There are times that I feel such overwhelming stress and fear and obligation and hopelessness pushing down on me that I can’t leave my apartment. There are days that I feel such mounting anxiety with every step towards my office that I feel like I’m choking and have to turn around. There are the panic attacks (a wonderful new development just in time for writing my dissertation), the rumination spirals, the self-recrimination, the isolation, the hopelessness. So what helps? Sharing with others has been surprisingly liberating and supportive. I’ve kept these struggles largely invisible to others (partly from the shame of having these problems – which of course just reinforces the problem), but almost every time I’ve shared my experiences with someone, I find they are not unique. I am not alone, and you are not alone. The commonality of depression and anxiety in grad school speaks to structural problems of graduate education – not a personal or moral failure in me, or you, or any other grad student struggling with mental health. This reflects a failure of institutions (PIs, research groups, departments, universities, funding agencies) to prioritize our well-being in a meaningful way.
Barring the dismantling of toxic academic culture, what else helps? I’ve found medication and Cognitive Behavioral Therapy enormously helpful. Medication gave me the space to start working on myself, while CBT helped with identifying unhealthy thought patterns, developing positive habits, and putting structures in my life that help me stay balanced. I work every day to prioritize myself and my wellbeing and to define success in graduate school on my own terms. I lean on my friends and family. I spend time outdoors. And I remind myself that it gets better. It’s hard and it’s a struggle, but it can and will get better.
I often feel like I don’t belong in Princeton. Everyone in my department seems to be very excited and passionate about their research. They live and breathe the subject and enjoy discussing their work and new papers in the field over dinner and at parties. I find this exhausting. I like to compartmentalize work into its own box. I give it my all when I’m in lab, but I want to spend my time and attention on other things when I’m at home or out with friends. I have many interests outside of my research and feel like there are many career trajectories I could have taken if I had not decided to pursue graduate school. I sometimes feel like I am simply not “nerdy” enough to be taken seriously in my department, and I often have to pretend that I understand (or even care about) what others are discussing in social settings. This often makes me feel like a fraud and an outsider. I don’t see myself pursuing a career in academia, and I think my peers (even more than my advisor) would find this unsettling. As a woman in STEM, I suspect some of my peers would even view me as a “bad example,” since I am contributing to the “leaky pipeline” in pursuing some of my other interests/talents. I am not free to be an individual with my own ambitions without repercussions, because I have the burden of representing an entire group of people. I recently got married, and the truth is that I really do care more about my family than my work, however “traditional” that may be. I want to have kids sooner rather than later, but I have been told again and again that it is difficult to be taken seriously and to be offered post-doc positions as a pregnant woman. Even my parents who used to badger me about grandkids when I wasn’t even in a relationship have now told me that I should put my life on hold until my career is more set. I understand their logic in this advice, but I don’t want something as important as the timing of my own children to be beholden to other peoples’ arbitrary prejudices. What has helped is a close-knit group of supportive friends in whom I can confide as well as my amazing husband. Having a support network makes a huge difference, especially when feeling socially alone in my department. I think it is also super helpful to have close friends outside of Princeton to help keep me grounded.
Although not particularly socially awkward, I often feel very embarrassed after an encounter with acquaintances/friends/professors. I can often identify what I did wrong during the encounter (e.g. talking too much, not being considerate enough, not making a smooth enough conversation transition, messing up details when hosting guests, messing up something on the board during a group meeting, feeling like I have become too comfortable with my prof and forgotten my manners, etc). I can spend hours agonizing over it.
The night before Generals, I was surrounded by all my study materials, and I felt so unprepared. I just lay on the floor and cried until I fell asleep. I went on to pass by the skin of my teeth. It took me a while to summon up the courage, but I went to Princeton Counseling, and ended up starting to see a psychiatrist. I’m still far from okay, but I’m now able to stay functional, and I think I’m getting a little better every day.
In undergrad, my lab had a fantastic post-doc who made everyone (including the undergrads!) feel like valued members of the group. He not only organized the group to get work done efficiently, but also created a warm and friendly social atmosphere with regular group lunches/dinners and just a general sense of belonging and family. The culture of my lab here at Princeton is vastly different. Grad students often feel a lot of pressure to get work done unreasonably quickly. We set unrealistic goals and then constantly feel like failures when we have to report at group meetings that we didn’t meet our deadlines. Expectations are often unclear and the majority of the burden of the lab’s work usually falls on only a few graduate students. It can be difficult to value one’s own time and to set healthy boundaries when that is not the culture of the group. Individually, the people in the lab are wonderful, lovely people, but together, we have created a somewhat toxic environment. It has taken me quite some time to recognize that I can’t be dependent on my advisor or post docs to guide my education and career trajectory. As grad students, we are not technicians in a boss/employee model. Our purpose is not to churn out work for our advisors (especially not at the expense of our sanity) but to learn and grow so that we can prepare ourselves for our longer-term careers. We are in grad school because we decided to be here to better ourselves. Realizing that has been incredibly empowering and liberating for me. We shouldn’t have to be afraid to tell our advisors that we don’t want a career in academia or that we dislike one aspect of lab work and would prefer to focus our time on a different set of tasks. Something that has helped me feel better is to try to be more like that post-doc I admired so much in my undergrad. I don’t get to work with him anymore, but perhaps I can be some approximation of that person for the younger students in my lab, and that gives me hope.