If you follow me on Twitter, you know October has been a rough month for me.  When I started this semester, I knew October would be Hell Month.  I was right.  Some of you already know all of the things I am going vent about in this blog post, so my apologies for being a broken record.

Sometimes things happen that are completely out of your control.  For example, there are times you might work two jobs and have two midterms, two assignments, a research proposal and a Thesis due in the same week.  Or you might have to use Undergraduates for your Thesis experiment and they don’t give a shit about anything, so they don’t show up to your experiment and if you don’t have two people at the same time, you can’t conduct your study.  Or you might not have any research assistants in the lab to help you collect data, code personality measures, conduct verbal content analysis on your experiment recordings or enter data.  Or you may not be able to control that there are only 168 hours in a week, that your body requires some sleep and sustenance to function or that in America we are supposed to bathe regularly. Or you may not be able to control that you are one person who really needs a personal assistant or a husband or someone, dear God, I just need someone to do little things for me like go to the bank or take my car in for an oil change or do my laundry or SOMEthing.

Sometimes, things get ugly in grad school and in my experience the ugly happens in the middle and at the end of each semester.

I won’t make the Thesis defense deadline

The last two weeks were brutal.  Even though I requested a few days off from both of my jobs, I still only slept between three and five hours each night. I was working in the lab for 17 to 20 hours at a time, so I am thankful I live so close to campus now. The last day to defend is November 11th for December graduation. Data collection did not go smoothly again this semester (due to a lack of research assistants and multiple no-shows).  Once I chose to end data collection (well before reaching statistical power), I organized the twenty recorded conversations from each two-hour session.

My adviser finally approved bringing on some RAs last week.  I grabbed a few Junior/Senior Undergraduates in Psi Chi and we hung out in the lab and coded every.freaking.single utterance in those recordings using an emergent leadership coding scheme that describes various categories of utterances. The coding and data entry took about 100 hours total. Why? It’s just the joy of verbal content analysis. When I say joy, I mean Hell. I worked all weekend on my analyses and a draft of my results.

Tonight I rested my brain for the most part by reading a few chapters in a textbook, catching up on 100 emails in my Inbox and blogging.  The rest of this weekend I am conducting my analyses to the best of my ability (as I read through old notes and textbooks about repeated measures multivariate  analysis of covariance) in the hopes that I can churn out a decent draft of the Results and Discussion section.  My adviser will receive a copy on Monday and he will throw it back to me as soon as possible.  (I don’t even want to think about the three assignments due this week that usually take about ten hours each).

Ideally, your adviser and committee look over your draft in enough time to give you some feedback before the public defense. So at this point, it looks like I won’t graduate again. I don’t want to rush right here at the end in case I make an error only to discover it in the middle of my presentation in front of people who know everything about statistics.  I will still defend this semester, but it won’t be in two weeks. I just hope the department will allow me to participate in Commencement. I already purchased a cap and gown and announcements. This is what I get for planning ahead.

I failed a midterm

As I pushed myself as hard as I could to finish data entry, I completed my assignments for the week, churned out a 30 page midterm exam in one class and then proceeded to fail a midterm in another class because I ran out of time. Yes, I failed it. We went over the answers together in class. Granted, this is a course that employs a great deal of Calculus and the instructor assumes we’ve all created Monte Carlo simulations in Excel before and I’ve never even taken Calculus and certainly have never ever used Excel for simulations.  I digress. I am not the only one who failed and we talked with the professor after class about it, but he didn’t seem too understanding. In his defense, I probably could have stayed awake for three days straight to finish it, but I chose a nap over a good grade.

Sometimes we have to make choices like that in grad school and in life. Sometimes you do your best, but it is not enough because there are things we either can’t control or because we try to do too much. Sometimes you decide to sleep or watch an hour of Buffy because your brain just can’t figure out how to solve a particular problem or answer a particular question.

It is not the end of the world if I don’t finish my thesis this semester or if I make a C in a class. Still, the program would place me on academic probation and there are implications for funding and courses counting toward my PhD.

The bright side

I survived this month remembering I have some of the most amazing friends on the planet. The level of camaraderie that emerged this month just within my lab was incredible. We spent so much time together. Each of us had our own reasons for staying up multiple days in a row and laughing at nothing at noon on Monday and sobbing uncontrollably at 2am on Wednesday. We had our own reasons for eating donuts for dinner because we didn’t have time to go to the grocery store this week and the only things we had in the lab at 2am on Thursday were some leftover donuts from the lab meeting.  We give good hugs and tell each other it is OK to cry because we genuinely care about each other.  We give the best advice because we are going through this right now with each other.  We truly do understand what we are all going through and it is such a relief.  Also, we bring each other gifts (i.e., we bring giant bottles of wine to the lab when we cry in front of each other).  No matter what we have going on in our personal, work or academic lives, we “get” it and are there for one another.

