Post
by DeeCee » Thu Dec 23, 2010 1:02 am
I'm in grad school and I will be finishing in May and attending law school August 2011. Although I admire your determination, grad school (at least my grad school) is quite similar to law school, i.e. you have more hours of work than you can EVER do in the day, your classmates are *extremely* competitive for internships, you have to find out everything on your own besides the parts presented in lecture, professors are perplexing, et cetera. But--my field does not have loads of books about how to succeed in grad school, how PLS2 and that entire genre of books (depressingly and ungraciously) does. I find it all so strange, and I now believe I must be joining the ranks of students who are OCD like myself.
That being said, I studied 10+ hours a day 7 days a week my first year of grad. I thought it was essential, and I read a bunch of things that never mattered in the end. I practically killed myself and almost ruined close relationships in the process. After that year, I knew I was working much harder than I needed to. This year, I took harder classes, changed my ways by dropping unnecessary materials and buying less optional class textbooks, and put in about 2/3 the time to study that I did before. Yet, I'm still holding a 4.0 after my grades came out last week and I enjoyed my free time. I know you're doing great but I personally felt that once I gave time to MYSELF on weekends and nights, rather than making school my absolute life, I was happy, and I still made great grades. Now, I do ~8 hours of studying (including class meetings in that time block), 5 days a week, much like a 9-5 job.
I might not be exactly comparing apples to apples here, being a 0L, so obviously do what works for you. I just feel that sometimes, these overbearing techniques can be detrimental to our lives, especially since we are all such overachievers (it was certainly detrimental to mine). Anyway, I just wanted to offer a different perspective from the ones offered in PLS2 and other books.
EDIT: Guess I should have paid attention and not revived such an old thread.