August 2018
Graduate students love to complain. I am one of the thousands of graduate students at Texas A&M and I know we complain quite a bit. We complain about the amount of readings we have, the length of our research papers, and the cost of a good cup of coffee.
While negativity is at an all time high in graduate school, many of us have found solace in our friendships. In graduate school, your classmates are the only other people in your life that understand how difficult an assignment is, how vague the directions are and how time consuming the readings are.
Your classmates are ‘your people.’ You have similar routines and priorities. You attend the same classes in the same buildings every single day. You complete the same assignments and stress over the same deadlines. You might even suffer a severe break down at the exact same time.
But these classmates also watch you succeed. They watch you completely re-organize your research at 4 am and then watch you kill the presentation just 5 hours later. They listen to you argue your perspective on an issue, and while they might not agree, they can’t ignore the amount of evidence you have collected. They sit through group meetings and support your big ideas.
At the end of a long week, these are the people forcing you to meet for margs and queso. They are the ones that help you prepare for a job interview or choose the perfect outfit for your upcoming event. When you’re overwhelmed, they show up at your apartment, fully prepared to help with laundry or proofread a paper. They drag you to the gym and make sure you’re working some of the stress out. They grab a coffee for you when you show up to class looking like a train wreck.
It sounds really cheesy, but graduate school is so much more than an academic program. This is where you develop a family that will last far into your professional careers. At this point in time, every single person around you is struggling. There is something about surviving a rigorous academic program that pulls people from all kinds of backgrounds together into one big family.
In grad school, the people around you become so much more than just classmates.
---
Goergia "Gandy" Osburn
Gandy is a second-year MPSA student at the Bush School of Govrnment and Public Service
While negativity is at an all time high in graduate school, many of us have found solace in our friendships. In graduate school, your classmates are the only other people in your life that understand how difficult an assignment is, how vague the directions are and how time consuming the readings are.
Your classmates are ‘your people.’ You have similar routines and priorities. You attend the same classes in the same buildings every single day. You complete the same assignments and stress over the same deadlines. You might even suffer a severe break down at the exact same time.
But these classmates also watch you succeed. They watch you completely re-organize your research at 4 am and then watch you kill the presentation just 5 hours later. They listen to you argue your perspective on an issue, and while they might not agree, they can’t ignore the amount of evidence you have collected. They sit through group meetings and support your big ideas.
At the end of a long week, these are the people forcing you to meet for margs and queso. They are the ones that help you prepare for a job interview or choose the perfect outfit for your upcoming event. When you’re overwhelmed, they show up at your apartment, fully prepared to help with laundry or proofread a paper. They drag you to the gym and make sure you’re working some of the stress out. They grab a coffee for you when you show up to class looking like a train wreck.
It sounds really cheesy, but graduate school is so much more than an academic program. This is where you develop a family that will last far into your professional careers. At this point in time, every single person around you is struggling. There is something about surviving a rigorous academic program that pulls people from all kinds of backgrounds together into one big family.
In grad school, the people around you become so much more than just classmates.
---
Goergia "Gandy" Osburn
Gandy is a second-year MPSA student at the Bush School of Govrnment and Public Service