Consider for a moment that since your whole K-12 and undergraduate experience that you have relied on everyone else to help guide you through your educational training. In fact, in those years everything for the most part was already laid out for you in terms of teachers, curriculum, and even when you chose your own major as an undergraduate the requirements to get that major were also laid out to you down to the credit hour. Now here goes graduate school, in which this is not fully the case. Yes there are some class requirements and a few key departmental milestones, but after that the rest of it is not at all predictable, preplanned, or scripted in a way that you can just follow for a few years. The end goal of getting your degree is there but how you get there, believe it or not, has a lot to do with you being responsible for you.
We as adults have to take full ownership and responsibility for ourselves, especially when it comes to this pursuit in higher education.
I remember when I felt like a complete imposter in one of my graduate classes (honestly almost all of them, initially) and I just did not get it. I’m a scientist ya’ll, so the topics covered in this class were abstract, very deep, and things I had only brushed the surface with in undergraduate chemistry. And to make matters worse, the professor taught from the place of being a creator in this specific field many decades prior at that time. Have you ever been taught by someone who wrote the course textbook? Or was credited for a field in many papers and books? So you see, this was an intense situation and I struggled. Not only did I not connect with the material. I did not connect with the professor. And I did not see at all how I was going to pull off getting at least a B (because a C was failing in the grad program).
After a few weeks of being far behind and too embarrassed to ask my peers for help, because of course they were getting the material, it occurred to me that I had two choices. One, keep doing what I was doing and definitely not pass the course and go down looking like a complete idiot to my peers, family, and advisor. Or two, do whatever it would take in order to ensure that the B was going to happen.
In short, it became clear to me that regardless of the obstacle of this course that was put in my way, I ultimately was the sole person responsible for whether or not I was going to pass this class. With this new conviction, I decided to “man up” you might say and take some serious actions. I went to every office hour with the professor and TA and came prepared with questions or discussed with them what I thought the lecture covered. I rewrote my notes a few times for each lecture and humbly asked a couple of my friends to share theirs so I could make sure I didn’t misunderstand or incorrectly write down my notes. I figured out who knew the material and was doing well in the course, and made friends so that I could study with them a few times. I got extra sleep on the nights before that course so I could show up awake at the minimum and really try to stay engaged. I actually read the chapters with highlighting and note taking strategies before I went to class. This I found made it easier to stay engaged and also to ask questions during class because I had something to pull from. Ultimately, all of these efforts not only resulted in my developing a positive relationship with the professor and TA, it also resulted in my mastering the concepts and topics covered in this course (which who would have known I would end up teaching years later). And of course, I got the grade. A+.
This class was one of several experiences in my graduate journey and also in my life that taught me that no matter what, at the end of it, I am responsible for me. How I choose to respond to things? How I choose to show up for class or my research? How I decide to get help when it’s needed? All of it. And so are you.
You are responsible for a lot of what happens in your graduate journey. And while this may seem harsh because there are times when it’s easier to blame a professor for not teaching the course well, or to blame your advisor for sending you down a path of a bogus experiment or research question only months later for you to figure out it fundamentally wouldn’t work, or whatever the case may be…the point is you have a lot of control and say in the matter.
When you take responsibility for you, especially in some of these areas below, you can tune into the inner genius and talents that you have to succeed in your graduate program. And not only succeed but to do so with a more positive outlook and experience. So here I share some areas that you have total responsibility for:
- How you show up to your class and learn the material
- Your health and well-being (you have permission to make this a priority and put in place the measures you need to do so)
- Your attitude and outlook on being in your program and your research group
- Getting the help you need whether it’s for a class, figuring out a quantitative method, becoming a better writer, or overcoming mental health challenges
- Communicating effectively
- How you react or respond to difficult and challenging situations
- Who you are and who you will become (ooh this is something I’ll definitely come back to on a later post)
- Figuring out how to figure it out (you don’t have to go this alone but you do have to take the steps to get help to sort things out when needed)
- How you manage your time
- Doing your part
Until next time,
Renã Robinson, PhD
