Guilt-Free Social Life, Part 2: Steps Toward Guaranteed Free Time

Part 1:  Importance of Outside Activities
Part 2:  Steps Toward Guaranteed Free Time
Part 3:  Success Stories

Last week, I wrote about why a social life is important and offered some suggestions on activities to take in order to be a happier (and more productive) graduate student. This week I'm going to focus on how to feel OK about doing something for fun when you could be counting cells.

It's hard not to feel like you're letting someone down when you take time to do personal things as a graduate student. You're either letting your mentor, your labmates, your loved ones, or yourself down by not getting your research accomplished in the shortest amount of time possible. However, you don't want to be locked in a lab all day every day or graduate school will really begin to feel like a prison sentence. ("Just 4 more years and I'm eligible for parole...I mean my PhD.") So, how do you get over these feelings and let your mentor (and yourself) know that you're going to doing things other than analyze data on Friday night?

First, you must open your lines of communication with your mentor. You don't have to tell him/her everything (or everytime) you plan something extracurricular but do let your advisor know about the new class you are taking at the rec center, your love of March Madness games, or your daughter’s ballet recital. It helps them to understand that things other than your research are important to you.

Second, you must be assertive. Assertiveness is something every graduate student must become comfortable with (I don't think a single student would get their degree if they didn't assert themselves). This doesn't mean you bully your labmates into getting out of the tissue culture hood so you can catch the 5:30 movie but it does mean that you act confident about the fact that you deserve a weekend camping trip because of all the hard (and productive) work you've been putting in over the past month...just make sure you actually have been working hard (not just at checking your email on the lab computer). Your mentor might tell you that taking Friday off is only going to extend your time to degree and you have to be OK with that. When you look back on your life, you are going to be happier knowing you spent every other Friday afternoon out of the lab experiencing new things or spending time with your family, even if it means you defend your thesis 2 or 3 months later than you would have otherwise.

Third, you must plan. As I mentioned in my previous post, if you find that you aren’t doing anything fun outside of the lab, you can schedule your extracurricular activities into your life like they are appointments (or experiments). This makes you committed to them and helps you plan your time in the lab accordingly. If you know you have a volleyball game every Thursday night, you can plan when you need to finish up on Thursdays in order to make it to the game in time. Maybe this means you come back to the lab after the game for a late night but you’re going to feel better knowing you took time for you before this late night.

Next week, I'll write about how this can work in real life.