We all work too much
Institutions must tackle higher ed’s mental health problem by paying graduate students more to work less
CW: suicide mention, discussions of mental health and wellness
The best advice I was given about graduate school was not to go to graduate school.
In 2017, I was floating the idea of applying to doctoral programs. While I had been entertaining the idea of a biology doctorate for a few years, I graduated uncertain about what I was to do next, and went into two gap years to figure out what I wanted. I enjoyed the part of science that was about learning and problem-solving, and questions of neuroscience and cognition fascinated me further the more I learned; the day-to-day realities were of course a little less rosy, but hey — it’s a living.
So I was admittedly on the fence, and the answers from my colleagues didn’t inspire great confidence. As I asked people about their experiences in graduate school, I got anywhere from lukewarm deflection to the refreshingly certain “I wouldn’t do it again.” Graduate students I knew were punished by arbitrary professional expectations that clashed with their cultures; postdocs refrained from going into depth about those years, or alternately, told me they had never been more miserable and were glad to be out. The straightest answer I received was from a staff scientist, who told me point-blank: “Grad school is hell. Don’t go.”
Despite this, I still applied to doctoral programs, and in spring of 2018 was accepted into my current program. After the warm endorsement of this career path I had received, my choice might strike you as misguided. But if I’m being perfectly honest, I’m not sure I would have applied (or stayed in a program) if I had gotten a happy-go-lucky, overly optimistic answer. What I was told matched what I had observed firsthand — and rather than resigning myself to being put through hell to get a PhD, it made me determined to get through, or not, first and foremost with my health intact.
The thing was, I had already put myself through hell for the academy. My undergraduate years introduced me to lows I hadn’t realized were even possible, and a huge part of that was the expectation that you would be working all of the time. My university was filled with overachievers driven by unrealistic pressures (I went to Cornell, judge me accordingly), and any personal metrics you had for success were slowly raised like mercury in a thermometer by the presence of one more kid who did more, studied more, stayed up later than you. I often would stay up nights not working but not-not working, feeling guilty even as I knew I needed to sleep. College was the first time I went to see a therapist, and looking back now, I couldn’t even understand the pall of anxiety and despair I was under for literal years. I never seriously contemplated suicide, but I had multiple friends who did. This isn’t a unique experience, for undergraduate students or graduate — the mental health crisis in higher education has been known about for decades.
Yet, for a long time, I thought it didn’t really matter how unhappy I was so long as my grades were up. The trade-off was clear: even if you were miserable now, it was for the sake of your bright and shining future. All this miserable, crushing, anxiety-producing work was an investment of time, energy, money, and sanity so that you could have something better down the line. It was just another instantiation of the marshmallow test: the wise, patient (economically secure) children wait for one marshmallow to be given a second, while the foolish, impulsive (and poor) children eat theirs immediately, and lose out on a delicious second marshmallow. The stinginess of the researchers for providing a meagre two marshmallows is, of course, never part of the equation — nor is the question of their perceived reliability in handing over the promised second marshmallow.
Because, really, when does the work end? The lowest point I had in college was my junior year when it hit me hard that it didn’t. The work would never end. I had put most of the things in my life on hold to get a degree and career — my writing, my sewing, my composition, my friendships and social well-being, the things I cared far more about than any purported career success — and for what? A day when I would finally have the time to get back to them? Or was the offer actually far more dire, in that I simply had no choice? If I wanted the bare bones of survival, I would always, always, always have to work.
In the best, most charmed and starry-eyed version of my future, my hard work might get me some prestige and material comfort. Perhaps I could become one of the 17% of PhDs that get a tenured professorship and spend my waking hours forever applying for grants. It might net me increasingly inadequate and arcane health insurance and a house if I was lucky, if I wanted to also blithely lie to myself that climate catastrophe wasn’t imminent and any future promises or second marshmallows were a gamble at best. But even in this ideal, best-case version of my future, I couldn’t ever get what I actually wanted: honestly, just some dang free time.
As I wrote my secondary applications in the microscope room, I decided I would make myself a deal: If at any point in graduate school ever became as miserable as I was in undergrad, I would leave. Take the L, get called a quitter, move on with my life, find something else to do. It wasn’t worth being miserable now, because I was never going to be allowed to stop working.
(The person who told me graduate school was hell ended up writing on a card from the lab, “Enjoy the suffering!”)
Everyone in academia works too much.
A recent tweet that I will not source was the inspiration for this article. I read it in my morning coffee-and-twitter-scroll, and had to take a beat at what a shockingly bad take it was. It put forth that it was impossible to get a PhD working 9–5 with weekends off, unless you planned to take a decade, with ample funding and an undemanding PI.
In the replies beneath it was a growing list of testimonials from people who had done just that — got a PhD well within the standard range of years, working 9–5 days with weekends off. The sort of mentality expressed in the tweet, however, is extremely prevalent at least in my little corner of biomedical sciences– both the hustle culture, and the strange sort of hazing mentality, the idea that “I worked my ass off and suffered and was miserable — and now it’s your turn.” All of us do work our asses off — graduate workers come in at odd hours, stay until late into the night, work on weekends. I have a suspicion I’m a bit of an anomaly for sticking as close to the 9–5 as science permits. I could always be working more, but why? The work gets done. I know also that the long hours of graduate students aren’t entirely self-inflicted; while there are many people who internalize these expectations, the expectations also emerge from PIs, supervisors, and other lab members who, either through instruction or example, make plain that this is the required behavior. It is also in some regards an American problem; while it is not uniquely American and your mileage may vary, it is also true that doctoral programs abroad have different, often more lenient, cultures around work and work hours. (And some of them are in places with socialized healthcare — what a wonder!)
