What Do Grad Students Do in the Summer? | Day in the Life of a PhD Student #2

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It's SUMMER friends!! I am very biased when it comes to summer. My birthday is in summer and since I'm on an academic calendar as a grad student, summer is just a smidge more slow-moving than other semesters which makes every moment count that much more!

One of the most common questions I get asked by friends who aren't in grad school is "So, what do you do in the summers?". And, I totally get it. It's really hard to fathom what a grad student does with their summers! Are we taking classes? Teaching? But aren't all the undergraduate students on break? Is it all research? Truthfully, it varies A LOT. Depending on what your teaching responsibilities are, where you are in your program, and how research-focused your university is, your summer may look very different to that of another grad student.

In my own experience, my summers are a little slower-paced than the school years, but that doesn't mean there's necessarily less work to be done. Though there's less running around campus because you have fewer classes to teach and meetings on campus, summer is also seen as this downtime where you try to cram in as much research work as possible. I either teach or TA multiple classes in the fall/spring semesters and since that can be a pretty big time sink, everyone tries to cram in as much research work as possible in the summers!

That being said, there's definitely more flexibility in where and how you do your work. So, while most in-person meetings stop and you have the freedom to do your work on the go, you don't stop working just because it's summer. To try and help demystify what grad students do in the summers, here's a day in my life as a PhD student - summer edition!

6:30 AM

7:00 AM

7:20 AM

6:30 AM — I'm usually up around 6 or 6:30 AM. I tend to be an early bird and do my best work in the mornings so I like to take advantage of that time by rolling out of bed and spending my most mentally sharp hours doing some reflection or getting straight to work!

7:00 AM — This particular day, I started it off by journaling and meditating. This isn't always the case for me - it really depends on my schedule - but in the summer months when things move a tad slower in the academic world I take some morning time to actually slow down and reflect!

7:20 AM — Planning! I'm a planner addict through and through. I just don't feel ready for the day if I haven't spent some

8:30 AM

8:30 AM

8:40 AM

8:30 AM — Coffee :)

8:40 AM — Fitting in a workout! If I have the time, I try to spend some time on my bike (If you're curious about my bike - I wrote a whole blog post about it here: Sunny Bike Review and My Home Cycling Setup) in the mornings. Sometimes, it's 15 minutes, sometimes it's an hour.

9:15 AM

9:30 AM

3:30 PM

9:15 AM — Getting ready for the day. Not everyone may feel the need to do a whole skincare and make-up routine, but for me, it's a process I enjoy and it makes me feel more prepared and ready to take on the day. (My current daily skincare favorite: Grace & Stella hyaluronic acid)

9:30 AM — Emails and catching up with students. I'm a TA for a class this summer, but it's much less busy than my teaching responsibilities during the school year.

10:00 AM — Data work and designing studies. Here's where the bulk of my time goes in the summer. Today I'm planning some additional data collections and researching measures to include in a future survey.

3:30 PM — Cuddle break with the cats! Remember to take breaks y'all :)

4:00 PM

6:00 PM

6:00 PM

4:00 PM — More data work! Some collaborators and I recently collected data so on this particular day, I'm cleaning up data and making sure it's ready to be analyzed.

6:00 PM — Closed my computer for the night and took a little walk with my fiance. We're really lucky to live next to a beautiful little lake. Being outdoors always make me feel like work is a little more bearable.

6:30 PM

6:30 PM

9:00 PM

6:30 PM — Dinner! I'm an early bird so I pretty much stop working past 5 or 6 if I can because even if I try to work after dinner, all of my work usually turns out half as good as it does in the mornings. My fiance and I usually spend a couple hours watching mindless reality TV to decompress from work :P (Current favorites are Love Island and The Challenge)

9:00 PM — lights out!

You can see that for me, I don't always work an 8 hour day. In fact, most days, I don't work a full 8 hours because my brain isn't able to focus fully for those 8 hours. Instead, I choose to work part of every weekend to make up that time when my brain is more awake and at full capacity. This isn't going to work for everyone - I know some people prefer to have full weekends to themselves - but for me, working a little on the weekends gives me the freedom to disconnect when I need to on the weekdays.

I hope this was helpful - especially if you're new to grad school and wondering what in the world grad students do in the summers! Have any more questions? I'd love to hear from you - leave me a comment or shoot me a message!

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How I Use Time Blocking as a Grad Student & Why Time Blocking Every Day Doesn’t Work for Me | PhD & Productivity

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If you’ve ever poked around the Internet looking for productivity tips, there’s no doubt you’ve heard of time blocking! Time blocking can be an incredibly useful tool but after testing it on and off for many years, I’ve found that it’s a tool that is only useful to me in certain situations and in fact, can stress me out if I try to use it every day like many people recommend doing! So, stick around to hear about my experience and see if time blocking is right for you.

Alright, alright, so I do use a type of time blocking if you could even call it time blocking. I schedule things in my google calendar so that I know when my meetings are and what time I need to be where. Without my google calendar I’d have no idea where I need to be since I have an awful memory! I'm not sure if this is considered time blocking, but I do at least put things in my calendar if I physically have to be somewhere. I usually refer to this as my "butt in the seat" calendar since I have many other calendars that don't actually reflect where I am in the moment and reflect other deadlines or projects!

