2. Mental and Emotional Preparation

Academic preparation should be coupled with mental and emotional preparation. Graduate school is stressful—and often demoralizing. Your undergraduate professors probably regarded you as one of the smartest students in your class. Your graduate-school professors are more likely to take a wait-and-see approach. At several points you will probably question your intelligence, ability, and sanity.

This section is to help you through the emotional ordeal. And don’t fool yourself: it will be an ordeal. A graduate program is demanding, and you’ll be largely on your own. Long gone are the days when a faculty member routinely took a graduate student under his wing and shepherded the student through the process, running interference and smoothing out bureaucratic hassles. Instead, it will be up to you to develop a research agenda. It will be up to you to develop relationships with the faculty. It will be up to you to identify and recruit an agreeable, constructive adviser. It will be up to you to organize your time and get your work done. No one on the faculty is going to do those things for you.

But if you really want a PhD, you’ll adapt. Eventually, you’ll learn which faculty members like working with and mentoring students. (Not all of them do.) You’ll begin to develop relationships with them. And they will start to meet you, maybe not halfway, but at least part of the way. And that entire process will begin—must begin—with you. If you wait for it to happen, it never will.

In short, you have to take responsibility for your own education. And for many of you, that means asserting yourself to a degree that may be uncomfortable. You will have to stand up for yourself and make sure you get what you need. 

How can you do that? 

It all begins by preparing yourself emotionally and psychologically for the graduate school experience. You will need to be your own best friend and supporter. How is your mental health? That’s a serious question. Are you depressed? Are you hard on yourself? What is your body image and relationship with food? Do you get enough sleep? Do you sometimes feel suicidal? I would explore those questions with a therapist before you begin graduate school and develop strategies and techniques for coping with any disorders or illnesses or self-sabotaging tendencies you might have.

Preparing emotionally and mentally is especially important if you are a woman or non-white. As hard as graduate school can be on a white male, it can be even harder on women and minorities. Women, African Americans, and Asians are often dismissed, devalued, and insulted. People are finally starting to speak out—for example, the economist Claudia Sahm—but change will be slow to come.

Ideally, you would begin graduate school with a healthy, positive view of your abilities and self-worth. Your attitude toward graduate school should be, “I’m going to give this all I’ve got and believe that it will work out, but if it doesn’t, I’ll then know that an econ PhD is not for me and will find some other interesting thing to do.” And you should work to maintain that view. It will come under assault, especially if you find yourself failing or falling behind in the program. It’s important that you don’t allow your performance in graduate school to determine how you feel about yourself. Your performance can determine your career choices, of course; but work with a therapist to make sure it does not determine your self-esteem. 

I would then complement any work you do with a therapist with developing a new identity for yourself. And what is that new identity? Economist, of course. As you enter graduate school, start thinking of yourself as an economist. Take yourself seriously in this profession you are entering. Yes, to some people you’ll be “only” a graduate student. But that’s their way of defining you; it doesn’t have to be yours. So start thinking of yourself as an economist. When you start thinking of yourself as an economist, you will start acting like an economist. As Aristotle might have said, you are what you repeatedly do. For example, as an economist, you should join the American Economic Association. The AEA is the most important society of your profession. They offer reduced membership fees for young economists like you. Join it. Today.

I would go one step further: I would not only think of yourself as an economist, but think of yourself as an economist who is interested in some aspect of the world—labor markets or health care or macroeconomic policy. And start introducing yourself that way. It may take some practice; but you’ll get the hang of it. When you introduce yourself at a party, don’t say, “I’m a graduate student in economics.” Say, “I’m an economist who’s interested in market design” or “I’m an economist who’s interested in methodological issues” or “I’m an economist who’s interested in education.” It might take some practice; but eventually you’ll grow into this new identify you are creating for yourself.

Let me end by returning to where I began: Graduate school is a pressure cooker. Yes, you should be academically prepared. But you need to be mentally and emotionally prepared too.