Resilience
The life of a Stanford graduate student is riddled with disappointment. Don’t get me wrong—I absolutely love being a graduate student here. You get to sleep late and people give you a lot of free food. But you also receive a lot of negative feedback: criticism on presentations, denials from fellowship committees, and rejections from journals. Initial ideas, experiments, and fieldwork often come to nothing and entire summers can feel like an exercise in futility. Let’s face it — there are relatively few instances for external validation and gratification during graduate school, and many opportunities for failure or insecurity. We rarely hear, “I want to congratulate you on your work. It was truly impressive.” Instead we see a lot of, “Thank you for your application. We had an extremely competitive pool of applicants this year and regret to inform you that we can not offer you a fellowship.”
No matter how many times you experience these setbacks, each one can hurt deeply. More insidiously, if you’re not resilient, these disappointments can infect your feelings of self-worth and optimism outside of the university, making you feel like a complete failure as a person as well as a student.
Create Your Inner Monologue
Strengthening your confidence in your academic ability will help you become more resilient to these disappointments. More specifically, you need to develop a positive inner monologue about your competence as a scholar, researcher, and teacher. Unfortunately, confidence often seems to go down, not up, upon entering graduate school at Stanford. Many new graduate students find themselves inflicted with “impostor syndrome” and low self esteem for the first time in their life. Students who were once at the top of their class must now compare themselves to brilliant peers and professors, worrying privately, “They made a mistake. I don’t belong here.” It isn’t true, and you must remind yourself of that regularly.
Since the opportunities for affirmation are so low relative to the opportunities for criticism, students must learn to be their own source of positive feedback. One way to create internal positive feedback is to create a list of your intangible accomplishments, such as: I am well respected by my peers; I work extremely hard and never give up; I contribute to my research group and give helpful feedback; my advisors (who are well respected academics at one of the finest schools in the world) believe in me, etc. and place it right in front of you at your desk or lab bench.
While this list might seem silly at first, these are exactly the intangible qualities that you begin to doubt after a rejection or two. So why not remind yourself that they are true? Keeping this list close and reading it every day will help you create a positive inner monologue about your academic ability and your value as a person, boosting your confidence and ability to bounce back from criticism or rejection.
Get a Fresh Perspective
When you’re finding it particularly hard to escape your web of doubt, get outside, go for a walk or run, or practice yoga. If you feel like you can’t devote a whole hour to exercise, yet are daunted by the idea of being trapped with only your own thoughts for that long, perhaps you can get a fresh perspective by going upside down with a headstand or shoulder stand for just a couple of minutes a day. Or just try sitting cross-legged on the floor in a quiet room and listening to your own breathing. These simple actions can help you reset your attitude and change your perspective when you’re feeling particularly trapped by negative thoughts.
Build a Network of Friends
In addition to creating an inner self-affirming monologue, try to set up an external network for positive feedback, a safety net to catch you when you’re falling into despair after a particularly harsh review or comment. In the context of graduate school, particularly helpful are friends that are one or two years ahead of you, who remember the disappointment and doubt you are feeling in any given moment and can assure you that life goes on after a rejection, and that even the greatest researchers receive rejections and criticism all the time.
I’m not talking just about good working relationships with your colleagues or the ability to engage in superficial repartee. I’m talking about building real friendships with students in your program or with shared interests. Such supportive relationships can only develop when we turn our brains off from criticizing someone else’s work and instead just chat about our interests, hopes, and disappointments during a late night in the office, a happy hour, or any event where you can be a real person, not just a graduate student. It’s good for you to take a break from your work and actively prioritize spending unstructured time with friends. Once you believe in your friendships you’ll begin to trust your friends with your doubts, which will allow them the opportunity to put things in perspective for you and tell you honestly how brilliant and terrific you are.
Enjoy It
Any good advisor will tell you that success in graduate school is all about hard work and determination. But who says you need to be miserable while persevering? It’s time to recognize the importance of resilience—that is, how quickly you recover from failures and get back to being a happy and confident graduate student. So don’t waste any more time surviving graduate school and its numerous disappointments. Be proactive about building your confidence, creating your positive inner monologue, and developing your support network. And start enjoying this experience.
No matter how many times you experience these setbacks, each one can hurt deeply. More insidiously, if you’re not resilient, these disappointments can infect your feelings of self-worth and optimism outside of the university, making you feel like a complete failure as a person as well as a student.
Create Your Inner Monologue
Strengthening your confidence in your academic ability will help you become more resilient to these disappointments. More specifically, you need to develop a positive inner monologue about your competence as a scholar, researcher, and teacher. Unfortunately, confidence often seems to go down, not up, upon entering graduate school at Stanford. Many new graduate students find themselves inflicted with “impostor syndrome” and low self esteem for the first time in their life. Students who were once at the top of their class must now compare themselves to brilliant peers and professors, worrying privately, “They made a mistake. I don’t belong here.” It isn’t true, and you must remind yourself of that regularly.
Since the opportunities for affirmation are so low relative to the opportunities for criticism, students must learn to be their own source of positive feedback. One way to create internal positive feedback is to create a list of your intangible accomplishments, such as: I am well respected by my peers; I work extremely hard and never give up; I contribute to my research group and give helpful feedback; my advisors (who are well respected academics at one of the finest schools in the world) believe in me, etc. and place it right in front of you at your desk or lab bench.
While this list might seem silly at first, these are exactly the intangible qualities that you begin to doubt after a rejection or two. So why not remind yourself that they are true? Keeping this list close and reading it every day will help you create a positive inner monologue about your academic ability and your value as a person, boosting your confidence and ability to bounce back from criticism or rejection.
Get a Fresh Perspective
When you’re finding it particularly hard to escape your web of doubt, get outside, go for a walk or run, or practice yoga. If you feel like you can’t devote a whole hour to exercise, yet are daunted by the idea of being trapped with only your own thoughts for that long, perhaps you can get a fresh perspective by going upside down with a headstand or shoulder stand for just a couple of minutes a day. Or just try sitting cross-legged on the floor in a quiet room and listening to your own breathing. These simple actions can help you reset your attitude and change your perspective when you’re feeling particularly trapped by negative thoughts.
Build a Network of Friends
In addition to creating an inner self-affirming monologue, try to set up an external network for positive feedback, a safety net to catch you when you’re falling into despair after a particularly harsh review or comment. In the context of graduate school, particularly helpful are friends that are one or two years ahead of you, who remember the disappointment and doubt you are feeling in any given moment and can assure you that life goes on after a rejection, and that even the greatest researchers receive rejections and criticism all the time.
I’m not talking just about good working relationships with your colleagues or the ability to engage in superficial repartee. I’m talking about building real friendships with students in your program or with shared interests. Such supportive relationships can only develop when we turn our brains off from criticizing someone else’s work and instead just chat about our interests, hopes, and disappointments during a late night in the office, a happy hour, or any event where you can be a real person, not just a graduate student. It’s good for you to take a break from your work and actively prioritize spending unstructured time with friends. Once you believe in your friendships you’ll begin to trust your friends with your doubts, which will allow them the opportunity to put things in perspective for you and tell you honestly how brilliant and terrific you are.
Enjoy It
Any good advisor will tell you that success in graduate school is all about hard work and determination. But who says you need to be miserable while persevering? It’s time to recognize the importance of resilience—that is, how quickly you recover from failures and get back to being a happy and confident graduate student. So don’t waste any more time surviving graduate school and its numerous disappointments. Be proactive about building your confidence, creating your positive inner monologue, and developing your support network. And start enjoying this experience.