Staying-on-Schedule/rewarding-yourself-a-gift-from-someone-specialWith all the stress in graduate school, it is also important to reward yourself for your accomplishments and jobs well done. Without positive reinforcement, it’s easy to feel burnt out and to become bored with your life as a graduate student. Because you might rarely receive positive reinforcement from others, you must reward yourself to […]

Earning your graduate degree is a long-term goal that will require years of planning on your part, but you will have other goals during those years that will either coincide or conflict with your long-term goal of earning your graduate degree. Besides earning your graduate degree, your goals may include immediate goals (e.g., reading an […]

You’ve finally finished several of your upper-level graduate courses and are beginning to put together your dissertation plan. You might be thinking that writing this paper will be a breeze and that you will complete the project easily. However, writing your thesis or dissertation is a process that will consume much more of your time […]

Do not underestimate how much time it will take to write your dissertation. Many graduate students spend much of their valuable time researching and collecting data and put off the arduous task of writing about what they’ve done until the last minute. These students inevitably scramble to synthesize thoughts and ideas on paper, making (what […]

Perhaps the most important part of writing is keeping your sanity throughout the writing process. A few ways to do this are screaming your problems into your pillow, making prank calls to that professor you hate, and openly crying in your graduate class. However, making a writing group with your colleagues to assist each other […]