Before classes, friends would text me to ask if I needed food or coffee.  Others emailed or called or hit me up on gchat. I mean, you know you are on the verge of crazy when other grad students in your program who are just as busy are making sure you eat lunch. (On a side note: At some point four of us were working in one of the rooms in our lab and we realized I was humming Third Eye Blind’s “Jumper.”  It was funny in a creepy, Alex might need to be medicated after this semester, step away from the computer kind of way.)

My grad school homies were not the only people who reached out to me over the last two weeks.  Many of you sent me texts, DMs, emails and tweets throughout the day to make sure I was alive. OK, maybe it wasn’t *that* bad, but you did your best to lift my spirits, send me warm thoughts and make me smile. You know who you are and you are amazing, each of you.  I know some of you were so busy lately.  It means a lot to hear from you. Thank you.

And thank you for making it this far in this blog post and for not un-following me on Twitter or un-friending me on Facebook this semester what with all my mood swings and stress-induced complaining.

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The challenge of grad school is rarely about learning content knowledge. I find most of the time, grad school (at least this type of program) pushes you to your absolute edge (yes, that metaphorical ledge) physically, psychologically and emotionally.  People who drop out before earning their Doctorate do not drop out because they can’t handle learning, applying their knowledge in courses, conducting experiments, etc.  They drop out because it becomes too much to manage.  It makes people lose their sanity a little, to be quite honest.  I’ve talked with multiple graduate students who each had thoughts like, “If I just got in a car wreck and hurt myself just enough, I would have a a legitimate excuse for taking a week off.”  Why would a human being in any other environment be placed on a suicide watch if they verbalized such thoughts, but such rules do not apply to graduate students?  Some people cannot manage the emotional roller coaster, the sleep deprivation, the headaches, the student-adviser-work-family-friends tug of war, the lack of free time or the interpersonal drama that can occur among highly intelligent, competitive individuals.  I now know I am reaching such a breaking point.  I started moving in the direction of a breaking point last summer and I don’t think that train has stopped.  I want to avoid a moment when I do decide that taking a step toward the ledge is the best and/or only option.  I always say I want to make a change, but once a semester hits, there is no going back.  I still feel like I’m drowning.

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What are some of the other ugly sides of grad school?

Image via Katie Weilbacher

It is a truth universally acknowledged that graduate school will take over your life, if you let it.

The trick is not to let it, but if that were easy the biggest drug expense for student insurance would not be anti-depressants (I have it on good authority that this is the case at the university I attend).

The problem is that university effectively rewards workaholism – or what my roommate  in undergrad and I termed “The Guilt”. This is when you come home exhausted but there’s still more to do so you spend your evening either working, or feeling so guilty about not working that you don’t enjoy it. It’s what causes you skip yoga or that class at the gym you wanted to go to because you’re “making progress” and why you eat takeout because you can keep working until it’s delivered and you’re so mentally exhausted that you haven’t got round to buying groceries this week and it’s Friday already anyway.

This is a miserable way to live. In undergrad however, you at least have respite during the summer and (if you’re lucky) in winter break. Graduate school runs all year round, however, so after living with The Guilt 24/7/365 for a number of years it is easy to feel like you’re losing your mind.

Between third and fourth year of my undergrad, I interned at a company. It was amazing, I was productive, I was happy, and I was in amazing shape physically because I got in at 0830, left the office by 1800 and went to the gym. That was what made me realize that The Guilt – the constant working and the neglect of every other area of your life doesn’t actually result in achieving more (assuming you don’t measure your life in small blue pills and trips to the therapist). It just results in misery.

Image via NTBrown for BARC

I wish I could tell you that as a result I dramatically changed how I worked and have ever since led a happy and well balanced life – but that would be a load of crap! The thing about a regular job is that it has boundaries – a computer that you don’t necessarily take home with you, an office that you go to, a time after which your boss doesn’t expect to get hold of you. The appeal of grad school is the flexibility – work when you want! Where you want! And that can come to mean “work everywhere, all the time” – but it shouldn’t. I did make some changes, though. I spent more time with friends. I stopped staring at hard problems and instead went swimming to clear my head. I tried to hang onto the habit of getting up at a reasonable time. Flirted with the idea of not working every evening. This helped, but The Guilt kept lurking.

