Graduate School and Mental Health

I am one day late posting my blog this week, and for good reason. I spent most of Friday, Saturday, and Sunday engaged in family activities (and traveling back home). There has been increased talk at USC about the state of graduate school life and mental health and how current students can improve their quality of life while undergoing an incredibly stressful program of work. During my years on the Graduate Student Government, I worked for 15+ hours as Community Service Director, took three courses which was 9+ hours of in-class time plus reading and homework, worked as a Teaching and Research Assistant for faculty for 20+ hours a week, all while expecting to be doing personal projects, attending conferences, and publishing papers. Now that classes are over, I've passed my qualifying exam, and I am no longer a member of GSG, my time is mostly dominated by working on the dissertation. This is a no less stressful but more flexible academic assignment. I list these responsibilities not to brag about my own accomplishments. Instead, it helps me to reflect on the immense pressure I experience, when I am a graduate student who is not also supporting a family on $30,000 a year, dealing with health issues, or serving as a member of a prolific research team.

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No matter our responsibilities, there is a great amount of pressure of students to succeed in public and suffer in private. It is very uncommon for people to discuss their workloads and admit failure or shortcomings. Instead, they turn into perverse competitions where we compare our workloads to others (I'm guilty of participating in this). When all we are told is "publish or perish," it is difficult to not have some sadness behind congratulatory statements or to take rejections from conferences lightly. To admit failure is to lose the game of PhD life and to express that openly is frowned upon. Research indicates that 60% of graduate students feel hopeless and depressed nearly all the time and 1 in 10 have contemplated suicide. But, there are few, well known resources for these feelings.

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I took up this blog post in response to amazing statements made by my colleagues, Ritesh Mehta and Cynthia Wang, who reflected upon their time at USC. Ritesh made a profound and poignant statement at his dissertation defense about how students should not have to suffer in silence and be afraid to reach out to one another. Although the program is 100+ students in size, it can be quite lonely work staring at a computer screen all day. Cynthia posted similar sentiments on Facebook about sharing failures and talked about being rejected from a journal. I am proud of both of their statements and wanted to make one myself: I recently was rejected from a journal. Although the comments were quite positive, there was a sinking feeling that there was something else back on my plate that was simply unbearable. There was no room to fit it back into the growing list of tasks, assignments, and responsibilities.

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I don't think that any of our problems are the result of USC. I would encourage any potential graduate students to consider this amazing and supportive program. I think the problems are deeper, within the PhD experience, and the academic community at large that engages in competitive mentalities and focuses on output instead of the process. Similar to ongoing debates about the requirements placed on medical residents, I think more conversation should begin about the mental well-being of graduate students. Reducing the stigma of sharing is something that I hope will get better as more students create a culture of support rather than judgment. This is something that will ebb and flow with time and does nothing to address institutional expectations. Indeed, when we think about the contributions that we will have as graduate students, it pales in comparison to what we will do as faculty members. Perhaps we need to treat graduate school more as training for academia than a full blown toss into the deep end of academic publishing and stress. This article provides some other potential solutions including increased acknowledgement, specialized training, and more resources.

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I took this weekend off, postponed my blog post, and had a friend cover the class that I'm teaching over the summer. I felt guilty for a while for this decision I made, but I think that more of us should be okay with taking more breaks, more mental days off, and enjoying ourselves with family and friends. The computer (and that R&R) will still be there tomorrow.

Research Tools for Students and Faculty: Google Citation

Once in graduate school and during the tenure process, academics are concerned with one thing: branding. Creating one's own website (site comparison forthcoming), formatting and meticulously combing one's CV, and  constructing an online presence are all important parts of one's academic brand and profile. In order to facilitate  one's online identity as a scholar, I'm going to take this post to explain two important ways to ensure that your academic publications and profile are the top results for your name.

Google Citation is an off-shoot of Google Scholar that creates profiles for academics by linking their publications within the scholar database. When someone searches Google Scholar to look for a publication or a topic area and finds an article of interest, they can select the author and be linked to their profile. Within this profile is the author's other articles in the Scholar database, the number of articles that have cited each article over the years, and links to those articles. Becoming familiar with Google Citations helps a scholar in two ways: creating a branding opportunity and tracking one's citations and web of scholarly interaction.

Google Scholar often auto-creates profiles for the more prolific authors by finding similarly cited names and linking the articles together. For new scholars and academics however, we can do part of the work for Google by creating our own profiles and linking our own publications there. The benefits to this (instead of letting Google create own for you) is that your profile will be available for searches and attached to your articles sooner and will be completed with more information. Scholars can upload their own profile photograph, create a verified email address for contact, key areas of research interests, links to other sites (like a research blog or professional website), and manually add articles that Google Citation might not have added (due to differences in citation style or name changes).

Keeping track of one's citations is a great way to create connections with other scholars with shared citations and cited each other's articles. With the multitude of journals and publications across field lines, scholars are often not aware of the people citing their articles or similar or tangential work in the same line of inquiry. This is great way to contact other scholars for panels at conferences, to find colleagues at institutions that might be hiring, or to find co-authors.

These benefits can be doubled if one has multiple citation sites. Other databases similar to Google Scholar have their own author profiles. Consider making one at each of the more popular search engines to make sure that your work is being connected to your brand. Other notable citation sites are ResearcherID at Web of Science and Scopus.

Keeping track of all of these sites is one more task on the ever-growing list of to-dos for academics, but this is an important one. Being able to link all of one's publications increases the likelihood of being found by other scholars and overall creates a stronger brand for the graduate student and faculty academic.