How to Stay Human in Graduate School

Live in a house. Not an apartment, not a town home—an actual house, with a driveway and a front porch and trees. Hang a clothesline in the back yard so you can see your clothes wave in the wind through the window while you wash dishes at your kitchen sink. Fill the living room with bookshelves and cozy couches and rocking chairs. Put a table in your dining room and then use it for dining, like human beings do.

Don’t live alone; share the house with friends, even if they’re the brand-new kind. Get to know them. Make dinner together sometimes, and talk about classes and books and ideas. But have quiet space for yourself too, and retreat to it when you need to. If possible, rent your house from wonderful people—perhaps even professors in your department, whose house is directly behind yours—and then be their neighbors, in the real sense of the term. Bake them cookies and let them give you fresh eggs from their hen house and play with their adorable children.

Do your reading—that’s why you’re here, after all—but don’t let your schoolbooks be the only things you read. Delve deep into American political institutions and constitutional theory, but keep your mind open to history and philosophy and theology and literature and natural science. When you go to bed, leave Larry Kramer on your desk and pick up a novel for fifteen minutes—it’s good for your brain. If you like to write, go ahead and look at your syllabi and calculate how many pages of papers you have to write in the next four months. Realize that it’s almost a hundred. Decide to keep writing for fun anyway.

Try to think of school as your job, because it is. Take it seriously, but don’t let it take over your life. Go out with people from your department. Go out with people from other departments. Try to make friends who have nothing to do with graduate school. Go to Mass every day, if you want. Pray. Exercise regularly—not because your department chair will care (they didn’t admit you because of your stunning displays of athletic prowess), but because it keeps you sane and help you rest well. Get enough sleep—even when you think you don’t have enough time. You can’t afford not to.

Make your life beautiful. Go hiking in the park with your roommate. Listen to music. Pick up your guitar once in a while. Cook real food, and drink wine with it sometimes. Write letters to your far-away friends—actual letters, with paper and ink and stamps and envelopes. Take the extra two minutes to drive to campus along the river, and don’t speed. When you wake in the morning, go outside and look up at the big Texas sky. It's amazing. And when you go to bed at night, say a prayer of thanksgiving—because you are blessed.