Mason Grad Insider Blog

At the Mason Grad Insider, we’ve written plenty of blog posts about self-care, meditation, well-being, and resilience as a graduate student. But what about when that’s not enough? What can we do when we’ve realized that our mental health has declined; when there are issues we’d like to work through; or, simply when we decide we need a little extra support? This is where external mental health resources, such as counseling or group therapy, can come into play.

You are in fact here to start a business - that business is your own research portfolio and your areas of expertise. You may not be selling any goods or materials, but you’re selling your ideas and your research.

There are plenty of great reasons you should get a plant, which I’m going to outline here. Some of these are my own personal reasons, but I also drew a lot of these reasons from the amazing horticulture class...

Deciding to get a masters’ degree and then a PhD didn’t change the way that I saw community engagement and service connected to my career and what I did on my own time. In fact, it might have further solidified it. In this new role as now a researcher and scholar, I see community as inexplicably tied to our work as graduate students.

When I’m starting a study session or settling into an evening class, there’s nothing I love more than doing it with a fresh cup of coffee or tea. Although my time at Starbucks is coming to an end as I will be starting my counseling practicum soon, I’d like to impart some Starbucks order suggestions and wisdom to all of my fellow graduate and professional students.

A lot of time in grad school, we talk about finding a mentor, but recently, one of my writing groups had a long conversation around us as mentors and I decided that not enough attention or conversation is given to graduate and professional students as mentors ourselves.

Being a graduate student can be one of the biggest time commitments that you have ever faced. Not only is there class time, but you also have to attend countless professional development workshops, build relationships with faculty, and get through mountains of reading.

If your degree is not only the end of your graduate studies but the beginning of your next chapter, what do you need to do during your graduate education to ensure that you’re going to be successful? How will you even know what being successful means? What are the things that you know you need to accomplish while you’re seeking your degree that will make you be a stand-out in the job search process?

For some, virtual job interviews feel even more complicated or overwhelming compared to in-person interviews. Adding the layer of technology can create additional unease for candidates who are new to job searching, as well as those with more than 30 years of work experience. I hope to assure you that virtual job interviews are really just the same old thing. When preparing for virtual interviews, the basics of job interview preparation will see you through, whether you have to drive to your interview or just turn on your computer.

Meal prep is essential for us working adults (as many of us graduate students are), both to bring to our jobs and to those evening classes. Meal prep is great for many reasons–when you meal prep, you’ll be eating more nutritious food, healthier portions, and saving a lot more money than if you were eating out for these meals.

It is now fall and I still enjoy getting outdoors and the perk of the DMV is that you get to enjoy the fall leaves, a thing I never got in GA. Don’t get me wrong, on the plus side, it is forcing me to write my dissertation, which I guess is a good thing. However, I can’t shake the feeling that I need to be outside and in fresh air.

With Zotero, you can upload your library of research articles, as I did, or you can add them in via DOI, ISBN, ISSN, and so on, and you can even add in sources manually. From there, you can sort your sources by folder (such as a folder for each research project, one for each class, or one for each topic) and add in ‘tags’ to make finding information easier.