A third year PhD student asks—

I just passed my quals and I don’t know what to do next; I feel like for so long I was working really hard just focused on my quals deadline, but now I feel like I’m doing nothing and I’m constantly worried I’m falling behind.

Woo! Congrats on having quals behind you! First of all, I would genuinely recommend taking time off—even if it is just a long weekend. Quals is a stressful experience and it’s important to take time to recover and recalibrate.

I think this period right after quals can be a difficult transition as you’ve just come from being singularly focused on a huge deadline with concrete objectives whereas now, that’s not really the case anymore. From here on out, there aren’t many built-in deadlines that naturally exist in grad school and while that’s really a symptom of the way the PhD is structured, I think that can feel pretty unfamiliar.

Your next steps will depend on your personal working style, but if you want to create some structure, I would recommend creating rough timelines for yourself. It can be useful to meet with your PI to discuss the goals of your project, how long they think each part may take, and set some benchmarks for your progress. Of course, science never goes how we plan it, and things always seem to take longer than we think they will, but having something that you’re working towards can help tether you in what is an intrinsically unstructured degree.

Lastly, I’d say give yourself a little grace—even if you aren’t yet producing data, it doesn’t mean you aren’t being productive. It takes a while to get a project off the ground.

-Kyla Foster, Career and Professional Development Leadership Intern