Why Education Is Important

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Students often feel pressure to make their PhD about other people’s goals.

It can be easy to lose sight of one’s true life goals.

Remember that your PhD should help you get what you actually want.

Isn’t it wonderful how many people all around you know exactly why you are in grad school, what you should be doing, and what your long-term goals should be? Getting a PhD should be a positive walk in the park with so many well-wishers working tirelessly to guide you through this period of your life.

But let’s be real—with so many people seeming to know exactly what, why, where, and how, it is easy to lose sight of the most pertinent piece of information, namely, the reason why you chose to go to grad school in the first place.

Here are some external pressures that my graduate student therapy clients have routinely reported to me. These pressures sometimes swell and balloon out of all proportion, and they entirely obscure people’s own desires and motivations. And remember, this is only a subset—there surely are many more.

Pressure from advisors to stay in academia: This is the first on the list because it might be the most frequent one I hear: Many people have academic advisors who are actually decent and well-meaning. However, these people have been in academia for a long time, and somewhere along their own journeys, many of them have come to believe that there is no life outside of academia and that all their students should therefore aim to become university professors. Thus, many students feel the immense weight of........

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