Keeping friendships in grad school?

January 17, 2007 6:59 AM

As a doctoral student, how do you maintain friendships with non-academics? With all the lab work and time that goes into research, there isn't a lot of time for fun. And it seems that friends and family don't always understand it - especially for first-generation students from places where not everyone goes to college. Have any of you had this experience? What's hard about maintaining relationships with friends and family -- and how do you cope?
posted by anondonna to education (21 comments total)

Beer. Seriously.

As an academic, it can be really hard to think and discuss happenings outside of your micrometer of the universe. Toss back two beers, and your thought processes may 'relax' a little bit.

I've been there. Two years ago, my PhD was conferred, and all my lifelong pre-PhD relationships are still strong. Probably thanks to beer.
posted by u2604ab at 7:33 AM on January 17, 2007

Join a club, sport or social where the focus is away from your work. This might well also lead to u2604ab's solution.

Your other friends will still be interested in whatever they were interested in before, they'll also be useful for getting away from the whole PhD process/environment and giving you a welcome break, take advantage of those every so often to remain sane and keep in touch at the same time. Win-win.

In my experience, you will only really talk to others within your field about the majority of your PhD work (who the hell else will be interested?), so foster friendships with other PhD students, most institutions will offer multiple options for meeting other postgrads so take advantage of them. These will be social but also professional, e.g. attending seminars, going to classes on writing/prepping theses, etc.

If none of your family went to college then you might well grow apart intellectually, keep in touch with them with regaular phone calls/visits. Try asking them what's going on in their lives, your other friends/relatives at home, general gossip, etc. They'll probably be pretty proud of you when you get your scroll ('...as my son, the doctor, was saying the other day...').
posted by biffa at 7:46 AM on January 17, 2007

As the (non-student) partner of a PhD student, I've got to say that the secret is listening. Your experiences aren't necessarily going to be interesting or even comprehensible to them, so make the time you spend with those people more about them than about you. My partner asks about my day every day, pays complete attention while I talk, and asks questions about what I do. Of course, I make the same effort in return, but the way that she sincerely listens and cares about what I do is really important to me and is part of what keeps the relationship working. Surely your friends and relatives will feel the same.

Also, come up with a "sound bite" way of describing what it is you study/do all day. Even if it's not completely accurate, it will give other people a basis for conversing with you. It sounds like you're in the sciences, so pick an issue that's in the news that's similar to what you do. When someone asks about what you've been up to, you can relate your work to something they'll know about.
posted by marginaliana at 7:54 AM on January 17, 2007

I really didn't have an issue with this myself. It's useful to talk about work over a beer/social event, so I socialise with my lab mates a lot. But the outside-of-uni mates are still around. They sometimes seem to find my decisions a bit odd (choosing to work long hours for little pay, for example!) but we still meet up, go out for beer/theatre/cinema etc.

I suspect there's an underlying issue here that's not been made explicit, and that is the way that grad school can sometimes take over your whole life. If you're working all hours, and socialising mainly with grad-school peers, your main topic of conversation may well be your work and that's all well and good in certain company. I've even heard people say things like "I've not read a novel since I started - I feel guilty reading stuff which isn't related to my PhD".

I think that approach is all wrong. You have to be able to discuss other stuff too, get some distance from the work, and it's really important not to get out of practice talking "crap" - TV, weather, sports, whatever. I did a completely unrelated evening class (french) for the last few years of my PhD and it was great to learn something completely different - but some of my peers were amazed that I would give up that much potential research time to something orthogonal. But hey, here I am, with the doctorate, and the postdoc position, and I'm still sane, so it worked.

The most successful grad students treat it like any other job - work the 9 to 5, work late when need be, and don't let it stop you doing the socialising you were doing before.
posted by handee at 8:01 AM on January 17, 2007 [2 favorites]

I'm in the same shoes you are, anondonna, and it is indeed tough!

Your program, and more importantly, your investigator will always push you (hard!) to maximize your lab time and output -- there's always more grant data to be generated, competitors to scoop, papers to write, and talks to prepare.

This makes it tough to maintain friendships, and to make new friends.

What I've found to be somewhat helpful is drawing a line in the sand: this is how much time I will dedicate to the lab, and this is how much time I will actively use to pursue my own interests -- which feeds into content to socialize with my friends about.
posted by NucleophilicAttack at 8:04 AM on January 17, 2007

I got my PhD in the humanities and not the sciences, but I do have a number of good friends who are science PhD grad students and postdocs.

The ones who tend to be successful at keeping in contact with non-scientist friends (or at least with me) seem to be the ones who put a hard limit on the time they spend in the lab--they usually work eight-hour days and quit between 5:00 and 7:00. Certainly it's the case in the humanities that academic work will expand or contract to fit the time you allot to it--I can't be certain that this is equally true in the sciences, but I'd guess that it's partly true. If it's the culture in your lab or department to work crazy hours, then consider rejecting that part of the culture.