I have to wonder what would happen if graduate workers stopped regarding ourselves as the undeserving beneficiaries of those gracious institutions which generously bestow degrees, and instead understand that we do good work in our own right — work that should be compensated, not with the promise of letters next to our name, but rather with something green we can spend on food. After all, how do we think our institutions, labs, and PIs would fare without the research that we do and the promises to their funders we fulfill? It actually seems as if, perhaps, they need us more than we need them.
After all, the work is never going to end. Graduate students work too much, postdocs work too much, professors work too much. Sorry, I phrased that wrong — we are all required to work too much. Even the 9–5 work day was the result of years of union struggle, not some minimum baseline, and the 40-hour work week supposes that you have a wife at home who does your cooking. Most of us, I would wager, don’t have that. (If you are interested in being my housewife, I mean, hit me up, but my stipend cannot support both of us). We tell ourselves it is for our own advancement; we chase the achievements of careers, awards, conference proceedings. We tell ourselves that the science itself demands it. And sometimes it does! Sometimes you have to feed your cells. But the science can also chill out sometimes, because the pace of publish or perish is something that our institutions, funding structures, and increasingly corporatized enterprises demand of us. It is not something inherent to doing rigorous and effective science.
Likewise, it can be simultaneously true that what we do is worth doing and important, but that it’s not worth killing ourselves over. The knowledge we produce may benefit humanity — but we are part of humanity, as well, and I signed up to be a scientist, not a martyr.
The subject of poor mental health among graduate and postdoctoral workers is frequently discussed in shrouds of mystery. Endless talks, seminars, task forces, and wellness programs all describe ways to be mindful, pet a dog, seek therapy (if you can afford it), be resilient. And I would never blame students who run programs like these for the sake of their own survival and that of their classmates. (I mean, yes, I will pet your good dog.) But what administrations are so happy to let these wellness programs obscure is why academia is so prone to burnout and why nearly half of graduate students in the biomedical sciences struggle with depression and anxiety. The reason is always something wrong with us — that we didn’t have the right work-life balance, that we couldn’t hack it and manage our time, that there was something wrong in our brain chemistry that means we’re not suited to academia — while yet another PI that shouts at their subordinates somehow is.
I don’t want another resiliency training. Resilience is the ability to recover from trauma. I would like people to not have to be resilient, because I would like them to not be traumatized.
Maybe when it comes to mental health in academia, we’re asking the wrong questions. Perhaps a line of work that demands monastic devotion of its inductees to prove their merit or fervor has some problems with it. Maybe the weird hazing mentality with which some graduate school-survivors regard their own experience is indicative that the structure and expectations of these programs should be scrutinized. Because not only does an exploitative and toxic environment select for toxic assholes (no offense to the toxic assholes out there), but it excludes people and perspectives that “can’t hack it” for reasons that have nothing to do with their insight, scientific skills, or knowledge, and everything to do with needing accommodations, having a family to care for, not having the resources to survive being seriously underpaid for years, and having to contend with the daily onslaught of racism, sexism, transphobia, and ableism from their institutions. Inhospitable and unfair conditions drive out the most vulnerable among us, and no amount of inclusivity training or seminars on work-life balance can substitute for changing the actual conditions under which people work.
This may be a little beside the point, but here at the end, I want to give you permission to work less if you want to and are able. I mean, honestly, do whatever you want, I’m explicitly not your boss and I’m not here to piss you off, but if you are grappling with that inner voice that chants “You’re not doing enough”, then here’s that little push. I urge this not because I think it fixes the problem, but just for your own damn sake. Work fewer hours, finish up by 5, take weekends off. You have my blessing to take back your time. You will finish your degree, it will come together — not only can it be done, but my suspicion is it will help.
But my broader point, and the one I want to hammer home, is that work-life balance is not really in our hands. Many of us can’t take back our time, because long work hours, unreasonable expectations, and toxic climates aren’t merely specters of our feverish minds. And so if you can’t work less, I am begging you: at least realize you’re being exploited. It doesn’t have to be like this, either to get a degree or to do the science. If the work is necessary for the science, that means there need to be more hands. If the work is necessary for the degree, then let them pay us more.
This is something that can change, and we have the ability to change it. New Mexico State graduate workers just won a union; Columbia, CUNY, and NYU have been organizing for years. Union workers are consistently more likely to earn more and have better benefits, including healthcare, than unorganized workers; just this year, workers at NYU made a tentative agreement after a 3-week strike that, among other changes, raises their hourly rate by 30%, includes workload protections, and dramatically improves healthcare coverage. Other union contracts include transparent processes for mistreatment recourse and third-party arbitration. While workload reduction and increased pay are not a panacea to all issues of mistreatment and mental health, collective bargaining is a powerful tool to effectively target the conditions that produce unwellness. Wins can be made. We just need to start by recognizing what needs to change, and then standing together to demand it.
The thing is, you don’t have to be miserable to do good work. You don’t have to be in the lab all the time to be a dedicated scientist. In fact, we could all work less for more pay and the scientific enterprise wouldn’t grind to a halt — in fact, with new energy, intention, community, and insight, we might find that science would blossom.
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