Graduate Student Success Coaching

Name One Thing: Advice for graduate students from those who’ve been there.

Welcome to Name One Thing the interview series where I ask academics, researchers, postdocs, and other professionals what they wished they’d known when they were in in graduate school. Today’s guest is… drum roll please…. me! I am a retired epidemiologist turned graduate success coach, here to share my hindsight on surviving grad school and my observations of graduate student success after a decade of coaching students to complete their degrees.

About Today’s Guest

Name: Dr. Cristie Glasheen (she/her)
Degree: Ph.D., Epidemiology
Current role: Graduate Student Success Coach

Find Her At:

• Discord: https://discord.gg/BSXDVsruVq
• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/glasheen
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/GraduateStudentSuccess/

1) Name one thing you wish someone had told you when you were a graduate student.

I wish that someone had told me that I wasn’t alone in how I felt in graduate school, what I worried about, and my doubts about my abilities. Having gone to graduate school before the explosion of social media, blogs, YouTube, and Ticktock, I felt very isolated. I had a great advisor and a great cohort, but none of us shared our inner thoughts and experiences. Imposter syndrome was rampant but wasn’t discussed. I constantly worried that I’d fooled everyone into thinking I belonged in grad school and that one false step would destroy the illusion. I worried that I wasn’t smart enough, fast enough, productive enough, or creative enough to succeed and that everyone was either humoring me or fooled by my mask of confident competence.

In hindsight, I know that most graduate students wrestle with the same insecurities I did but because we were all wearing that mask, it always seemed like everyone else had it together. I didn’t realize that this feeling was a common part of surviving grad school (not healthy, but common). I wish someone had said…hey, you’re not so great an actor as to fool an entire admissions committee, all of your instructors, and your dissertation committee into thinking you’re something that you’re not. Maybe then I could have accepted that feeling uncertain about what I was doing was a normal part of graduate school and not a mark of not being good enough to be there.

2) If you had a magic wand, name one thing that you would give graduate students to survive grad school with their sanity intact.

Students struggle with many different issues surviving graduate school but there are some repeated themes. If I could only give them one thing then I think I’d give everyone more distress tolerance. It’s one of the greatest skills a graduate student can develop for success in grad school and life in general.

Distress tolerance is the ability to tolerate uncomfortable emotions while not allowing them to get in the way of being successful. Grad school is filled with a lot of uncomfortable emotions: uncertainty, overwhelm, anxiety, disappointment, confusion, self-doubt, etc., and to survive grad school, you have to be able to experience these emotions and keep on progressing. Procrastination is the number one complaint I hear from grad students and I believe that a lack of distress tolerance is a major cause of procrastination. Students avoid getting started with their work because it’s uncomfortable. It triggers a lot of anxiety, worry, perfectionism, etc.

Students have to be able to sit down, as uncomfortable as it may be, and start working instead of avoiding the negative feelings by procrastinating. The more students avoid being uncomfortable, the more that sensation grows and it becomes a vicious cycle. The reality is, starting is usually the hardest part. The anticipatory anxiety is worse than the actual tasks, so once the student gets started the worst of the uncomfortable feelings usually dissipate. If students can learn to accept the discomfort, sit with it, and get started anyway, then surviving graduate school gets a lot easier (and faster).

3) You talk to a lot of graduate students about their relationship with their dissertation advisors, name one pet peeve that you have about how advisors relate to their students.

My biggest pet peeve is that advisors assume that because something (theoretically) worked to get them through graduate school, then that is how every student should do it.

I see this a lot in toxic productivity and toxic advisor behaviors. For example, I’ve had clients whose advisors have told them they should be putting in 12 to 16-hour days regularly because that’s what the advisor put in. The problem is that working that many hours leaves students fatigued and burned out without increasing productivity. When you’re fatigued, you’re less creative, have lower problem solving skills, are slower, more distractable, and make more mistakes. You’re not getting more done by working more hours, you’re actually getting less done over a longer period of time. The advisors didn’t succeed because they put in those hours, they succeeded despite it!

I also see the “it worked for me” attitude in toxic advisor behavior. I’ve had clients’ advisors demand that all works they review must be of pristine quality (they won’t review early drafts, etc. because that’s how their advisors were). The student then waste time endlessly editing, trying to be psychic and guess what their advisor is going to want, and constantly worried about the slightest mistake. This can leave the student down a wrong path for far too long and makes the student feel like they cannot get help early in the process. Meanwhile, the advisor rationalizes this as having “high standards.”

It’s the same way when motivating students. Many advisors use a “punishment” approach to motivate students to be more productive. I’ve seen advisors threaten to withhold funding over minor issues or tell the student that they will never graduate. This doesn’t motivate people, it stresses them out. The students who respond “well” to this approach would have responded just as well to having a rational discussion and the other students will shut down and perform worse because of it.

Surviving Grad School

So, these are my main observations for surviving grad school based on my time in graduate school and over a decade of coaching graduate students to earn their degrees. I hope that these observations help you through whatever stage of your graduate school journey you’re in. Remember, you’re not alone.

Interview Disclaimer

We aim to share diverse perspectives and experiences. The views, opinions, and experiences shared by our guests in this interview series are solely their own. Their participation is not an endorsement of our services, products, or views, nor does it imply an endorsement of their services, products, or views by us.