I don’t think I can accurately put into summation what it feels like being a graduate student. I usually resort to a dark humor-esque analogy when my relatives and friends bombard me with the ever-common question: “So how is graduate school going Meghan?”
My favorite comeback thus far has to be: “Moments of sheer unhinged confusion and catastrophizing combined with the sweet taste of burnt coffee and hysterical laughter amongst my cohort in the graduate room when we trauma bond.”
But I love these moments, and I love getting to have more of them ever since I became a graduate student. There is something about enduring an experience with people around you that makes things easier to get through when you’re struggling inside and outside. There is therapy in admitting across a small table that you are not prepared today, you are not happy today, and you don’t know how to feel better right now. But the helpful part doesn’t solely come from offering solutions or even offering help with assignments, sometimes the helpful part is someone who looks you dead in your eyes and says, “I’m a wreck right now too.” As graduate students in the realm of higher academia, we are so eager to offer support in times of hardship, because in a sense, that’s all we know and constantly juggle during our time in grad school.
That, in the purest of means, is what it means to be a graduate student in an academic institution. Not only are self-soothing, coping, and distraction valid ways to cope with the whirlwind of responsibilities you have to fulfill your role as a graduate student, but they are the reasons we hang in there too. University is meant to challenge our ability to critically think about our lives and develop how we conduct ourselves as academic professionals, but that doesn’t mean we don’t get to mess up, a lot sometimes. When you get to Graduate School, you feel as though you’re supposed to have the logistics of academia and student life mastered and tuned to your own unique contexts. You’re not supposed to fail exams because hey, you’ve been here for four years now and who the hell fails an exam after they got their Bachelor’s and have been in the throes of academic life for so long?
Well, that would be me. And I didn’t just fail by a little, I failed by a lot. And it was the best thing that ever happened to me as a student. Not only did I realize that I will never seek a career in statistical analysis (go figure), more importantly, I learned how to take accountability and collaborate on what I could do to still finish adequately and maintain my sanity while doing it. It’s not the failure of something that defines you, it’s how you pick up the pieces afterwards that lets you know what you’re made of.
Being in Graduate School means simultaneously and harmoniously feeling like you have everything under control and somehow wandering aimlessly in your mind like a zombie. The graduate experience can not only test the boundaries of your coffee tolerance, but it also tests your ability to think on your feet and come up with solutions or sacrifices that can be made to keep your mental stability semi-thriving. Being a graduate student means that in some small or big way, you have sacrificed to be here and have had to make difficult decisions. I acknowledge you, and I see the drive it takes to constantly have to prove yourself that you belong.
The other day I started to grasp why I loved and struggled with my first semester of Graduate School so much. There is a lot expected of a student in grad school and in a sense, an overwhelming amount of pressure to maintain a professional and academic reputation to feel like you’re being taken seriously. But there are also spaces within your cohort and supervisors to let go and conduct yourself in silly and expressive ways, and this is so very much needed to feel validated as we do with academic praise. It’s nice to be told you’re smart and you’re bright, it’s even nicer to be told that you don’t have to always be smart and bright. Just being someone who cares enough to be here at all is admirable enough.
The heart of a graduate student lies in their unwavering determination to make it work and to keep moving, to keep trying. This part of our heart that remains always dimly or brightly stems from our bold and expansive need to want, to yearn for a professional or personal life that fulfills us one day. However, in the most laymen of ideas, our thirst for curiosity and critique of society lets us ask the harder questions not only for the places and people we interact with, but ourselves too.
To all Graduate students just know this and know it well, we are perfectly flawed, we evolve so much in so many different ways, and we remain agents of pure and remarkable capability.