Changes are hard.

October 23, 2014 2:23 PM

I will enter a master's program in Fall 2015 in the humanities. I want to use the next year to become as prepared as possible.

The program is largely paid for and I don't need to go into debt for it. My major concern is that in undergrad, I experienced a great deal of anxiety and a touch of depression, and as a result those years of my life were socially isolating. I loved the classes I took and I'm looking forward to going back to school, but I don't want to end up in the same place I was at the end of my undergraduate career.

What practical steps can I take in the next few months to be as prepared for this change as possible? I don't currently have money for therapy, and I work in a demanding career that is tiring but fulfilling. I want your best quality of life tips. I am already trying to work on developing a consistent exercise habit; what else should I be doing?

posted by kingfishers catch fire to Health & Fitness (8 answers total)

The school where I recently completed my graduate degree actually offered therapy for free to students. I think it was because they were allowing the psychology grad students do the sessions, but still, better than nothing. So perhaps you could look into that at your school and see if they do something similar, in case you decide you need it.

Also, I did the going to grad school while working full time at a demanding job thing. It did depress me at times. The things that overwhelmed me were the little things - not having time for laundry, or to cook elaborate meals, not having tons of free time for my friends, etc. Understand now that you will have those issues come up and try to prepare for it as you can ahead of time. Maybe start getting into your schedule now things such as cooking a large meal on Sundays so you have food the whole week, doing your laundry at a set time each week, for example. The exercise thing is good. Also start getting into good sleep habits now that you can hopefully continue while in school.

Lastly - when you get to school, make friends with your classmates. Form study groups - it was so much easier for me to do the work and get everything done when I didn't feel isolated, and I felt I had others to discuss things with. Good luck! Feel free to message me if you have any other particular questions!
posted by FireFountain at 3:28 PM on October 23, 2014 [2 favorites]

Along much the same lines as FireFountain, along with setting up good routines now, do you have enough money and space in your living quarters to start stocking up on non-perishables? I cannot begin to overstate the annoyance of being a tired grad student and realizing that you're out of dishwasher soap or TP and it's midnight and you really don't want to have to go out to Walgreens or Target. If you have freezer space, start squirreling up on cheap meat as it gets closer to time (you don't want anything to freezer burn, of course). Grab canned soup when it goes on sale. Etc.

Also, if you can afford it at all, grab yourself a couple few gift cards to your favorite cheapish places to eat. Try to forget about them, and then when you're in the middle of your program and broke, you can still afford to go out with your friends occasionally.

I am totally with FireFountain; when I know that when I know my day to day stuff is taken care of - like being able to eat and have clean clothes - then my anxiety is lessened, at least. When you have papers to write and 500 pages of reading to do in a week is not when you want to get home and realize you have nothing to eat and no cat litter, you know?
posted by joycehealy at 3:37 PM on October 23, 2014 [4 favorites]

Good practical advice so far. On the academic side, start developing some reading and notetaking habits and practices that work for you! You'll have a much better handle on the workload if you hit the ground running with a system. There's lots of good threads on MeFi for this, e.g. this one, this one, this one.

Also, try and get in touch with a couple of people who will be on your program, or who are presently on it. Just say hi! It'll be nice to have at least a couple of people around you who already have you on their radar when you get there. Good luck.
posted by idlethink at 3:40 PM on October 23, 2014 [4 favorites]

For the social isolation, another habit to develop now is keeping regular contact with a few family members and/or good friends who are not going to be in the same academic program as you. It's much easier to maintain a habit like that ("I call Mom every Sunday night", "I always email friend X after I watch this week's Scandal") than to do something out of the ordinary when you're already depressed, anxious, or isolated. And when you're plunged into an all-consuming grad program, it can be really nice to have some contact with people on the outside as a reminder that not everything revolves around the post-modern critique of subject Z or whatever.
posted by katemonster at 4:07 PM on October 23, 2014 [1 favorite]

Reading the one-liner before I came inside, I thought "anxiety", and my answer was going to be something like: work on your anxiety, so that you don't try to overprepare for things as a way of controlling uncertainty, and maybe try to have as much fun in the moment as you can, such as by going on a big trip.

