3 Things They Don't Tell You About Grad School

1. Say goodbye to your friends.

Everyone always jokes about this aspect of any type of post-high school education. However, with grad school it is the only truth. You cannot have a complete life while doing a graduate program. The deadlines are based on a normal work day so most of the time your assignments will be due at midnight on Friday or Saturday (or sometimes Tuesday). This means you will spend your entire weekend trying to play catch-up on the 300 pages you have to read for each class. And if you are like me and try to work while doing school, some things just don’t happen. I work retail, at a library, and I am a full-time student. The last time I saw my friends was before Halloween. You have to give something up and if getting the degree means being a hermit, hand me the cloak.

2. Absolutely no one will understand what you are doing. (Sometimes not even you)

Graduate programs are so specialized, give up on trying to tell everyone what you are studying around the holidays. They won’t get it. Sometimes people in your own program won’t even understand. And you will have that moment (at least once a semester) when you sit there and ask yourself if you know what is going on…the answer will be no. My biggest advice for this portion(s) of grad school is to accept the unknown and talk to your advisor. Mine suggested I job shadow someone to talk about how they got to where I want to be.

3. Whatever mental illnesses you have will evolve!

I started grad school with three specific mental health issues. I won’t go into detail about that but let’s just say they were being managed. Now everything is different. They all act differently and present in different ways. For an example, my anxiety and ADD now presents as dermatillomania. This means that I am chronically picking at things without realizing it. It happens when I am reading or writing or even driving. Now I am not saying this will happen to you but, I am saying that you can’t expect to stay the way you were before you started school. But, you can adapt and change too. Having a therapist in grad school is a great idea! Mine is lovely and will let me rant about things she probably isn’t interested in and then help me find a solution. If I had the ability to change it, everyone would have a therapist.

Overall, this short blog post is not meant to scare you away from grad school but to make you think. The positives are high. You learn more about yourself than you every would in undergrad. You meet some pretty impressive people and make some friendships that will last a lifetime. And out of all of this hard work, you get to wear a funny floppy hood at graduation and feel like a dork. It will be great!