High stress in PhD programs is a familiar experience – graduate students talk and commiserate about it together, we share support strategies or seek university resources to get through some of the toughest milestones or working demands, and we laugh (often with some inward recognition) when someone shares a picture about PhD culture and how hard earning a doctorate is from the likes of PhD Comics, Lego Grad Student, or xkcd.
This high stress has serious consequences: a Nature Biotechnology paper from 2018 suggests that as many as a third of all PhD students develop or experience psychological disorders. Other research suggests that as many as half of all PhD students across all disciplines in the United States depart their programs early. I learned of these figures shortly after dropping out myself, leaving a PhD program in physics at another university where around half of my cohort had decided to depart their degrees, as had many friends and peers I had known from undergraduate studies. For me, a challenging advisor relationship, some mental health issues, several close friends departing before me, and some of my working demands all played into my decision to drop out of a PhD. I became interested in why these mental health and dropout rates were so high, and what we could do to better serve – and preserve – PhD students in their programs and their well-being, which led me back to UIUC to pursue a PhD in Educational Psychology.
I did my Bachelor’s studies here and felt that the education of students was really valued, so I came back to study the PhD student experience and hopefully to describe with vigorous research what doctoral workplaces are like and how they become so stressful. Now, as I depart with the knowledge from my dissertation work which studied high stress, and as I reflect on the experiences of my PhD, I’d like to share some of my findings, some thoughts about what I think could be improved in how we approach stress in PhD programs, and how this research impacted my work as a PhD student.
About the Doctoral Engineering Experience Study
My dissertation work, very recently defended, explored the nature and the consequences of high stress for PhD students, especially ones in engineering programs. In a study mixing qualitative and quantitative psychological and educational research methods, I first conducted a series of interviews and surveys with a diverse cohort of engineering PhD students and then used what I learned from those interviews to develop and test a survey to measure stressors, by which I mean sources of stress. While other studies of stress for PhD students often focus on a specific stressor, like navigating relationships with PhD advisors, I found that I wanted to understand the full landscape of stressors and how they affected PhD students of different identities, at different stages of their PhD programs, and in different sorts of research environments.
I found that there were, roughly, eleven categories of stressors we could label that would be relevant to most students, including stressors related to doing research, interacting with the advisor, completing coursework, and balancing work and life as the most commonly occurring. Overall, my team’s findings are unsurprising at first glance: the most severe stress happens when multiple of these categories are actively causing stress at once. The consequences of these stressors vary widely, but include heightened symptoms of stress, anxiety, and other mental health challenges, and decreased intention to persist in PhD programs. Additional consequences included late nights and trouble sleeping, physical discomfort, reduced use of hobbies and other relaxation strategies, and ‘cycles’ of falling behind. Some stressors were what we call inherent to the undertaking of a PhD - these stressors are the kind that every student might expect to experience, like balancing home life, research, and coursework. Other stressors were not-inherent, involving situations which were harder to anticipate, such as conflicts with a colleague, medical issues, or experiencing microaggressions. My team recommends that mandatory training modules for students, which currently focus on preventing not-inherent stressors, should also include guidance on dealing with stress inherent to PhDs, and that advisors should more consistently model their strategies for coping with stress.
How Researching Doctoral Student Stress Affected Me
This study gave me an opportunity for me to hear the stories of stress and coping from a wide range of students and apply new techniques to my own working life. I noticed in particular that participants in my interview study who had really well-set routines were among the least stressed across the students I sampled. Thus, I pushed my own writing and research schedule to be more consistent during the last two years of my PhD, greatly improving the quality of my working life – and resulting in a quick production of my dissertation. To keep myself level, I increased my practice of taking more weekend and evening time off and set a hard limit to never conduct work on Saturdays in particular, which I am glad upheld firmly, even as my defense date grew near. Further, I raised my awareness of my bandwidth for working effectively and turning down or postponing projects when necessary, acting on the important lesson most graduate students learn about saying “no” to projects.
I recommend coping practices to younger graduate students now, including experimenting with schedules and routines. For example, as I tried to set a routine, I found that if I requested no meetings after a certain point in the afternoon, I could write uninterrupted in the middle of the day when I am most productive, building “deep work times” into my schedule. I have also become more open about my advising preferences, particularly where writing is concerned. For example, after hearing of a participant’s useful “workshop sessions” with their advisor, I requested more frequent writing meetings with my advisor for the purposes of accountability and for receiving feedback. My advisor was initially somewhat skeptical about whether the meetings would be productive for her, but we ended up collaboratively advancing and submitting several manuscripts as a result of these workshops.
A Few Closing Thoughts
If I could choose for my research to have one result, it would be that it catalyzes some conversations about stress in PhD programs: why it’s so normally experienced and how it affects students. I hope that undergraduates, administrators, staff, and professors can see some of their own stressful experiences in the descriptions my study’s participants gave and consider their own experiences of stress, and maybe how they cause, reduce, or normalize stress. Culture changes only when individuals start to, through words and through many discussions. As part of a graduate community, this is a culture that affects us all deeply and in the institution which is heralded as the most progressive agent of change and growing human knowledge, we have a lot to do together to advocate for the wellness of one another, and ourselves.
Joe Mirabelli recently graduated with a doctoral degree from the Department of Educational Psychology, and is now a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Michigan. His graduate work focused on engineering education, including studies of culture, mental health, and retention of engineering students. He is very grateful for the many collaborative research experiences and training received with the Departments of Educational Psychology and Bioengineering during his PhD studies.
