Work + Grad School: A Data Scientist’s Survival Guide (Part 2)
This article is a continuation of a previous post, available here. In this piece, I discuss my experiences working as a full-time data scientist, while simultaneously pursuing a graduate degree in statistics.
Realities and Best Practices, Continued
In this section, I will go through a few of the most compelling realities I experienced, along with best practices that I found to work through them.
Reality Three:
This style of attending school has unique dynamics
When you decide to take the plunge, you will probably have idyllic scenes of your undergraduate days in mind — thoughts of spending the afternoon in the student union chatting with friends, hunkering down in the library to finish your calculus homework, or mulling over a challenging problem over the course of a long walk about campus. I am here to assure you that this is not what your existence will be like. In undergrad, I would spend most of my Saturdays in the library, taking breaks to meet my roommate at Starbucks (they had better coffee then) or go for a run; I would wrap up by 7, and then spend the rest of the night hanging out with friends or going to a party. My Saturdays for the past few years have looked a bit different. They consist mainly of studying dense, quantitative material, with breaks built in for the accomplishment of chores, such as laundry, grocery shopping, cooking, cleaning, exercising, and anything else that requires attention. I don’t mean to be hyperbolic — I was able to socialize and hang out with friends as well — but like chores and studying, these were things that had to be time-boxed fairly rigidly.
Best Practices:
Rely on structure and discipline rather than motivation
I have discovered that a best approach is to find a routine that allows you to get everything done, and stick to it. The main benefit of routine is that, while it can get a little boring, it is actually quite efficient from the standpoint of reducing cognitive overload. If you have to think about when you are going to accomplish chores, or where you are going to get your next meal from, it is very difficult to also put forth the requisite thought into the proof you are supposed to solve for Homework 3. Set aside designated time for studying and homework where you are sure you won’t be interrupted — I found that 2 hours is a good amount of time. Also try to do as much as you can on weekends — when compared with the workweek, this is generally a time when you will have more energy, and be much more in control of your schedule.
Note: It is important to not rely on motivation to accomplish required tasks — motivation is fleeting, and will be harder to come by as the semester drags on. Defining a schedule that works for you and having the discipline to stick to it will get you are lot further than motivation ever will.
Get used to saying “No”
This is great training for the future execs and parents out there. Prior to re-entering school, choosing which social events I wanted to go was a breeze — largely because there was little choice to be made.
- Want to go hiking? Sounds good.
- Spend an afternoon at a local brewery? Sure.
- Take a day trip to a nearby city? Why not.
Wanting to succeed in my studies motivated me to become choosier about these things, a process which was, to be totally honest, not particularly enjoyable. Turning down opportunities to socialize never really feels great, but it does get easier if you focus on why you’re sitting in your apartment or house reading about post-hoc statistical comparisons instead of spending time with friends. As mentioned in Reality 2, you need to make sure you continually validate what you’re doing.
Plan for Convenience
As often as possible, try to consider everything you do as an investment in what will come later; for example, sleeping 7–8 hours a night so you can be more productive during the next day. One thing that I found especially helpful was to invest my time in ways that would save me much more time later, or just make my life easier. The most significant of these was meal prepping over the weekend for the rest of the week. This process involves batch cooking large quantities of food at once, and then packaging them up for later meals. It takes about 1.5–2 hours, but is well worth it, as it reduces all cooking time over the next five days to however long it takes you to put glass Tupperware in a microwave.
Reality Four:
The Sponge is Full
In high school and college, I distinctly remember the unique feeling of finals week — mainly the sensation that I would only experience during that time, of being unable to cram any additional information into my already at-capacity brain. A cliché way to think of it, is that your brain is like a sponge completely full of water, and your attempts to use that sponge to pick up more water (information) are completely unproductive. During the last four years, this is a sensation that I got to experience fairly regularly, usually starting after the first midterm of a semester. At this point, the cumulative weeks of doing quantitative job work for 45–50 hours, combined with the additional 15–20 hours of watching lectures, doing proofs, and reading math textbooks would start to take their toll, and I would find that a task that should have taken 15 minutes would take 40.
Best Practices:
Take care of yourself
When you start a new significant commitment such as school, it can be tempting to focus all of your energy on it and start to neglect other areas of your life, especially your health and fitness. You don’t need to spend countless hours in the gym (nor should you), but you do need to make sure that you are eating right and exercising regularly. This is obviously a platitude, but I’ve been in situations where I’ve abandoned exercise in favor of study for extended periods of time, and situations where I made it a priority to exercise and eat well. The superiority of the latter cannot be overstated — if you are in good shape, you will feel much better about yourself, have much more energy, and perform better in work and school over a longer period.
Pace yourself
One reality that I’ve learned to embrace is that there are only 24 hours in a day; put another way, you simply can’t do it all. If you want to be successful in your work + school endeavors, you need to take proactive steps to avoid burnout, and this means recognizing your limitations and knowing when you need to take a break or slow down. For me, this meant taking one class a semester and stretching out my degree, rather than trying to get it done as quickly as possible. Why did I do this? Because if I had tried to take more than one graduate-level statistics class a semester, I would have severely hurt my chances of finishing the program, or inhibited my ability to perform well in my job. If work and school are making you miserable, you need to find a commitment you can drop, or reign in what you are trying to accomplish day-to-day.
Note: there are some unavoidable scenarios, such as summer semesters, where even one class will be relatively brutal — my only advice here is to focus on the break (however brief) you get at the end of the stretch.
Reality Five:
You will, at times, feel as though you are making no progress
In the basement of my undergrad dormitory, there was a picture of a statue that had bird crap all over the top of it, along with a pigeon. The caption read: “Some days you’re the pigeon, some days you’re the statue.” I have never felt like the statue more than I did while working on this degree. There were difficult moments, particularly in the middle of the program, when the initial excitement of being back in school had worn off and the end of the program was nowhere in sight. As you might imagine, these moments were tough, and it felt like I was making minimal progress, despite that being far from the case.
Best Practices:
Celebrate milestones
The best motivator I came up with in these times was to reflect on the progress I actually had made, and celebrate it. Reminding myself that, prior to all of this schooling, I had no idea what bootstrapping, the Cochran-Mantel-Haenszel test, or Weibull distributions were was helpful, as was taking a step back and realizing one day that I had spent several minutes explaining what a non-parametric hypothesis test was to several of my peers. I also made sure that after every semester, I took at least a small amount of time off — even a short day trip becomes a lot better when you don’t have any homework to worry about.
Words of Encouragement
In the genuine hope that I don’t scare you off from this endeavor, I have included some words that I hope will be encouraging.
Now that I am closing in on completion of the degree, I’ve had a number of people ask me “Would you do it again?” This is, interestingly, something I have also asked myself, and thought about a great deal. The conclusion that I’ve come to is an unflinching “Yes.” While there have been a lot of unforeseen challenges, or things that I believed I was prepared to handle but actually wasn’t, I also feel as though I can attribute a great deal of career and personal growth to completing the program.
If you are thinking about pursuing a graduate degree while working, know that it is not easy, but definitely possible, and I encourage you to go for it. Thousands of working professionals get degrees every year and live to tell the tale (my parents both did this in the 1980’s!). Additionally, with the rapid expansion of online educational opportunities, I anticipate that this type of thing is going to be more and more common, so you definitely won’t be the only person around doing it.
The career benefits to earning a hard-won grad degree are worth it, and while it can be tough to see them while you are grinding through, I haven’t met a single person (myself included) who regrets doing it.
