by Elizabeth Kiss
While working full-time and going to graduate school full-time is hard, it’s doable. You will just most likely be exhausted, overly emotional and socially unavailable. You hear PhD students say that MA students have it easy. They forget that there are only two differences between us: (1) PhD students are funded and MA students are not; and (2) They work 20 hours a week, and we work 40. You’re taking the same seminars, you’re doing the same amount of coursework, you’re contributing to the same discussions they are. That being said, do not resent your cohort. It is not their fault. You might get irritated when they complain about how tired they are, or how stressed they are. Don’t. It’s a waste of energy. Just take a deep breath and remind yourself that you can do this. If you’re working full time and going to graduate school full time, you’re not going to have time to bond with your colleagues anyway. You’re going to waste so much energy you need with that negativity. Trust me on this one. That being said, this is the perfect sentence to segway to the graduate school workload!
I’d love to say there is a way to prepare you for the amount of work you will be doing, but there really isn’t. You’re expected to be working on your seminar papers for your pro-sems, your dissertation or thesis and keeping up with a ton of reading and also working. I hear a lot about Google calendar alerts and day planners and alarms when it comes to organizing your life. I tried that. I scheduled everything into Google, down to date nights with my amazingly understanding boyfriend, family dinners with my parents and siblings on Sunday and lunches with my friends. It never worked. Perhaps its easier if you’re not studying something as horrific as crimes against humanity, gang rapes and genocide—but there were days I just got up from my reading and walked away from it. Other times, my friends would come and drag me from the house and make me leave in order to get away from academia. If you plan on scheduling your life down to the last second, you need to remember one thing: Take care of yourself. Get away from your employment and your graduate work. Don’t feel guilty about it, either. Everything you’re working on in graduate school, should theoretically, in a perfect world, contribute to your thesis or dissertation. So do not burn yourself out on it. I tried to remain that organized my first semester, and I am a fairly organized individual by nature. I would not be over-exaggerating if I said that my first semester of graduate school, combined with a full time job, was the most stressful time of my life. My days would start at 4:00 AM every morning and would continue until 10:00 PM at night, and that is if I got to bed on time. Those organizational skills? Out the window. Once I lost that rigid schedule I tried to impose on my life in order to remain in control, everything got a lot easier.
Will people be sympathetic to your work schedule? I believe it truly depends. While most of my professors were sympathetic to my plight, others were not. My academic adviser and another professor told me that had I simply had the time to sit down and focus more of my attention on my studies, I would excel. But I listened to criticism more than anything. After a professor told me that my papers were rushed and sounded like foreign policy rants with no empirical evidence to back them up, and that I shouldn’t be in the program, I almost gave up. It was this specific professor’s words and hostile actions towards me that had me considering quitting the program. Not the workload, not the ability to do my own research—the fact that a professor was able to make me feel so terrible about myself in five minutes when I had gone in to ask for guidance. I had not scheduled a meeting with him to beg for leniency. I was honest when I said this was not my best work and that I was under a lot of pressure at work. That was unimportant. For the next six weeks of the semester, after being repeatedly told I was wrong in front of my cohort when I expressed an opinion on the material, I just stopped participating. I think it is important to inform any graduate students who are working on top of their scholarly pursuits that not all of your professors are going to care if you are working or not.
I will end this with the following advice I received from a member of my cohort who is also working full time: “Hang in there lady. It gets different and then the same and then different and hard and intense and basically a ginormous emotional roller coaster!” Holly basically summed up graduate school in one sentence.
Don’t give up though. It takes a special type of person to go to graduate school and work. You’re basically working two full-time jobs. Juggle as best as you can, take care of yourself and remain positive. You’ll do great.
Good luck and May The Force Be With You!
Elizabeth is a first year MA student at Arizona State University’s School of Politics and Global Studies studying comparative politics and international relations, specifically focusing on gender and sexual violence and inequality in Post-Communist countries. On top of her full-time graduate status, she also works at Parker Schwartz, PLLC, a law firm in North Phoenix, as an intellectual property legal assistant to Ira Schwartz.
I’d love to say there is a way to prepare you for the amount of work you will be doing, but there really isn’t. You’re expected to be working on your seminar papers for your pro-sems, your dissertation or thesis and keeping up with a ton of reading and also working. I hear a lot about Google calendar alerts and day planners and alarms when it comes to organizing your life. I tried that. I scheduled everything into Google, down to date nights with my amazingly understanding boyfriend, family dinners with my parents and siblings on Sunday and lunches with my friends. It never worked. Perhaps its easier if you’re not studying something as horrific as crimes against humanity, gang rapes and genocide—but there were days I just got up from my reading and walked away from it. Other times, my friends would come and drag me from the house and make me leave in order to get away from academia. If you plan on scheduling your life down to the last second, you need to remember one thing: Take care of yourself. Get away from your employment and your graduate work. Don’t feel guilty about it, either. Everything you’re working on in graduate school, should theoretically, in a perfect world, contribute to your thesis or dissertation. So do not burn yourself out on it. I tried to remain that organized my first semester, and I am a fairly organized individual by nature. I would not be over-exaggerating if I said that my first semester of graduate school, combined with a full time job, was the most stressful time of my life. My days would start at 4:00 AM every morning and would continue until 10:00 PM at night, and that is if I got to bed on time. Those organizational skills? Out the window. Once I lost that rigid schedule I tried to impose on my life in order to remain in control, everything got a lot easier.
Will people be sympathetic to your work schedule? I believe it truly depends. While most of my professors were sympathetic to my plight, others were not. My academic adviser and another professor told me that had I simply had the time to sit down and focus more of my attention on my studies, I would excel. But I listened to criticism more than anything. After a professor told me that my papers were rushed and sounded like foreign policy rants with no empirical evidence to back them up, and that I shouldn’t be in the program, I almost gave up. It was this specific professor’s words and hostile actions towards me that had me considering quitting the program. Not the workload, not the ability to do my own research—the fact that a professor was able to make me feel so terrible about myself in five minutes when I had gone in to ask for guidance. I had not scheduled a meeting with him to beg for leniency. I was honest when I said this was not my best work and that I was under a lot of pressure at work. That was unimportant. For the next six weeks of the semester, after being repeatedly told I was wrong in front of my cohort when I expressed an opinion on the material, I just stopped participating. I think it is important to inform any graduate students who are working on top of their scholarly pursuits that not all of your professors are going to care if you are working or not.
I will end this with the following advice I received from a member of my cohort who is also working full time: “Hang in there lady. It gets different and then the same and then different and hard and intense and basically a ginormous emotional roller coaster!” Holly basically summed up graduate school in one sentence.
Don’t give up though. It takes a special type of person to go to graduate school and work. You’re basically working two full-time jobs. Juggle as best as you can, take care of yourself and remain positive. You’ll do great.
Good luck and May The Force Be With You!
Elizabeth is a first year MA student at Arizona State University’s School of Politics and Global Studies studying comparative politics and international relations, specifically focusing on gender and sexual violence and inequality in Post-Communist countries. On top of her full-time graduate status, she also works at Parker Schwartz, PLLC, a law firm in North Phoenix, as an intellectual property legal assistant to Ira Schwartz.