They're also proactive with making social arrangements with me, even if those arrangements are at the last minute ("Hey, do you want to meet for a drink in an hour or so?"). Since I'm corporate right now, my evenings are almost always free, so last-minute arrangements don't bother me that much.
posted by Prospero at 8:04 AM on January 17, 2007

Seconding u2604ab. I survived grade school because of my weekly beer with my non-academic friends. By the second pint, you totally forget your research and you start socializing like a normal human being.
posted by racingjs at 8:07 AM on January 17, 2007

I survived grade school because of my weekly beer

Wow, that must've been one progressive school.

Offering some observations from the other side of the equation (a non-college grad who's better half has a masters degree), the people amongst her grad school associates who seemed to socialize easiest with non-academics were those who had taken a break between college and graduate work and worked at more prosaic jobs or those who had passionate non-academic hobbies like music, or comics or stuff like that. And as the man said, beer helps.
posted by jonmc at 8:21 AM on January 17, 2007

Here's my brutal assessment, as someone who is trying to finish up a humanities PhD.

The basic problem is that grad school makes one very boring. The problem isn't your non-understanding friends or family. It's you. You need to stop being so boring, so that you can successfully be around people who don't care about your work.

How to do this:

1. Keep up with pop culture. Things like sports, T.V. shows and movies provide a common ground that people can discuss on an equal footing. Try to stay abreast of those things.

2. Try to exercise in a social setting. Instead of going to the gym, putting on headphones, and spending a half-hour on the stairmaster, join a basketball league, take a dance class, sign up for the Master's swim team, etc.
posted by craichead at 8:48 AM on January 17, 2007 [2 favorites]

I have a similar problem. I am a PhD student, my boyfriend is not and I have nothing to talk to his friends about.

I try to have 3 relavent pop culture stories on hand.
posted by k8t at 9:28 AM on January 17, 2007

Also, come up with a "sound bite" way of describing what it is you study/do all day. Even if it's not completely accurate, it will give other people a basis for conversing with you.

The other thing to come up with is the alternative sound bite that tells people that you do weird shit that they don't want to talk about.

This probably depends on field. I do political science, so there's always a danger that J. Random Conversant will start asking me what offices I've run for, or how we should fix Iraq, or what I think of some random local political event from three counties over. None of which is at all fun for me. But if you're doing a lab science, this might be less common.

Anyhow, the practical upshot is that if you seem to be normal and ask me what I do, then "I study legislatures" or "I study differences in rules and structure between different legislatures." But if for whatever reason the red flags have come up, I'm worried that I'm about to get trapped in an hour-long tedious conversation about stuff I don't want to talk about, and you ask me what I do, then "I develop mathematical models of internal legislative institutions and test them statistically." At least sometimes, this means that we can get back to talking about Family Guy or Blade Runner or whatever.

The basic problem is that grad school makes one very boring. The problem isn't your non-understanding friends or family. It's you.

No, the problem is also that people find it hard to get some aspects of academic life.

I've had to explain on numerous occasions, often again and again, that I can't just send my resume to LocalSchool -- if there's no job being advertised, there really isn't a job being advertised. I've have to explain to my mother multiple times that her casual acquaintance who teaches mechanical engineering cannot help me get a job at LocalUniversity doing political science. I've had to explain again and again that the journals my stuff ends up in are not popular magazines that you can pick up at the newsstand.
posted by ROU_Xenophobe at 9:33 AM on January 17, 2007 [1 favorite]

ROU_Xenophobe, yes. Agreed. The way things work in acadcemia is close enough to the way things work in the larger world that people do think one can just send out cold resumes and use contacts in the same ways. The path I take, when confronted with something like that, is usually to admit that "gee, academia is weird!!", which I find puts the other person at ease.

I think everyone has excellent suggestions (the beer, especially...). The basic sum of it is to not let your life be taken over by your research. I am even in the position of having a research concnetration that is "fun" (I had to go to bars for part of it), but even that gets boring for some people. Have something else to talk about, yes, but also have something else to do.

Conversely, when you meet/see someone you do not like at all and do not want to talk to in any way, you can always spout off some extremely technical garbage and watch their eyes glaze over before they hurriedly excuse themselves.
posted by oflinkey at 9:50 AM on January 17, 2007

No, the problem is also that people find it hard to get some aspects of academic life.

That's true, and it can be annoying. For instance, my parents can't seem to wrap their heads around why it takes so long to write a dissertation, and they have a really hard time understanding that just because school isn't in session, it doesn't mean that I'm free to drop everything and act like I'm on vacation. It's a source of tension, for sure. But I haven't had trouble maintaining friendships with non-academics, and I've managed to work through most of my issues with my family. I think it basically comes down to realizing that all relationships require some effort, and you're not exempt from that effort just because your work culture tells you that you're above things like fun and relationships. If you can't talk about anything but your work, you're going to have a limited pool of friends, because you will be boring to everyone but people who work in your field (as well as to many people who work in your field but prefer not to talk about it 24/7). If you don't have time for fun, nobody is going to want to be your friend, because you're going to begrudge them every minute you spend with them. That's just kind of the way it goes. It's not anyone else's fault for not being understanding.

