“For PhD students, our work becomes closely aligned with our self-worth, and we take failures hard. We need to be resilient, and as we struggle to learn academic resilience, we need our friends and family to understand that what we are feeling isn’t just normal ‘job’ stress, and respond to our requests for support accordingly.”
— Kate Samardzic
I recently came across this amazing article, “What I wish my friends and family knew about my PhD,” by Kate Samardzic in Nature’s Career Column.
While written from the prospective of a graduate student, I think the story she tells really resonates with both predocs and postdocs. Personally, I am very lucky that I always had a very supportive mother to lean on in graduate school. However, I think equally important for my mental sanity was a strong support group of fellow grad students and postdocs (aka. my lab mates) that helped me get through the many pitfalls, hurdles, and challenges that come with graduate school. At the end, the author offers up a few solid pieces of advice for friends and family to best support PhD candidates, pieces of advice that I think we should all keep in mind as we strive to support our fellow lab mates and peers.