After reading more I still think this is my answer. Speaking as a now-finished grad student who had similar issues. Trying to do as much as you can is feeding the anxiety. The anxiety is saying, I don't trust that I can handle a bad outcome, but the situation is so wildly unpredictable that I can't guarantee a good outcome; therefore I need to invest 100% of my energy into controlling the situation making a good outcome a certainty.

In grad school there will be a lot of situations that you can't control. The behavior of professors and review committees who have a lot of power over your life, for example. Whether or not your paper gets accepted. Whether a prof likes your idea or shoots it full of holes. And if you don't trust yourself that you can handle a bad outcome, and you realize the situation is not controllable, then the only option left is to stall. It is textbook graduate school, almost the quintessential experience. We all go through it. Research and writing is agonizing precisely for this reason; not because it's technically difficult, but because the content is something new, that we've had to create, and we can't control what other people will say about it (and therefore about us) once we put it out there. We agonize over the details, and spend forever trying to make the work perfect to fend off all the angles for criticism, but it's impossible. New work is always messy, otherwise someone would have done it, and you have to respect your limits. You have to put it out there and hope for the best. And you have to trust yourself that your best is enough, and you will be proud of yourself no matter the outcome.

As someone who is fresh on the other side of eight years of grad school and two degrees, who smashed into his limits during the thesis and went through therapy and made it through only after doing a tremendous amount of emotional work: I think the number one thing you can do to prepare, by far, so far ahead that is in a league by itself, is get a head start on that emotional work. Before the inevitable crisis comes, and before you have let anxiety guide the pivotal career choices that are going to come your way again and again, such as, is this good enough to submit? Should I go to this conference? Should I talk to this bigshot whose work I admire? Should I be working on this thing that I find really interesting but which seems a bit risky? Before you miss these opportunities. Even a few sessions of therapy - like five or six, a fraction of the tuition and living costs that you're about to spend on this degree - could be transformative for you, and have a multiplying effect on what you get out of this degree.
posted by PercussivePaul at 7:07 PM on October 23, 2014 [3 favorites]

so that you don't try to overprepare for things as a way of controlling uncertainty, and maybe try to have as much fun in the moment as you can, such as by going on a big trip.

Agreed.

I'd also suggest finding an extracurricular hobby that you enjoy for its own sake and that you can keep completely separate from your academic life once you get to grad school--in other words, something to do that makes you feel good regardless of whether or not you're mindblowingly awesome at it, and that brings you into contact with new people. Grad students, especially in the early years, have a way of becoming very subtly tense, arrogant, and passive-aggressive when they socialize with each other--even if they don't mean to--and the process can get very draining if you have no other social outlet in your life. Speaking as someone who's at the opposite end of a grad program and may have to leave ABD due to burnout, I can say that the one thing that might have made the situation more bearable for me would have been having a stable group of local friends who had nothing to do with the university.
posted by urufu at 10:40 PM on October 23, 2014 [1 favorite]

This will depend on the program, but could you start to do some of the work in advance? For example, if it's the kind of program where you're going to have to read 500 pages a week, could you do some of the reading now? You'd still have to do that reading again during the class, but you'd be rereading it and thus would be ahead of the game.
posted by Mr.Know-it-some at 6:22 AM on October 24, 2014 [1 favorite]

Seconding PercussivePaul. If you were depressed and anxious as an undergrad, get out in front of it now, because grad school in the humanities (especially if you're aiming for a PhD program/academic job) will bring all those factors back in spades. Imagine if you had an allergy to book-dust, and you were going into library school -- you would want to get on top of your allergy shots ahead of time and rigorously keep up with them. So -- exercise routine is a great thing. Therapy if you can. (Maybe there's a sliding scale provider near you?) Pick up The Feeling Good Handbook and go through it doing the exercises. When you get to school, get yourself set up with a local therapist who can help you keep perspective and avoid getting yourself into trouble.
posted by LobsterMitten at 12:13 PM on October 24, 2014