After a year off, mostly spent jittering about the world skiing and kickboxing, the memory of The Guilt had faded sufficiently that I went on to grad school – in city where I knew no-one, on another continent. There’s a long story behind this, starting when I moved with about a weeks notice, but here’s the summary: I ended up living with a 30-year-old Catholic philosophy student who after 2 months went bonkers and the two girls I’d become friendly with both left the city (for different reasons). Feeling a little friendless and alone I ended up spending a lot of time with a recently dumped passive aggressive with borderline personality disorder.

Chaos ensued. But – I was still doing pretty well at school. And eventually I hit a wall, decided I wasn’t going to be controlled anymore and refused to talk to the passive aggressive, ignoring the arguments of my then-boyfriend and Pet Hobo (guy who’d been living with us rent-free for four months – another story). Drama and backstabbing ensued as Pet Hobo decided his loyalties lay with the woman he wanted to sleep with (the Passive Aggressive) and not me.

Image via Rude Cactus

But eventually the dust settled, and there it was – my cognitive surplus.

Now, I would never suggest that you fill your life with lunatics in order to locate your cognitive surplus. In fact, I would advise very strongly against it. For starters, they are very, very hard to get rid of. But the biggest reason is that lunatics are not a good thing to spend your cognitive surplus on.

So, having found my cognitive surplus I started using it for things that weren’t grad school. I realized that I wasn’t learning what I needed to at university and started reading voraciously around and outside my subject (computer science). I resuscitated the Women in Science and Engineering group at my university and met some lovely people as a result. I started blogging. I took a summer contract in Shanghai, and after the break came back refreshed and motivated to work twice as hard. I was asked to TA in French, and I did – surprised myself by not sucking at it, and I submitted a proposal for a talk entitled “Art, Life and Programming”, which I ended up doing (in English and in French), and as a result got asked to develop a workshop, which was awesome. Things started to spiral and sometimes it was stressful, but I was still moving forward with my graduate work, and even spending a day a week working as a ski instructor during the season. Then I got offered a place in IBM’s Extreme Blue internship (my work with WISE got me noticed by the recruiter) and took the summer off to do that. Once again, I had structure in my life – I worked long hours, but I was loving what I did, and had time to launch Awesome Ottawa, study for interviews at Google, and plan with another EB intern the CompSci Woman blog (launched September 1st).

By the end of the summer, my time away from my research has led me to rethink my direction and I’m really, really excited to go back to it. I have an amazing job lined up for January, which will motivate me to finish on time (this will be my 5th semester if you don’t count the one in Shanghai).

The thing is, I don’t think I would have this job lined up, and I would definitely not have spent the summer at IBM if I hadn’t found my cognitive surplus. I might have finished earlier, but probably not because my interest in blogging and twitter has definitely influenced the direction of my research (and made it better). In fact at the moment, I’m working on a side-project with a friend in the Communications department to visualize her research (I’m also working on Twitter so I gave a talk to the Communications grad students and that’s how we connected).

Your cognitive surplus is there – it’s just being eaten by The Guilt and/or unnecessary drama.

So, I hope I’ve convinced you that you want to find your cognitive surplus but as this post is entitled “How to find your cognitive surplus in graduate school” here are some tips and tricks that I find helpful.

Avoid a reactionary workflow

I really think this is the number one thing that enables me to do everything that I do. Email is a huge killer of this (why I hate email), so I check it infrequently and don’t have alerts set up. Twitter can do this too, so whilst I use Twitter during the day I don’t click any links but instead mark things as favourite and go through them at times when I won’t be productive. I schedule links that I want to share through the week (using SocialOomph) and also schedule my blog posts. When scheduling things in my calendar, I know what works for me in terms of effectiveness (enough going on that I don’t spend too many days in my pjs, and enough free that I can have long chunks of time to focus) and I try and work to that. Also, I don’t play the “I’m busier than you” game – it’s stupid and pointless. I try to say yes to opportunities, but I’m learning how to say no to things that aren’t.

Don’t give up what you love theorizing that it’ll still be there when grad school is done – say yes to things you are passionate about

During last winter, I worked one day a week as a ski instructor. Some people thought this was bonkers, but spending a day a week on the hill away from my computer (and cell phone service) was really refreshing, and I’d go back to my thesis more motivated. That might be the only time that I end up teaching skiing, and I’m glad I did it.

The Awesome Foundation is a group of 10 trustees and a dean and every month we give away an $1000 grant (each trustee puts in $100). The sensible thing to do would be to wait until I have a regular job to do something like this, but I had a well paying internship and I decided to do it now, not later. The fall will be harder as a result, and yes, it takes time, but I cannot tell you what I buzz I get from helping enable stuff like this. It keeps me going.

