The one thing that I was proud of my 23 year old self that summer was planning out things I want to do during my 2 years in graduate school. It turned out that the two years of master degree was insanely busy and I hardly had any time to do any strategy planning. However, I still know which activities I would want to join and what activities that I wanted to skip. This made my graduate school experience rich and full of experience.
That was why when I started mentoring other graduate students in my second year, I suggested they do the same thing.
What is a strategy?
- Understand why do you go to grad school
- Include defining your goals
- Include types of activities that are helpful to your goals
- Include steps by steps and prioritization
Why should you have a strategy?
- Master degree is much shorter than undergrad, you barely have any time to “re-do”
- There are plenty of opportunities with limited time. Knowing your goal can help you quickly decide what to join and what to skip
- Have a way to measure your success during graduate school
How to decide your strategy?
- Ask yourself:
- What do you want to know about yourself and about the field after graduate school?
- What do you want to do next AFTER graduate school?
- What do you want to develop during your graduate school?
- What does your future self look like after graduate school?
- What if you don’t know?
- I suggest finding inspiration – LinkedIn search for positions, people, etc that excite you
- Do some reflections – looking back at your life time, use certain strategies to reflect during the day (check out my future post for guidance on reflection)
- Research on different types of opportunities out there and think of how they can assist you reaching your goal
Tips: plan a lot and set yourself to achieve 80% or the plan (unexpected things will come up anyway)
- Example:
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