Top 7 Grad School Tips

For those who have been planning to get into grad school. Why waste your time procrastinating? Decide now or regret later. It’s the most wonderful thing that could happen to your career. You have more to gain than to lose for such endeavour.

For those of you who have already decided. Be prepared for several changes in your life. In order to go through such grad school trials, here are some grad school tips for you from someone who has been through the jungles of grad school:

1. Create a timeline for finishing your degree. A Gantt chart would be a great solution for this. This will give you a broad perspective on what you will be doing for the next 3 years or so in your life at grad school.

2. Choose the best grad school for you. Do you like to live near your school? Is it okay for you to travel regularly? What type of professors would you want to teach you? What type of classmates/peers do you want? What types of programs do you want to enrol in? Can I afford financing my graduate education? These are some of the questions you have to answer first in choosing what school is best for you.

3. Ask support from your family. Be it financial, material, or moral support, you definitely need that to go through grad school.

4. Be computer literate. Grad school is now modernized through the use of computers. Professors communicate through email now. They send soft copies of lessons instead of printed ones. Sometimes you have to submit only electronic copies of research papers. You will also be tasked to present topics in class of which knowledge in PowerPoint is a must.

5. Socialize. Be friends with peers/classmates. They will be your allies in the coming years.

6. Manage your files efficiently. In grad school, you will accumulate tons of paper in no time. Handouts, lecture notes, photocopied books, journal articles, etc. Create a good filing system for these so that you can easily retrieve them in the future. Think about your school library. That’s how you should manage it. I promise you will have a library at home after grad school.

7. Start studying independently. You won’t get much group study sessions from grad school. All your peers are busy too. Plus teacher driven lectures are not as many as in college. In fact some courses have no lectures. So learn to study on your own.

Grad school is a wonderful experience. Though some are afraid or hesitant in going through it, people who have been through it tell wonderful stories of their unique experience in grad school. It’s much better than college.

Do you have some tips you can add to this post? Don't hesitate to share it. Click the Comment link below.

(Photo from: cdn.venturebeat.com)