Usually, when we refer to time blocking though, we're referring to blocking certain chunks of time for specific tasks or projects. Oftentimes, time blocking is used in tandem with task batching where you do similar tasks at the same time - e.g., you might respond to all emails in a block, grade papers in another block, prep meals in a third block.

Types of Time Blocking I've Tried

To make things more complicated, there's a lot of variation in what tasks should be blocked together and how long people recommend those blocks be. Here are some of the time frames and methods I've tried:

• half hour blocks — I wanted this one to work because the woman who recommended it to me seemed so efficient with her time, but there were some pretty big lifestyle differences between the two of us. As someone who doesn't have kids and primarily works from home on a computer, I found that I was mostly putting the same thing in 3-4 blocks in a row. Rather than having the 1st block say "prepare lunch" and the 2nd block say "tidy the kitchen and the 3rd block say "put johnny down for a nap", I found myself labeling five blocks in a row with the words "dissertation, dissertation, dissertation." Half hour blocks turned out to be too short for me!

• 3-4 hour blocks - Most time blocking advice out on the Internet seems to recommend somewhere around 3 hour blocks. Since the short half hour blocks seemed too short for me, I tried 3-4 hour blocks for a period of time but again, this wasn't ideal for me because some days I'd work on the same project for the entire day which made the blocks moot.

• project and task based blocks - some people recommend that blocks be based on projects you are currently working on (e.g., specific research projects or blog posts) whereas others recommend blocks be based on types of tasks (e.g., you might work on sorting through your emails for a couple of hours since it's the same type of task though those emails may be about a lot of different projects). This type of time blocking worked for me depending on how busy my day was - which I'll talk about more later!

• digital and written time blocks - you can either write out your time blocks in a planner or on paper in a notebook or you can block it out on a digital calendar. For me personally, I find time blocking to be most effective when I've written down the block rather than booked it in a digital calendar.

Why time blocking hasn't really worked for me in the long term

I’ve tried about every recommended “type” of time blocking but have found that it doesn't always work for me due to the nature of my work and how I prefer to get things done - and here's why:

• I'm crap at guessing how long it'll take me to do WORK things. As a grad student, I'm constantly learning and doing things where I have absolutely no idea how to do or how long they're going to take. Cleaning and analyzing data could take me 2 hours or 2 weeks depending on how long it takes me to figure out a specific method of analysis or what data issues I might run across. Same with preparing a class - depending on the lecture topic, I might spend a couple of hours preparing to teach or I might spend an entire day. Though this might make planning in blocks of time difficult, it's a natural part of life as a grad student where the majority of the things you are doing are things you've never tried to do before. Many people I've followed or spoken to who use time blocking have more predictable tasks or more consistent jobs where the things on their to do lists are easier to predict so it appears that time blocking may work well for tasks you can easily predict and are already familiar with.

• I find that I go through seasons. Since grad school work has a very seasonal flow to it, it makes sense that time blocking isn't always the appropriate method. When there are super pressing upcoming deadlines, I find that time blocking doesn't seem to work for me because I prefer to spend days or even weeks immersed in the same project and letting the work guide me towards what to do next rather than planning to move onto a different task in the next block.

• With long-term projects time blocks can be sort of unmotivating. This goes hand in hand with the flow of graduate school work but frankly, when it takes you weeks to finish a paper, having time blocks that only accomplish tiny things or having the same time block label day after day because you still haven't finished writing your theory section can be pretty demotivating!

• I get bored or tired. This could entirely be a "me" problem - but I am a big believer in listening to your body and mind. This isn't always possible if I have a deadline but if I'm not under massive time pressure then I like to listen to my mind and work on what I feel like working on in the moment (within reason of course!). Sometimes, this results in my mind wandering off during time blocks because I really feel motivated to write rather than analyze data or prep teaching materials rather than read emails!

How I actually apply time blocking in my life today

Even though time blocking did not work for me on an everyday basis, there are still certain situations in which it works extremely well for me. Though I'm total crap at estimating how long a paper will take me to write or an analysis will take me to run, I'm really good at estimating how much time it'll take me to get through emails or grade student exams. I'm also good at estimating the time it takes me to get to different places and how long it'll take me to run an errand. So, for days where I'm on my feet running around campus or taking care of life admin things, time blocking works really well!

In the end, I do use time blocking but prefer to use it as a tool for days when it's a fit for what I need rather than an all around rule for how I run my life! As much as I love trying new productivity methods, we have to realize that all of these productivity strategies are just tools that are nice to have in order to make our lives better and not rules we have to live by if it's not serving us in that moment or on that day.

Enough of my rambling! I hope this was helpful - let me know in the comments if you've tried time blocking and what you thought of it!

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10 things to do the summer before you start your PhD

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So, you’re starting a PhD - congratulations!!! Now what? Here are 10 things to do the summer before you start your PhD!

