A PhD is no joke- there’s a lot more that goes into it than I would have thought before I started my own. It sounds simple enough- you do research, sometimes you teach, you write it all up at the end and voila- PhD!

Yet somehow throughout my time in grad school, it’s always felt like so much more than that. A student and a teacher I know I am, but I’m also a manager, a coworker, an editor/proofreader, a speed-reader, a presenter, a mentor, a confidant, and a leader. There is a lot of pressure, too, from all the things we are expected to be as PhD students, all the time.

And I can honestly say- the thing that gets me through the hardest days of pressure like this is classes at the Rec.

I’ve always been an active person, but I’ve never thought of movement as a sort of medicine until I came to grad school. I started out going to an array of classes offered at the Rec during free week- which is the first week of each semester, when all the classes are free so you can try them out and see if it’s worth it for you to buy a pass for the semester.

Since that first free week my first year here- I’ve always had a class pass, every single semester (even the summers).

And COVID put a pause to that, there were fewer classes offered and a very small number of people that could be in a room at a time- so I took up weightlifting to keep myself busy, but it never quite did it for me mentally the way that going to fitness classes did.

Since the end of the bulk of the pandemic, I’ve loved every minute of going back to my classes. Particularly, dance classes have been my favorite form of moving to release stress that builds up throughout the day. It sounds corny, but my thoughts really do melt away into nothing when I’m sweating in a room full of people and loud music, trying to follow an instructor and believing, truly, that when I dance, I look like she does when she dances (I’m tragically aware this isn’t true but avoid looking in the mirrors on the wall to keep up the illusion for myself!).

So, if you’re struggling, or maybe just bored- give the classes at the Rec a try. I’m partial to dancing but there’s a ton of other options too- yoga, kickboxing, weights-based classes, and cycling, to name a few.