Eliminate people who don’t support you, or create pointless drama

This should be self-explanatory after my story about the passive aggressive above. Don’t underestimate how much some people drain your energy – why are you letting them?

Surround yourself with people who support and believe in you

I got a ton of stuff done this summer. What changed? My social circle. I started spending more time with amazing people who believe in me and who pushed me forward even when I doubted myself.

Make commitments – and keep them

Leadership and Self Deception (Amazon) is an amazing book, and it talks about how “betraying yourself” (thinking one thing and then doing another) is damaging to your relationships – this applies in work and in other areas of your life. Don’t break your commitments – in my opinion it has the same effect. And don’t weasel around this one by not committing in the first place, “I’ll do X if I get enough work done” is usually a guarantee that you won’t do X. Work with the constraint – often, you’ll surprise yourself.

Commitments doesn’t just apply to spending time with friends, but also non-grad-school things that you do. After work and life settled down earlier this summer I committed to 3 blog posts a week. Sometimes I schedule them in advance, sometimes I think “damn I don’t have anything scheduled for tomorrow”. But I’ve kept that commitment, and it’s helpful. Self-discipline is self-perpetuating – self-discipline in one area of your life will flow to other areas. I keep over-committing myself, but it does tend to work out.

Sleep

I genuinely don’t know how anyone expects to be effective whilst not getting enough sleep. If sleep deprivation can affect your moral judgement, what else will it affect? Make time for the 7-9 hours you need a night, every night. You’ll feel better, and be more effective for it. You are not Jon Skeet, who does, shockingly, actually sleep ~6 hours a night.

Exercise – use a gym buddy or trainer to help stick to it

IMO, you can cope with one, maybe 2 nights of insufficient sleep at a crunch. I think you can take a week off exercising in a crisis. However it’s not a long term strategy – being unhealthy is a huge time sink. Last fall I dislocated my kneecap and couldn’t do anything – for a while, I could barely walk. It took me a while to get back into reasonable shape (and I’m still not where I want to be) but the difference is enormous. Go back to the gym with a friend to motivate you, make a schedule and stick to it. You’ll feel better for it – promise.

Image via PhD comics

Set goals

Your thesis is this huge, and often far off goal – it’s hard to comprehend achieving it and all you can really do it chip away at it. Goals are important, and not something like “make progress on thesis” – they need to be tangible, like “read 5 papers” and “review chapter 2 and send to supervisor”. I spend a lot of time thinking about effectiveness and time management, and I’ve found a system that works for me. I separate my top level (yearly) goals, from my mid-level (weekly) goals, and my Remember The Milk todo list. This keeps me sane – my todo list should mean I work towards my mid-level goals, and my mid-level goals have to be such that they work towards my overall plan. I put my top- and mid-level goals in public on my blog. This is just what works for me, try it or find some other system that works for you – but set goals – how else do you know if you’re on track?

Find an imbalance you can live with

I don’t know any grad student who has a balanced life. I certainly don’t. But I realized that the problem wasn’t the imbalance, it was the nature of it. Now I work to have an imbalance that I can work with – I even experimented with a PA this summer and I delegate as aggressively as I can. For CompSci Woman, my friend and I have an agreement that I deal with WordPress and she deals with email – it works to our strengths. We also decided that neither of us have the time or inclination to manage a Twitter account so we just automate that from the blog. Hopefully in time we’ll be able to delegate it. We accept that for a side project we can’t do everything, and we need to do mostly things that we enjoy.

Forgive yourself for failing

I have achieved my weekly goals a total of ONCE. So pretty much every week my eyes are bigger than my achievements and I fail. At the start of the summer, I had two – huge failures – I’ve since bounced back. I actually finished work this summer with 32 unread emails (I hope they weren’t important). What was important was that I got our two patent disclosures in, and beating myself up about never getting to those emails would be unproductive. You’re going to fail – and when you do, decide what you can learn and move on from it.

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In a similar vein – How To Be Crazy Busy Without Losing Your Mind

Cate Huston is an alumna of IBM’s Extreme Blue program and will finish her Masters in Computer Science at the University of Ottawa researching influence and media contagion on Twitter by the end of 2010. She has a BSc (hons) in Computer Science from the University of Edinburgh. Cate has trained in martial arts in China and is a CSIA Level 2 certified ski instructor. She has taught programming in the UK, US, China and Canada and has developed programming curricula that was taught across the US. You can find her latest CC-licensed curriculum, developed for uOttawa here. Cate is the former president of Women in Science and Engineering at uOttawa and is currently Instigator of Awesome at Awesome Ottawa and an Editor of CompSci Woman. She blogs about technology, programming, effectiveness and life at Accidentally in Code and twitters as @catehstn.