The journey to your doctoral degree is a long one when you’re in it but in the course of your entire life is but a short chapter. That said, to wait until you’ve completed this journey and defend your dissertation or choose to walk across the commencement stage, is a long time to wait for a big celebration. Four, five, six years later is too long to pop open the champagne or Martinelli’s. What if instead you celebrated along the journey?
But what’s to celebrate along this journey you ask? I’m glad you did. Let’s see.
Everyday certainly does not feel like a win in graduate school and in fact most days can feel like you’re absolutely failing at everything including the smallest things like taking good notes in class. But what if you celebrate instead the fact that you were able to take notes at all in class and that you showed up to class.
You turn in your second draft of your first manuscript to your advisor and get it back a month later tremendously marked up and automatically internalize that you must be a horrible writer and there’s no way you’re ever going to get this paper submitted. But what if instead you viewed having a draft that you can fix that is further along than it was two months ago, as a win. Indeed, this is a considerable win and it gets you a few steps closer to the draft that is worth submitting.
The experiment you ran in lab continues to give you poor quality data and you can’t figure out which step you need to fix to make it better, because you’ve tried everything you know how to do. So, day after day you feel like a failure and that you don’t have what it takes to do this. But what if instead you changed your perspective and celebrated the fact that you actually know how to run an experiment in the lab that you had no clue how to run a few years ago and that getting data, albeit poor, means that you’re still moving in the right direction but could use some help or fresh eyes to get to that quality data. And that you are determined to not quit and get to this quality data showcases how much of a winner you actually are. Most champs get knocked down every now and then but certainly don’t stay there.
Celebrating your wins and seeing more things as wins, will do a lot for your confidence and your mindset. I recognize that in the midst of everything happening today that is not your normal it can feel like you’re not winning at all and there’s nothing worth celebrating. But first and foremost, remember that you are worth celebrating. You’re alive. You’re hopefully well, at least well enough that you can read this. And you’re still here to make decisions that will keep you moving forward in a positive direction. Yes, you can and have the power to make decisions to keep moving forward in a positive direction.
Next you can celebrate the small wins of the day, such as making that outline that was needed to start your paper, reading that literature article that you’ve been staring at all week, creating that data table that will help you figure out your next project steps. These are important feats and your taking time to celebrate them will propel you to keep making progress and increase your confidence that you can do this, despite all that’s happening in the world around you.
And if you’ve been able to get into a zone and develop tunnel vision in this time and make big progress (got a draft completed, paper submitted, dataset analyzed, completed a take home exam, fill in the blank here), I celebrate you in this time and am excited for you!!! Yasss!!! You did that and you deserve to take a moment to celebrate this achievement and milestone. I know it doesn’t seem right to do so in this moment but believe me, we all need something and someone to be excited for and help us have a positive outlook for a moment in time.
Struggling to celebrate yourself. Why not schedule a Zoom meeting (you must be really good with this at this point) and have a virtual happy hour with friends! Or call up your family and let them know in lay terms, what you just accomplished for the day (it’s okay if they don’t fully understand it). Or better yet call one of your colleagues who knows how rough it’s been for you to get to this win and will genuinely be happy for you and also encouraged themselves to get going.
Again, this graduate journey doesn’t require that you have to wait until the end to have a celebration. Start now and continue to celebrate your wins, big and small, along the way. You deserve it!!
Until next time,
Renã AS Robinson, PhD
Photo by Jill Wellington from Pexels