Get to know your new home

In all likelihood, you’ve probably moved to a new place and a new school for your PhD, so if you are able, spend some time getting to know your new home! Get to know the area you live in, what restaurants, gyms, libraries or parks are in your area. Test out different grocery stores in your new location. If you have access, get to know your new campus - what are some good study spots and what building is your office in? Though these might seem like small things that you’ll familiarize yourself with over time, starting a PhD is hard work and you may not have time to think about what grocery store to go to once you’re swamped in readings and assignments! If you’re not yet in your new location, do some online research and create a bucket list of places to check out once you’ve moved. I always find that crowd sourced information from sites like Reddit are a good place to start.

Start browsing academic journals in your field

Although I am a huge proponent of taking the summer before your PhD to relax and take time for yourself, one thing I wish I’d spent a bit more time doing was browsing academic journals in my field! I’m not saying you need to read every word of every article or take copious notes, but it certainly doesn’t hurt to start looking at journals in your field and getting a sense of what journals are out there and what kinds of things people are researching. A good place to start is to look at the papers recently published by faculty and students in your department.

Get organized

I may be a little biased because I love to talk about organizing, but one thing that has been indispensable to me is having a strong organization system for keeping track of my assignments, deadlines, and research projects. I decided to use a very specific file naming system and use platforms like Notion and OneNote to manage different projects which has helped me keep track of notes from research meetings and allows me to revisit takeaways from classes I took years ago. Your organization system will most certainly change as you learn the expectations and workload required of your program but it’s a good idea to have a plan in place for how you will organize things before you get thrown in the deep end!

Try to make connections with other PhD students

One of the things I recommend the MOST to new PhD students is to have friends both in and outside of academia. Before I started my PhD, I was fortunate enough to work in a lab that allowed me to develop relationships with grad students and the summer before I started my program, I connected with several other PhD students through Bumble of all places! For me, having other PhD students in my life (even if they are not in my specific program) has been hugely beneficial to my mental health. Even if they aren’t in my department, they understand what it is like to be a PhD student, experience the same milestones, and are a great support system that is especially important when you need someone who understands the academic environment.

Keep your connections outside of your PhD program

Related to the one above - I also recommend making plans to keep and maintain your relationships with people outside of your program, especially with friends who are around the same age or stage in life! A PhD can be a pretty all consuming endeavor and it’s important to have people outside of your PhD life who can remind you that there is more to life than academia :)

Find a hobby or a passion project

It doesn’t have to be high-stakes hobby or project - just something that will help to take your mind off of your studies when you want to take a break. I think this advice applies to anyone in the work world, too. As much as you might love what you do on a day to day basis, it’s important to engage in activities outside of work that either bring you joy or develop a passion that you’re not able to engage in your everyday work. For me, this has always been on the creative side - I love to decorate my apartment, try out new make-up looks, paint, or knit. These are all more creative hobbies that I don’t actively use in my day to day job as a PhD student so it’s nice to be able to take time to remind myself that I am more than my PhD.

Establish healthy habits

It’s a hell of a lot harder to start a habit than it is to maintain an existing one - so establish those healthy habits now!! I started exercising daily about 2 years before I started my PhD and every day I still think to myself how grateful I am to have this habit so deeply ingrained in my brain. Getting into the habit of working out every day was such a struggle for me (a kid who hated gym class with a fiery passion) but now that it has become a habit, I miss it on the days that I don’t incorporate some movement into my day - even on the busy days when I’m overwhelmed by PhD things. This has also helped me tremendously on a health and productivity level because I get sick less often and feel more a wake during the day. I am a big, big, big believer that y ou cannot be productivity without taking care of your well-being first so take some time during the summer to tackle those healthy habits you want to develop so you can continue the easier work of maintaining them throughout your program.

Determine what you are and are not willing to give up for your PhD

Throughout your PhD there will be a lot of people - in academia and outside of academia - who will tell you how you should live, how you should work, and what they view as the best (or only) way to do a PhD. Remember that those people are not you. You are the only one who can determine what you are and are not willing to give up during your PhD and your academic career. As a long-time migraine sufferer, I decided decades ago that no matter how busy things were for me at work or in school, no amount of work would surpass the importance of sleep and exercise for me. People have told me that if I’m not working 80 hours a week on my PhD then it’s not enough or that I might have to give up having a social life or having a family in order to pursue an academic career. Maybe that’s true for some people, but it may not be true for you. Before you start, determine what you are and are not willing to give up for your PhD and for you own mental well-being.

Write yourself a reminder of why you are going for a PhD

There are going to be A LOT of moments where you wonder to yourself “why the heck did I want a PhD in the first place?” I’ve found that it’s really helpful to have a little note to myself of why I started it in the first place, what I wanted to accomplish, and what I wanted to do out in the world with my degree. No one else in the world has to know or see this reminder so write it for you and only you so that future you can revisit the excitement of starting a PhD.

Celebrate!

Academia is a world full of criticism, so take every moment you can to celebrate your accomplishments. You were accepted to a program and you deserve to be there! So celebrate that this summer - because you’ve achieved something great and have so many great things to look forward to! 🙂

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