If you are already in graduate school or are thinking about graduate school, you have probably experienced an overwhelming feeling of “Uh-oh, can I do this?” or “How am I supposed to balance everything I have going on?” Fear not, current and future students. I will introduce you to a whole new world of balancing acts. A few balancing issues that grad students have are family, money, and time.

Now that you know the basics of how to research, communicate with, and assemble your dissertation committee, your next job is to maintain this relationship until you earn that long-awaited diploma. The type of relationship that you should really strive for with your dissertation chair is one of mentorship. As three authors describe in Mentoring…

After reading this fourth post in my 5-part series about communication with your dissertation committee, you’ll not only be able take their comments constructively instead of personally, but you’ll also be able to understand what their job entails when it comes to advising your dissertation process. Communicating with your dissertation committee on a regular basis is a huge component of your dissertation writing process, as I’ve posted in the past,…

After writing about how to choose your dissertation committee members, I thought it would be a good idea to let you know what you should expect from your committee members. This third post will be about how your committee members will involve themselves in your dissertation process and how you should interact with them. I’ll give you a hint: they probably won’t need to be as involved as you’re thinking.

This blog post is the second part in our 5-part series: Your Dissertation Committee. To read the first part of the series, go back to March 26 and read about the various tips and tricks on how to maintain a good relationship with your committee. When you read this post, you’ll learn that selecting and assembling a committee encompasses many tasks that require attention and detail-oriented work. You might be…

This is the first part of a 5 part series: Your Dissertation Committee. Before you jump into the process of receiving your doctorate degree, you’ll need to focus on a few things, such as who should be in your committee and how you’ll create a good community among all of you. The following tips will make up the rest of the Your Dissertation Committee series, so keep an eye out…

Yes. Sleep is actually more important to us than we think. Especially for graduate and PhD students. Even though you may think that if you get less sleep, you can get more work done, you will benefit more than you know if you decide to catch those Zs more often. You might be thinking, “That could never happen with my schedule,” but here are a few notes that you should…

Students struggle with staying true to themselves in a few different ways: allowing fear to cripple their writing, becoming a cocky writer, plagiarizing, and thinking too much about their writing. More issues exist in students’ writing, but these are a few that I would like to highlight in this blog post. The first article that I found discusses how you should not allow fear to cripple your writing.

Whether it’s in undergraduate or graduate school, students struggle with time management. Some students don’t necessarily go out to parties or procrastinate by socializing constantly, but they allow their work to become back-burner material, second to other organizations on campus, family, friends, and jobs. I have a few tips that should get you on your way to better managing your time. 1. Budget Your Time. Just like most of…

How many graduate students from your university do you know? Do you only know the names of those in your department? My goal is to push you to desire to know more people who are in the same program as you. Stanford University, as well as many other universities, accomplishes this by maintaining what they call the Graduate Life Office. Visit their site so…