5 Secrets to Finishing Your Doctorate with Your Sanity
There are a number of challenges that doctorate students face during their journey. Some of the challenges are centered around attempting to balance it all especially towards the end of the semester. To assist, I created a list of 5 tips to completing a doctoral program with your sanity intact.
1. Create a Support System
A good support system is what will sustain you during difficult times of pursuing a doctorate degree. Members of your support system can be made up of various individuals including family, friends, significant other, classmates, co-workers, mentors, faculty, etc. They do not need to know the intricacies of the doctorate program to be beneficial to you. Sometimes, we just need someone who will encourage us to keep going, remind us why we started the doctoral journey, or just listen to us vent. Be sure to know who is a part of your support system and the role that each of them play in your success.
2. Develop an Organizational System
A good organization system that works for you is crucial to your success as a doctoral student. You want to make sure that your reading and writing projects are set up in a way that will help you to be efficient with your time. Tools like Google drive, Dropbox, and Mendeley are all helpful.
3. Prioritize Your Mental Health
Pursuing your doctorate degree takes a toll on you emotionally, physically, and mentally. It is easy for undealt with issues from the past to bubble up to the surface. Even if this isn’t your experience, it’s important to seek the help of a mental health professional to process your thoughts and feelings. Personally, a professional mental health counselor helped me to uncover issues that I had with imposter syndrome and self deprecating messages. I was not aware that I was navigating the world with these thoughts that were not conducive to accomplishing my goals so a neutral party was helpful to overcome these challenges.
4. Keep a Social Life
When pursuing a doctorate degree, one of the first things to be sacrificed is your social life. Don’t make this mistake. Your social life will keep you motivated and focused as you have to make the best use of the time that you dedicate to your program, assignments, and dissertation. This by no means is an excuse to not prioritize the work that you need to do to be successful. Please make whatever boundaries are necessary to have a healthy balance of study and play.
5. Celebrate Your Wins
You are working on a major life event. It doesn’t matter how big or small, you should find ways to honor the progress you are making towards your overall goal of attaining your doctorate degree. For me, I love to travel so I tried to celebrate a semester’s hard work with a trip. I didn’t have to go far. There were times when I did a staycation and scheduled a relaxing massage to commemorate the survival of yet another grueling semester. The change of scenery helped me to reflect on what I had accomplished and to mentally transition to what was ahead in the next semester.
What tips would you add to the list?
