Tag: school

Hey Sunny Siders, happy Sunday! Today I wanted to talk a little bit more about my final semester of grad school and some of the things I learned.

Mainly, the biggest difference that my final semester of grad school presented was that I was working a full time job on top of being a full time student. This is something very common, but to an outsider you don’t truly understand the kind of challenge it is to balance both until you’ve done it.

I had never worked a full time job while going to school and once I did I had a lot of extra respect, admiration, and appreciation for my friends and colleagues that had been working full time since the start of their program.

It’s not an easy thing to balance to full time commitments separately, especially when both areas of your life are seeking your entire attention and devotion.

Not going to lie, it was hard to balance both. The only way I could find being able to juggle my 8 hour days at work with my homework load was by not having a life for 5 months.

Essentially, I’d get up go to work from 8:30 to 5, come home around 5:30 – 6 depending on traffic, and work on academics until 9 or 10 pm when it was time for bed.

On weekends I’d load up with most of the work so that weekdays only had to be spent strong group meetings or taking exams, but still I really only had the capacity to focus on those two things to be successful at both.

I was so lucky that I had my brother living with me because he helped with a lot of the regular household things such as cooking and getting groceries. Had I been fully alone I probably would have subsisted off of pop corn and pasta because I just didn’t have time or energy to cook every night.

I think the most interesting element to all of this is how professors really are out of touch with reality and not understanding of their students circumstances at all.

I was in a working masters program as most are, and still my professor scheduled office hours for 9 am on weekdays. Trying to explain that I was working and couldn’t make it never mattered to her, which is why it was always so hilarious when she couldn’t understand why no one showed up to them.

All of this to say that working full time and being a student full time is a big order. If you know someone in your life that is doing both, give them a big hug and tell them you’re proud of them for sticking with it because it really is a big feat to handle two full time jobs at once, especially when one of them expects you to be available 24/7.

I am amazed by my friends who had been doing that since the start. I could barely handle one semester, let alone 2 years of having no downtime where you aren’t expecting to be thinking critically. People really are amazing when they put their minds to things they want.