The Real Challenge of Grad School: Mental & Emotional Health

If you’re considering going to graduate school, you’ve probably always been a good student. School maybe even came easy to you. Of course, you want to use your powers for good: who would be better at producing top-notch, field progressing research than you? And, as a professor, you’ll be able to help craft the minds of the next generation. You assume grad school will be challenging, yes, but nothing could be more exciting than dedicating a few years to becoming a full-fledged scholar.

But before you take the leap, I’m going to share a little secret with you:

Graduate school is a test of your emotional and mental health, not your intelligence

I cannot stress this enough. You will read this and you won’t believe how deeply true it is until you’ve gone through the process.

You know you’re smart. Your advisor knows you’re smart. Your friends and family — they all know you’re smart, too. Your dissertation and the degree will neither prove nor disprove your intelligence.

Sure, you will certainly learn things during the process of getting your PhD and you’ll definitely hone your research and writing skills, but they are almost all things you already know how to do and could improve, if you wanted to, without the structure of graduate school.

Part of the reason for this is that almost everyone who goes to grad school has been a good student their whole life and, for many, school has come easy to them. Grad school may be the first time someone tells you that your work “isn’t good enough” or, worse, “completely unacceptable for the graduate student level.” You may hear this consistently over the course of your entire degree. Can you handle that?

The process of getting a PhD is the academic equivalent of military “boot camp”: the process is intended to break you. And then, later, build you back up into an academic. Whether or not you are able to recover from the “breaking” is something to seriously consider.

If you are sensitive, insecure, have self-doubts, frequently feel overwhelmed, need a lot of approval, have a strong need to please people… this is going to be a very tough road for you. If I had known how this process would so deeply disturb my self-confidence, I may not have done it.

Yes, it’s that bad for the majority of grad students at one point or another.

A recently graduated PhD once said to me, “there are plenty of very intelligent people in the world who don’t feel the need to prove it by getting a PhD.” Take this statement to heart and let it sink in before you make the final decision to pursue a PhD. If ultimately you do decide to go to graduate school, when you have tough days, remember this article and know that you’re not the only one and keep going, one day at a time.

This post was written by Micky Cowan, a content writer with Enago.

Originally published at www.enago.com on January 7, 2016.