How Journaling has helped me through grad school

Serina Taluja

I’ve always been a writer (obviously, I’m writing for the Aggie Voice blog on top of the writing I do for research anyway!), but I never really thought to use my writing just for me. I always wrote things that I hoped would be published, like papers and articles, or used by others, like protocols and instructions. It wasn’t until I was in graduate school that I really appreciated the power that writing has not only to help us process our thoughts, but to also keep us organized and on-track with our short- and long-term goals.

Journaling for organization

My organizational writing mostly takes place on the Notion app now, but I’ve cycled through lots of different writing-based organizational tools in graduate school. Whether it’s Google Calendar, Notion, or a good old spiral planner, it’s so helpful to decide what you’re going to accomplish in a day- and then as you work down the list, either cross things off or take a minute to acknowledge that you just achieved a goal! A big part of writing for organization, for me, is the new awareness it brought to just how productive I can be when I put my mind to it and my goals are clear. For a long time, I struggled finding motivation on days that I came to work not feeling like my best self. Having a written plan and being able to look forward to the rewarding feeling of finishing something on that plan gives me the incentive I need to be productive even on those hard days.

And those goals can be as specific as you want- I find that having hourly goals throughout my day helps now that I don’t have any external structure (like classes, or lots of weekly meetings to attend). However, if hourly is too specific, start with your goals for a week! Then maybe for each day of that week- whatever timeframe you use, writing your goals down makes them so much more real than just keeping them in your mind.

Journaling for inspiration

I have a separate, chaotic journal that I keep with me during meetings and seminars, and that joins me at every conference I travel to. By contrast to my organizational writing, the best part about this system is that there are essentially no rules- I let myself write down interesting things from talks, or ideas I can use in the lab later, or things that I remember suddenly that I need to work on or finish. I even let myself doodle in this journal because it’s primary use for me is inspiration and idea collecting. I don’t force myself to take in depth notes on what’s going on around me the way I was always trained to in class- instead, this journal houses all my best and worst ideas, along with any intrusive thoughts or things I just want to put somewhere so I don’t forget them later.

This type of writing has made research way more fun for me. Not only does it provide a home for some of my crazier ideas (even the ones that require a doodle or a diagram to go along with them), but it also makes me feel more like every talk I go to I’m searching for new ideas or pieces to a bigger puzzle that is my dissertation research. And while I’m not always explicitly taking notes on the entirety of the topic at meetings or seminars, often my notes add to my understanding of what’s being discussed as a whole.

Journaling for mental health

This one is not novel by any means, but I want to encourage it anyway- it is so much easier and faster to get to the root of why you are feeling what you’re feeling if you write it down! And this is another type of writing where there is no wrong way of doing it- you can write down anything you’re thinking and anything you’re feeling, and often you’ll start to notice patterns in things you like, or that bother you, or that make you sad, etc. Writing things down can also, sometimes, make problems that feel unreasonably big suddenly much smaller and more manageable.