Happy Valentines Day!
Valentines Day is a wonderful opportunity to show love for special people in your life: your spouse, your children, your friends, and family members. But…Valentine’s Day is a double-edged sword. Besides having to spend half a paycheck on a dozen roses, Valentines Day can also lead to tension in an otherwise healthy relationship. On Valentine’s Day many years ago when I was in graduate school, I had lunch with a few students and professors.
“Are you and Terry doing anything special today?”- I asked one of my friends.
“I was going to get her roses, but they are so expensive, I think she’ll get mad at me if I get them. Or maybe not…I am not sure.”
“I know what you mean,” replied a female professor. “My husband and I have a wonderful relationship, but we have a fight almost every Valentines Day. It seems like that’s the only time of year we get mad at each other, and it is almost guaranteed we’ll have a fight that day. I think the problem is with all of these expectations.”
Unmet expectations leading to disappointment and even tension…sounds familiar? It seems like not managing expectations is the root of so many professional and personal problems, especially in graduate school. You think you will have a straightforward thesis project, but six years down the road, you still have no coherent story. You think you will have a supportive boss, but he ignores you or checks on you more frequently than you can tolerate. You think you found the love of your life, but on Valentines Day he/she cannot go on a date, because they have to work late or study for their qualifying exam, which is the following day. During my lunch time conversation in graduate school, someone mentioned that the most number of romantic breakups occur on Valentines Day.
In some ways, the way we handle disappointments on Valentines Day mirrors the way we handle frustration in life. If something is not working, we can accept it with bitterness, leave it altogether or try to make it better. The last option takes the most work, at least on the short run. It seems so much easier to do nothing or just leave graduate school altogether than to make sense of reams of data or improve your relationship with your supervisor. Yet, the long-term benefits of striving for a worthy cause (e.g. finishing your degree so you can become a professor) will probably outweigh the amount of effort you have to put it now to make things better. Think about it, how much longer would it take to finish your degree if you started over in another group? (Of course, there are situations where it is better to start over than to fight it out – use your own judgment.)
During the writing of my book I asked a young aeronautics engineer how he handled stress in graduate school. He replied: “I had some tough, very tough, times in grad school. But now I realize that it was during these truly tough times that I learned the most. Whenever I encounter a difficult situation now, I just focus on what I can learn from it.”