How to flourish in graduate school? This is not a question, but it is such very huge agenda, and there many things to be sought for understanding before jumping right into this agenda.
There are a myriad of advice and suggestion about how to survive graduate school. I, however, personally, have never complete taken put my faith in those. For I believe that there are no inclusively complete recipe for living graduate student lives. So, what I usually handle myself in graduate school is to combine those available recipes with my own personality and my goals of life - to live happily.
There are only three objectives that I would like to achieve while living my graduate student life are (a) to stay healthy, (b) to enjoy my life, entertaining, and (c) to work in order to fulfill the graduate school’s requirement. However, the objectives (a) and (b) by far outweigh the (c). I strongly believe mental and physical health is very important; that is why (a) is the first priority. And I also believe that every life on earth deserves a very quality time of living happily, then it would be a very misinformed if we forego out happiness and enjoyment just because we serve our life with academic reason. Finally (c) working hard - this is a very collective term - is very rewarding in the long run.
I would like to compare studying in graduate school to working in real world environment. I don’t want to claim that one of them is tougher than the other since they are also tough in difference point of view. When working, we have to remind ourselves that we are working toward “something” that usually takes us up to 6 years of suffering. Short-term, intermediate-term, and long-term goals can be differently achieved with different requirements. It is acceptable to allow yourselves to get punished for the purpose of achieving goals, and, moreover, it is very important to reward yourselves when you conquer such intellectual quest.
All in all, don’t live life so seriously because you cannot quite it anyway.
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