Most of the grad. students on facebook groups appear to be working far more hours a week than I am for much longer spans of time than I have been, and yet appear to be making far less progress (some people are in their fourth years, work 60+ hours a week, and haven’t even started their dissertations!)

I generally write about 3 hours per day, four days a week. That’s 12 hours. My class adds another 3, plus 9 for the assignments, so that brings me up to 24. Working on other projects generally takes far less time than the dissertation; perhaps another 5 or 6 hours a week. That makes 30.

And that’s it (unless you count commuting back and forth, which adds 3-12 more hours each week, which is one reason why I try to work remotely and minimize the number of days I need to be in the lab).

I still feel like my life as a graduate student is very much out-of-place. I easily managed to get an MS in one year simply by taking four courses a semester – my undergraduate workload was heavier (but still left me enough free time that I had to wedge three jobs into my week to avoid becoming bored). On the dissertation, it’s only been 6 weeks since I started and I’m already 1/3 of the way through (granted, the easiest third)… and it’s still only the beginning of my second year, when no one else in the department has even come up with a topic!

I’m also the youngest student there by at least five years. This isn’t speculation – there was a meeting where all of the graduate students mentioned their ages.

Some of it is the fellowship. Some of it is motivation: the drive to recover my personal autonomy so I can again pursue great things. Some of it is probably the fact that I follow what I think I’ve shown to be a much more powerful personal philosophy for acquiring knowledge than the one typical students follow (sacrifice breadth and you sacrifice your very creativity – don’t hyperspecialize). That doesn’t account for everything, however – the rest is probably the school.