<p>Typical day in the life of a grad student: blog.credible.com/blog/2014/9/15/a-day-in-the-life-graduate-students</p>
<p>What does a typical day look like for you? </p>
<p>My days changed as I progressed through the program. Earlier in my program when I was worse at managing my time, my days might’ve looked like the blog - waking between 7 and 8 am, starting classes typically between 9 and 11 am and doing some combination of research, teaching, brown bags, colloquia, and other classes in the hours before about 6 pm. After that it was generally writing papers, analyses, doing readings, etc. Some nights I got an hour or two of free time in (television, reading, mostly). Most nights I was not in bed before midnight, and a few nights I went to bed around 2 am, meaning that I was basically a zombie throughout the days. If I went out, it was typically Saturday night.</p>
<p>This kind of work is unsustainable and so I burned out after 2 years, learned to manage my time better and so my days past year 4 rarely looked like that. (I honestly can’t remember much of a schedule in year 3, but I try to block it out of my head.) I also didn’t have classes. In years 4-5 I’d rise between 6 and 8 am (I woke up at 6 on the days I worked out or ran in the mornings, about 7:30 am otherwise). Every day I had clearly demarcated, scheduled times to do things. So some days I might teach from 9-11, take a meal break from 11-12:30, write for a few hours from 12:30 to 5, and then perhaps read or grade a few papers from maybe like 5-7. Then cook dinner and relax for the rest of the evening, and go to bed between 11 pm and 1 am depending on how tired I was and whether I was running the next day. I always got 7-8 hours of sleep by then, because you are less productive if you sleep 4-6 hours and try to stay up to finish everything than if you sleep.</p>
<p>My dissertation year was the best because I only worked 10 hours a week, refused to TA, and spent most of my time writing. So I still woke up around 8 am, but then I would either go work for 4 hours, break for lunch and then write for 4-6 hours or I would do the reverse. Then I would go running and cook dinner. Then relax. I didn’t work much on the weekends - I sometimes wrote a half day on Sunday. BUT I made sure that when I was actually writing, it was productive writing time. That’s why I could get away with only writing 4-6 hours on most days of the week and still finishing my dissertation in 9 months. I wrote closer to 6 hours most days, though.</p>
<p>My experience will be completely different from the typical full time graduate student perspective. I’m attend a MS Computer Science program part-time because I work full time as a software engineer for a defense contractor. To me, the MS Computer Science is simply a “check the block” type of goal. An MS is equilvanent to 2 years of work experience so the purpose of me completing it is to basically advance 6 years of work experience… in an actual span of 4 years. </p>
<p>So here’s what my day looks like:</p>
<p>M-F 9am - 5pm: Core working hours
T and Th: 7pm-9:40pm class. I take 2 classes per semester (at this rate, it will take me 3.5-4 years to complete)</p>