Graduate student work habits

From what I've seen over the past year, there are three categories that graduate students fall into in terms of their work habits:

Most graduate students have committed to making a lifestyle out of being a graduate student. They've decided that they will spend most of their day on campus and then will often hang out with fellow graduate students at night. They identify foremost as graduate students and do all of the things that go along with that. But once they've decided that they are supposed to be on campus ten to twelve hours a day, their productivity drops (this category includes me, and I'm not making a value judgment here--just an observation). They take long lunch breaks, they go to the gym, or they go out for a drink in the middle of the day. After leaving campus, they might go hang out with someone from their year who works in a different research group. I would argue that these people are living a balanced life within graduate school. They work a fair amount, and they don't stress out too much because they build breaks into their work day. Their social lives are centered around the chemistry department.

Next, there are the students who work a shorter day and don't socialize as much. These students are generally quite efficient about their work and don't structure their social life around graduate school. Often it's because they have a significant other who works more normal hours who they want to get home to. They are for the most part pretty normal grad students to be around, but they don't really go out drinking or get an afternoon snack with you--they tend to be more focused on getting their work done and going home at a reasonable hour. This also describes many postdocs, who are generally more likely than graduate students to have moved on to this phase of their lives. Again, I think these people live a balanced life--they spend a good amount of their time working, but they also have other personal obligations to tend to.

Third, and pretty rare, are the workaholic grad students. These people consistently work eighty or ninety hour weeks and are constantly trying to get something done--no hour-long lunch breaks, no going to the gym, no watching Youtube videos while bringing something into the glovebox. These people are more intense about graduate school, often have loftier career goals, and are generally either spectacular successes or failures. Some of them burn out from pushing themselves too hard and failing to live up to their high expectations. Others produce a lot of results, graduate a year early, and land a coveted postdoctoral fellowship. But I would argue that they do not lead balanced lives--they push themselves to work harder than most people are capable of handling. They don't seem to be capable of relaxing. They don't have hobbies. They are unaware of what else is going on in the world, and in general are less interesting people because of their tendency to hyperfocus on chemistry (OK, now I'm judging). The worst are the ones who get cranky, and whose attitude spills over into their relations with other people in the lab.

Despite the fact that most graduate students work quite a bit, most of them wish they were getting more done. Many graduate students feel guilty because they fall into the first category of student and think they should be more productive; or they fall into the second category and think they could be working an extra hour every day. But I think these people underestimate the balance brought by having other things to do--whether that's coffee breaks with labmates or getting home in time for dinner with a spouse--and delude themselves into thinking they should be more like the third category of students. I would like to think that the people in the first and second categories have set their schedules and efficiency according to what will actually make them happiest--and if that's so, that's exactly where they should stay.

Of course, I haven't even touched the issues of how lab dynamics and research advisers pressure people into working. For a classic example of that, see this post at Chemistry Blog.

Bad group meetings

In my brief time as a chemistry student, I've seen two types of group meetings. In one, many people in the group describe what they've been working on for the past couple of weeks on a chalkboard. Most groups in the Berkeley chemistry department are large enough that they do the more formal style of group meeting: a different person in the group will give a hour-long talk with slides every week. Probably the most awkward situation I've been in in graduate school has been the bad formal group meeting.

Many people in graduate school worry about not getting enough done on their projects. Even though people in the "synthetic" groups (at Berkeley, this term doesn't mean solely natural products or inorganic synthesis, but rather is a catch-all for the non-physical half of the department) work a fair amount--60 hours is probably typical in an average week--there's always this worry about not having enough done. I think the graduate students would be happier if they could turn this thought process off--it just drives them to work harder and harder and to never be satisfied. Everyone goes through unproductive periods, but most students tend to make reasonable progress despite their worrying otherwise. Occasionally, though, people really haven't been putting in the time--or have been using their time poorly--and it shows. If a group meeting normally runs sixty minutes and you only have enough results to talk for thirty, it's kind of obvious. So to lengthen their talks, people in such a situation generally pad it--usually with a combination of excessive background information and planned experiments. These things are good to include in a talk to a reasonable extent, but when you spend three quarters of your time talking about things you haven't done, everyone realizes what's going on.

Another thing that can ruin a group meeting is a lack of peripheral knowledge. Some students work on their projects passionately and devotedly, but myopically. This is especially true when the goal of a project is very specific--for example, "synthesize molecule X." In such cases, I've seen students (this described me as an undergraduate, as well) map out a plan of how to accomplish their goal and then follow it stubbornly. But they don't spend enough time reading the relevant literature to be able to contextualize their project well: what larger questions do they want to answer? How will the knowledge gained from this project complement the body of knowledge in the field? Most importantly in terms of accomplishing well-defined goals, what recent discoveries support, refute, or complicate the evidence that the plan sketched out at the outset is an appropriate way to pursue the goals of the project? In a total synthesis project, this might involve another group publishing a method to perform a key transformation that would normally take several steps to complete. In a biochemical context, it might involve the discovery of a new enzyme in the pathway under study. Questions related to these types of discoveries naturally come up at a group meeting, and it shakes my confidence in what someone is telling me if I ask a pretty basic question and I get an "I don't know" or, worse, if their response has to be corrected by someone else in the audience.

From what I've seen and heard, most advisers are polite enough not to call someone out on a poor group meeting. In the bad group meetings I've been to (I've seen one that was awful and another that was kind of bad), the adviser tends not to ask many questions and sort of plows through the group meeting in an attempt to get it over with. Of course, I have no idea what happens in private later on.