put any significant dent in it. And so, I worked to pay for school. In fact, I assumed that’s what everybody did. It wasn’t until later that I learned that some people were privileged enough to focus solely on studying while an undergraduate. Thus, for about four years I worked full-time in a professional/corporate environment completely unrelated to my studies. All this to say that when I heard “graduate school is a 9-5 job,” it was a concept I was familiar with and could relate to.
The professor who spoke to us during that orientation week went on to explain that graduate work could be manageable if we treated it like a job. Of course, there are elements of it that are akin to our undergraduate life (e.g., taking classes, reading textbooks, writing papers, and the occasional hunting for free food around campus). However, being able to show up to work each day and work from 9-5, he suggested, would be the difference between a chaotic life and a stressful, but manageable, working schedule. I decided to take him up on this challenge to test whether graduate school could be treated as a job. In the following sections, I will highlight five different ways in which treating graduate school like a full-time job has been the critical shift in my thinking that has allowed me to maintain a fruitful and satisfactory work-life balance.
Scheduling
Corporate life is full (FULL!) of meetings. Everything is a meeting. Now, things have changed since the onset of hybrid and online work, but the principles of scheduling are the same. In graduate school, we still attend a lot of meetings, but that is not the type of scheduling I’m referring to.
Taking the time to schedule your time is instrumental in getting your work-life balance to a manageable level. To properly do this, I encourage you to take a few hours at the beginning of the semester to outline all the projects you’re working on. This will likely involve your personal research, lab-related work, classes you’re taking, classes you’re teaching, etc. Then, each week, you try to organize each day with the tasks that you need to complete to move forward on each project. At first, this can seem time-consuming and wasteful. After all, you’ll eventually get that paper done, right? The big lie that you’ll be tempted to tell yourself here is that taking time to schedule your work is a waste of time.
In relation to this, one of the most valuable things you can do is implement a working schedule. If work starts at 9 AM, then I need to be on my desk “clocked in” by 8:59 AM. In a corporate role, there are very few options for saying, “well, I’m done for the day I guess I’ll head home early.” If I’m scheduled to be there until 5 PM, then I won’t “clock out” until 5:01 PM. The important thing, of course, is what’s in between those 8 hours. I encourage you to fill it with work (we’ll talk about that below), but more importantly, is that you stick to your schedule. It’s never too early or too late to assess all the tasks you have to complete and schedule them in a way that does not overburden you. That takes us to our next point, resting.
Taking breaks
For most jobs, including typical office jobs, there are “breaks.” The importance of taking breaks cannot be overstated, and we’re probably not doing it enough. Scheduling your breaks is as important as scheduling your work. You may sometimes only be able to squeeze in a 30-minute lunch, a 15-minute stroll around campus, or just a quick chat with a fellow graduate student. Either way, it is important that your breaks are scheduled so that you can work when you need to work and rest when you need to rest. I know that, especially during your first few years of graduate school, it feels like there are too many meetings, office hours, coffee breaks, classes, graduate activities, etc., etc., etc. that take up your time. For this reason, it is important that you set aside some time to plan your schedules and learn to stick with those plans.
Working
Now, as important as it is to schedule breaks, it is important that you’re working during your “clocked-in” time. This may appear obvious (of course it’s important to work), but what I want to highlight is how much you can do when you sit down, know what to work on (based on your schedule), and have a place where you can focus. There are several applications that you can search online that will help you track your work (e.g., Toggl, MeisterTask, Monday.com, etc.). I don’t particularly recommend them (they’re an added layer of organization that doesn’t help me), but they can be an insightful activity for helping you recognize when time is being unnecessarily wasted. Keep in mind that, often, we’re wasting time because we have not learned to schedule both our work and our breaks.
For most, this general skill of time management must be developed; it is not as simple as saying “okay, for the next 2 hours I’m going to be focused on my work.” For example, at times you will need to remove yourself from a distracting environment, you will need to explain to a colleague that you’re busy (e.g., “this is my writing time, can I talk to you later”); or you may need to take more practical strategies like silencing your phone. Given the many tasks that you will have (e.g., research, prepping for your own classes, TA office hours, grading, editing, writing, etc.) it is important for you to set time aside for each task (again, in your schedule).
Boundaries
One of the outcomes of setting and sticking to a schedule is your ability to better understand your availability. This can be a great strength because it will allow you to better understand your boundaries. Are you able to take on that role as a reviewer? Can you join your advisor on another project? Do you have time to help a younger graduate student struggling with stats? I’m not suggesting that your answers to these questions should be “no,” rather, your schedule will help you dictate the amount of time that you can devote to these tasks. More importantly, scheduling (your work and your breaks) will allow you to direct and re-direct your efforts so that you are better equipped to jump on opportunities, projects, roles, and programs that will benefit your long-term academic and career success.
Further, while there are exceptions, in a corporate role you are not expected to work after your shift is over. This is an aspect of the 9-5 graduate life that has been most important to me: after 5 PM (or whatever that time is for you) I will be off the clock. While I may look at the occasional email or need to respond to a quick message, I am not working. Sticking to your “clocked-in” time is as important as sticking to your “clocked-out” time. Keep in mind that this will require clear communication from those to whom you report (e.g., students, advisors, collaborators, etc.). It will take practice, but it can be done and I encourage you to set the boundaries that work best for your graduate career, goals, workload, and mental health.
Uncertainty
So far, I’ve written rather rigidly about having and keeping a schedule. On the contrary, having and keeping a schedule has allowed me to build in (and be comfortable with) uncertainty. Things will come up. Plans will change. At times, you will need to come to the office earlier, stay late, work on the weekends, etc. This should not discourage you because you should have a clear understanding of what your working schedule is and how to navigate around it when a deadline is approaching faster than you anticipated, when one of your projects takes a left turn, or when your advisor is giving you particularly troublesome edits on a paper. So, while it may appear rigid at the onset, these time management strategies (specifically treating graduate school as a 9-5 job) have helped me build skills related to task prioritization, goal setting, taking breaks, delegating tasks, learning to say no, eliminating distracting, and learning to adjust.
Conclusion
Our first son was born three weeks before I began graduate school. Our daughter was born three years later, amidst the ongoing pandemic. Because juggling graduate work and family life is not easy, developing strategies to successfully manage my time between the different graduate work tasks I had was crucial. There are many strategies that you can implement, including your own adaptation to some of the above. I hope to have clearly outlined some of the efforts that have made my life as a graduate student much more manageable. While it’s unclear whether time management was Hamilton’s greatest challenge, so many things started piling up for him that it was difficult to properly handle them. Trust in yourself to find what will work best for you and keep going. You did not come this far to only have come this far. Best of luck.
About the Author
Juan Valladares is a 5th-year graduate student and Ph.D candidate in the department of psychology at Lehigh University. He researches interracial interactions broadly, with a focus on applying cultural psychology insights about the sociocultural self to improve interracial contact situations for both majority and minoritized group members. He was born and raised in Honduras, received a bachelor's degree in psychology and Spanish from Brigham Young University in 2017, and is preparing to defend his dissertation in May of 2023.
References
Risen, C. (2013, December 6). How America Learned to Love Whiskey. The Atlantic. Retrieved April 1, 2023, from https://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2013/12/how-america-learned-to-love-whiskey/282110/
Chernow, Ron. Alexander Hamilton. New York, Penguin Books, 2005.
Cooke, Jacob. Alexander Hamilton. A Profile. D. By Jacob Cooke. Hill & Wang, 1968.