Incidentally, my sense is that this is generally more of a problem early in your academic career and that most people find a better equilibrium after their first couple of years of grad school.
posted by craichead at 10:01 AM on January 17, 2007

I'm a non-doctoral student dating a doctoral student. My biggest challenge has been my eyes glazing over. I just don't completely understand what he does and I don't totally get the steps that it takes to get there (in the lab for example). I'm working on it, but I would say that's the biggest PhD/non PhD challenge. My job is easy to discuss, but it's harder to have the "how was your day" conversation from his side. So I would say to use lay terms (sort of like what marginaliana says) and be patient in consistently explaining why you have to be in the lab and why you have to travel to XYZ conference and why you have to get a post-doc.

Other than that, I would set aside some time for fun and friends. Your mental health will thank you and it will be a good way to reconnect. Believe it or not, the time does exist, you just have to be good about forcing yourself to take it. I would also change your mental outlook on this. It seems that you've posed it as a me vs. them situation, but really, the main goal is to continue being yourself and continue to nurture your relationships (not: how can I make these people understand me).
posted by ml98tu at 10:27 AM on January 17, 2007

SO of a PhD candidate in Condensed Matter Physics here. I thoroughly second any suggestions that cultivating pop-culture knowledge is a great way to keep it together with your friends. Not only that, but watching a few episodes of the Simpsons or chilling out with some comics is also a great way of stopping your brain from overheating.

I'd also like to second the "double sound bite" sentiment
ROU_Xenophobe expressed. Use the good one on science friendly people, and the tricky one on people who will want to gnaw your ear off. The Man also has a habit of describing his research as "work", something that conjures up more images of fiddly time consuming lab activity and less of sitting around classrooms passing notes to friends. The word 'school' conjures up very different images for people without any tertiary experience than it does those who've been through that wringer.

Keeping in touch with friends can be easier than it seems. We also invite friends over about once a week for wine and nibbly things, though if you wanted to give that a go you'd probably be better off doing it every few weeks, since I do most of the actual leg work for that one. It's a good way of rounding up the troops, and it's not that hard to grab a bottle of vino and a wheel of brie. At one point we also had a weekly cocktail night at a cafe not that far from our house. If your buddies are tech-saavy, social networking sites like Livejournal or *shudder* even Myspace.

Out of curiosity: what branch of science are you working in? is it the sort of thing that glazes laymen over (i.e, Condensed Matter Physics) or something with a more tangible aspect (maybe medical science or biology?)
posted by Jilder at 7:46 PM on January 17, 2007

Erm, that would be "If your buddies are tech-saavy, social networking sites like Livejournal or *shudder* even Myspace can be a good way of keeping track of them."
posted by Jilder at 7:48 PM on January 17, 2007

Jilder - I'm in the social sciences, but what I do is more technical and "boring"

Everyone: You guys have offered some really helpful commentary -- it's good to know that I'm not the only one whose family and friends don't get the dissertation process or how getting an academic job is not as easy as stopping by and filling out an application.

Handee's suggestion to treat it as a job is one I've heard before but somehow it makes more sense or is more realistic coming from a "real" person and not some book on surviving academia.

Ml98tu is right about focusing on nurturing relationships rather than simply wondering why I'm misuderstood.

As many of you have mentioned, I need to relax more, listen, kick back, and keep a finger on pop culture -- and stop talking about my work incessantly.
posted by anondonna at 6:35 AM on January 18, 2007

I think beer is quite essential to keep friends across educational borders. Try tease your friends about how the beer is made. I have some non-university friends who are very scientific about how they make their own beer, but if I told them that they were using science to make it, they would probably scold me :-) (being too nerdy, that is.)

I am not a gender specialist at all, but I happen to think that true inter-educational-level friendships are more difficult for women than for men, but I would like to be proven wrong on that one, of course.

Then of course there is the "all women like trash men"- stereotype, of which k8t is a prominent member of. I never understood the concept: to end up with someone so stupid that you have to make up stories to be able to talk with his/her friends, but it certainly is sociologically intriguing!
posted by KimG at 4:07 PM on January 18, 2007

KimG - I think you're reading an awful lot into k8t's statement, and I hope you're wrong about the inter-educational-level friendships being harder for women thing.
posted by handee at 2:18 AM on January 19, 2007

Damn. "Social Sciences" opens you up to long-winded rants from people about what they think is "wrong with Society these days", and nothing that can be said will help. I acidentally managed a sociology minor, and even that piddling little knowledge got me the rants.

Looks like you'll only need the deflecting sound bite, then.
posted by Jilder at 2:30 AM on January 21, 2007

Yeah -- I mention my field and everyone wants to talk about it -- but typically way off controversial topics that are not at all related to what I do..... deflection is essential :)
posted by anondonna at 7:54 AM on February 2, 2007