The past year, my third in grad school, has been a strange one. The first two years of grad school are hectic for everyone, since grad students are living on unspoken probation until passing the candidacy requirements. We all have to attend classes, fulfill research requirements and take some combination of written or oral general exams by the end of the second year. Failure to accomplish all of these means getting thrown out after the second year (on the other hand, the last student to fail candidacy requirements in my department ended up on reality TV…).
For those grad students who pass generals, two things can happen: In science or engineering fields with lab work, the adviser knows that the student can now do research full time, and the latter is obliged to slave away under the adviser’s watchful eyes. On the other end of the spectrum, students in the humanities or sciences like math or theoretical physics tend to have less oversight from their advisers: One still occasionally hears stories about grad students whose advisers are unaware of their existence.
My department, astrophysics, falls into the latter category. I study the inter-galactic medium, the gas that resides outside of galaxies. Since this is not, regrettably, something that can be studied in the laboratory, my research generally involves reading papers and sitting in front of my computer doing calculations and manipulating data. This can be done from anywhere and at any time, so there is no need for a nine-to-five schedule.
After passing generals, my life lacked structure for the first time since I was prodded into kindergarten. No longer was I tethered to a series of short-term goals like homework deadlines or exams to drive my life. Instead, I had the vague, nebulous goal of accomplishing enough original research to get my doctorate by the end of my fifth year.
Ph.D. research is never an easy prospect, and without external motivating factors, it was easy to turn away from the challenge. With my thesis deadline a couple of years away, it didn’t seem to matter if I just turned off my alarm clock in the mornings and missed a day of work. Or five. Or 10. When stuck with a difficult problem, endless procrastination was just a few clicks away on the computer. This lack of discipline wreaked havoc on my sleep cycle, which only served to erode my motivation to get much work done.
During this time, my friends imprisoned in engineering labs looked enviously at the amount of slack I had. Yet, I felt a gaping vacuity in my life. Like almost everyone else in Princeton, I’ve been an overachiever all my life, and the juxtaposition of my half-hearted efforts with the brilliant research being cranked out by my colleagues was jarring to the psyche. Despite the lack of external stress, I was flirting with depression.
The end of the past summer brought the realization that I will have to apply for jobs in a year’s time. Since my accomplishments over my third year of grad school amounted to publishing a single research paper and acquiring an excessive familiarity with internet memes, I needed to achieve far more to have any hope of landing a decent postdoctoral position.
I have also started getting involved in several projects involving BOSS, a major astronomical survey that is being commissioned over the next few months. Collaborating with scientists and engineers working around the clock trying to get a multi-million dollar project to work leaves little room for procrastination.
The sense of drift and lack of purpose that I had experienced over the past year is probably the worst part of my graduate school experience. While I hope that I am past it, I know people who never found a way out of this wilderness and dropped out. It isn’t clear to me that there is a fixed recipe for helping other graduate students in a similar situation, but I think the first step is for both grad students and advisers to be aware that extensive procrastination is not (necessarily) pure laziness on the part of the student, but perhaps a sign of a greater malaise.
Khee-Gan Lee is an astrophysics graduate student. He can be reached at lee@astro.princeton.edu.
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