Back to School!

Posted September 9, 2025 by Emmy Mahoney

Hello, everyone! This semester, I am starting the second year of my graduate school program, and I am very excited to jump back into learning. Having survived a full year, I have some tips for students entering their first year of graduate school.

In terms of keeping up with assignments, one of the best pieces of advice I can offer is to find a calendar system that works for you. This could be a planner, a monthly calendar, a digital calendar, or something else entirely. My preferred calendar system is to create a large poster of the semester, which outlines all of my assignments and their due dates. This helps me to visualize the semester as a whole and make long term plans for completing school work. Furthermore, I hang this poster by my desk, so I am consistently reminded of what I need to accomplish.

My next piece of advice is to schedule a recurring time in which you do not complete any school work. This could be at a certain time every day, or even one full day a week. It is important for you to rest your brain, and to give yourself time to process all of the information you are learning! Similarly, it is important to take care of your body during graduate school. I recommend finding movement that you enjoy. This could be in the form of traditional exercise–running, lifting weights, etc.–or non-traditional exercise–dancing, hiking, roller skating, etc. Anything that moves your body and that you enjoy will work! Exercising, even a little, will help you feel better physically and emotionally. The movement I enjoy the most is taking my dogs for long walks.

Another helpful tip is to find a project or hobby unrelated to your graduate program. Grad school requires a lot of hard work and can sometimes feel all-consuming, so it is important to remind ourselves that we exist outside of school. Working on a project or participating in a hobby can help to accomplish this. Outside of school, I am learning how to crochet; I have just started working on a scarf.

Some final tips for this post are to ask your peers and professors for help, to find what strategies work best for you and stick to them, and finally, to make sure you are drinking water, and not just caffeine. Have a great semester, you’ve got this!