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Grad school is hard. Most of us at some point (or points) during our degree could benefit from some mental health help. It can be intimidating to look for services, and there are options available that you might not even be aware of. I hope that by creating a ‘cheat sheet’ of different sources for working on your mental health, you are able to find whatever you think would be best for you. I also will recommend that you try to avoid my mistake – waiting until things are an emergency.

Hello fellow grad students! This post is coming from the heart of tough times in the research realm. POV, I just spent the past year and a half building a research partnership to have my site withdraw just days before data collection. If research heartbreak is a thing, I am definitely feeling it.

Grind culture seems to be something celebrated on a lot of platforms. Many of us talk about the nights that we spent, full of caffeine and manic energy, trying to keep up with assignments, readings, and everything else on our plates. There can be an almost toxic celebration of the suffering that comes from the ‘grad school grind’. I know that I fell into this trap of putting aside my physical and mental health while trying to keep up. And it always seemed like other people were doing more, and handling things better. Why couldn’t I keep up?

By the time you are reading this, I have just finished defending my PhD. What a wonderful thought that is as I can currently feel the nervous butterflies flutter in my stomach. After 5 years of working on my PhD, I got to submit it to the exam committee. Although that in and of itself is a huge accomplishment, I could not help but feel more nervous than happy at the time. For those of you who do not know, you submit your PhD 5 weeks before the defense.

Certainly, it’s no secret that grad students have this immense pressure to be working around the clock. Evenings, weekends, holidays; if we aren’t working, we must be falling behind. If we fall behind, we must not be working hard enough. Isn’t it ironic that after years of working with lab rats, we seem to become lab rats ourselves?

Picture this: It’s the summer of 2020, you’ve been quarantining with your family for 2 months, while you count down the days until you’re back at school in September. As an undergraduate student at Queen’s, I was lucky enough to have a summer home in Kingston, which I used as my last-minute escape from the COVID-19 madness. I packed up my bags, said goodbye to my family, and made the two-and-a-half-hour trip to Kingston.