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Mindset & productivity PhD's STEM careers

Grad School Mode: Thriving when work-life balance is anything but regular

2025-07-10 11:19
Greetings, dear friends -

In the past 6 months, I've re-embraced a way of life called Grad School Mode.

Grad school mode is a goal-oriented way of life in which many Ph.D.'s thrive. We put in hours towards our goals, lots of hours, but not on a regular schedule, and certainly not 9-5 Monday to Friday.

I thrived during my first experience in Grad School Mode during grad school (mostly).

Research was fascinating, classes were challenging, teaching was energetic, and all of it was demanding. These things happened on their own schedules - some at regularly scheduled times of the week, some commanding more hours some times more than others.

With experimental research, key ingredients to thriving were flexibility and balance.

Coding in my cubby hole, Houston, circa 2008.

Photo credit: One of my labmates, probably now Professor S. Khatua.

What was I doing?

Let me elaborate on experimental research. I studied gold nanoparticles, one at a time. When we study particles one at a time, we call it a 'single particle' study. I did something called 'correlated single particle spectroscopy' of gold nanoparticles.

We were asking very simple questions:
1) Where is the nanoparticle?
2) What shape is it? How big is it? Is it hanging out with any other particles?
3) What color is it? (Technically, which colors bounce off or get absorbed most?)

Practically, it was not so simple. It meant working with millions of dollars (USD) of shared equipment in 3 different buildings.

That meant putting my sample - a paper-thin glass slide with gold nanoparticles on it - into an electron microscope to 'see' their size and shape.

Then I took the same sample out of that microscope, into another building, and put it into our home-built optical spectroscopy setup linked to another microscope where we could find the same particles (as bright spots with no details in dimensions) and find out what color they were.

Before all this microscope work, we designed our sample such that we could find the same sub-microscopic particle from one building to the next. That meant making a map and being really good at reading and navigating that map. We made this map using a stencil and gold-vaporizing machine. Solid gold became vapor gold, which then cooled onto our piece of glass in the holes of the stencil.

This vaporizing machine took >3 hours to reach low enough pressure for a beautiful beam of electrons to vaporize your gold.

Houston, circa 2010. Photo credit: J. Olson

Science digression:

These particles are so small that your regular science class microscope can't see these details. Electron microscopes, which now cost USD 1 million upwards, use beams of electrons rather than beams of light to 'see' such particles. For this to work, they require high vacuum systems and rooms with suspended floors that isolates the machines from fluctuations in temperature and vibrations.

Since colors are light and electrons are not light, electron beams cannot tell us the colors of nanoparticles. We need light to do that, hence the multiple microscopes. In the past 12 years, there have been efforts to combine these functions into one microscope.

What did this mean as a lifestyle?

Being committed, flexible, and flexibly committed.
1) Committed meant committing to the times reserved for some types of work – teaching, classes, shared equipment, etc. For some shared equipment, my supervisor was billed 100+ USD per hour. There was no refund for no-shows.

Committed also meant honoring our other commitments – running a half-marathon in another city, singing a concert, celebrating a family birthday, eating dinner – not to be ignored. It’s much easier to commit to work when we are healthy and fulfill our other commitments too.

2) Flexible meant being opportunistic in practicality and agile in perspective. When something goes in your favor - e.g. equipment frees up and it means you can do something now you scheduled for later and you have the wherewithal to do it - use the opportunity.

When something goes not in your favor - e.g. the sample for which you have amazing images and all you needed was one last set of data... breaks... and instead of having data this week, you're delayed weeks, possibly months, to make a new sample and acquire all the same types of data for it again...

‘Flexible’ included learning from any mistakes, being understanding with anyone needing a change in plans, including myself, and adjusting and seeking help as needed.

3) Finally, flexibly committed meant committing to the goal - having your "eye on the prize", and being flexible with other things towards that prize.

Our single-particle optical setup consisted of lasers; lamps; mirrors, lenses, pinholes, and other beam-manipulating parts; a microscope and 40,000+ USD detectors operated in the dark that could be fried in seconds if they were on and some person ignorant of what you were doing flipped the light switch.

This combination of equipment usually took 6-8 hours to align and test before we could gather any meaningful data. Once it was up and running, we stayed there and collected as many data points on our sample as we intended to and then some.

Shutting everything down meant that you would spend another 6-8 hours aligning the next day.

These experiments easily exceeded 12 hours, occasionally extending into a 20-hour day, but everyone would follow such a day with a morning (possibly a day) at home, recovering, doing something rejuvenating.

My Ph.D. advisor and coworkers also understood that analysis took time and often yielded surprises that changed your plans. Research is about discovering laws of nature, and nature really doesn’t care about your hypothesis or what you expect from it. If you do the right experiment correctly, it will tell you something and you have to respect what’s telling you and work with that, regardless of your plan or what you wrote in your grant application.

For those paying attention, flexible with perspective, and committed to making the best out of what they have, these surprises could be gifts.
Research is about discovering laws of nature, and nature really doesn’t care about your hypothesis or what you expect from it.

New challenges provide excellent perspective.

Beijing, 2011. Photo credit: S. Siu

Making grad school mode work for you

As with everything, it took discipline to make grad school mode work for me. It didn't always work.

For myself and many, grad school mode could easily become unhealthy and overboard. The most common issues were overwork, restricting oneself to a schedule we believed others expected of us but weren't good for us, or feeling guilty for taking breaks while others were working.

Grad school mode habits that did work for people included:
  • Arriving at 5 am and leaving in time to be with kids
  • Starting at noon regularly, taking the night shift for experiments if needed
  • Playing tennis several days a week, starting work with satisfaction around 10
  • Going home to feed the cats, no matter how busy
  • Going swimming in the middle of the day (they built a fancy gym with Olympic-size pool across the street from my building)
  • Taking naps any time
  • Going home every winter

Grad School Mode in 2025

The cliché exists because it’s true: grad school is a marathon, and so are life and running a business.

For me, it means working when something or someone needs my help, resting when I have to, and being opportunistic.

If clients aged 10-17 are available after school and weekends, work with them then. My Saturdays have been packed.

If academic writing clients are barraging my messages at 11:00 pm (hopefully I’m asleep and don’t know that), acknowledge the messages at the next healthy opportunity, then create ‘sharp brain’ time to tackle the intellectual challenges.

If my creative mind annoyingly kicks in at 3:00 am forbidding me to sleep, then write something, then sleep.

Need a day off and it’s Wednesday? Take a day off.

There’s a fable about a lumberjack who chops down 40 trees everyday for a few days, then while working just as hard, he can do only 38 a day, then 35, then 30. He contemplates why he’s yielding less while work just as hard, until someone asks, “When was the last time you stopped and sharpened your saw?”

Grad School Mode now is about trusting that being healthy and happy sharpens your saw, making your work better.
Over to you! Three free questions to coach yourself:
  1. What ideas around productivity really work for you?
  2. Which ideas would you like to discard?
  3. What would you do differently if you trusted your idea of ‘sharpeningyour saw’?


Thanks for reading!

This blog was first published in the Clear Water RoundUp, the monthly business newsletter. Subscribe here ot receive blogs like this and more in your inbox each month.