My first semester as a PhD student was stressful, with plenty of days where I woke up, worked, ate periodically, and then went to bed. I had to prepare lessons, design curriculum, study and write for my own classes, and try to maintain some sense of sanity. I expected my workload to keep increasing as the end of the semester neared. But, it didn't. When I should have been experiencing end-of-semester panic, I was taking it easy, waiting for students to turn in essays so I could grade and attending classes where I'd already submitted my final work.
I can identify a couple of things that led to this. First, I was taking classes designed for newcomers to teaching and graduate school, and I’ve been teaching for a few years, so much of what was discussed I was rather familiar with. I’m keeping this in mind so I don’t get steamrolled next semester.
Second was my extensive planning, to do lists, and goal setting.
This brings me to something I haven't discussed in my last two start of year posts on goal setting: stress.
I experience stress and I have plenty to be stressed about. I only have some vague ideas for my dissertation, I worry which essays I can turn into publishable material, and the pressing fact that next semester won't be as easy as this one. However, and this may sound weird, I've found my planning and lists spreads the stress out.
Let me give an example. One of my classes last semester required a 50+ source annotated bibliography. When the due date was a couple weeks away and I was worrying about the work I had left to do, I asked a classmate how hers was going. She answered that if she annotated 3 sources a day, she'd have her 50 by the due date. Thankfully, she didn't ask about mine: at the rate I had been going, I was doing one a day and I'd have a week or so to run it by our professor and make revisions. I probably had finished about as many as she had to do.
This happened because a month or so beforehand I had set a goal to complete one annotation every day. A few days I was able to get two done, but for the most part, every day meant one annotation. And bear in mind, this isn't just writing a paragraph – it's finding and reading articles, chapters, and as much of some books as possible. I spent a couple hours every day working on this. It took a lot of work, but I started early and was consistent with it. While there were instances where I had to put aside a book or article because it just wasn't helpful and I had to start over, I knew I was on a good track and, unless something really bad happened, something that would put me a week or two behind, I'd be able to finish up in plenty of time.
However, this wasn't all smooth and easy. It required a recalculation of my goal setting. More on that in my next post.
