A Year In Glasgow: A Grad Student Schedule (with bonus island photos)

As some of you may know, I'm currently writing my dissertation on early medieval monasticism on Scottish islands, which involves a lot of hair-pulling, book-copying, note-taking, island-hopping, and did I mention hair-pulling? It's been over a month since I've written a blog post, but to be honest aside from the occasional trip to the islands for field research (which will be written about; though actually it'll be easier to show you lovely photos instead of rambling about the archaeological remains of a questionable 8th century priory), my daily routine as a graduate student remains fairly consistent.

A usual day is as follows:

Wake up. This could be anytime between 8 or 10, or sometimes 11. It all depends on how late you've stayed up the previous night frantically wondering if you even know what you're talking about anymore.

Do the usual human things, including shower, eat food, attempt to brush hair, and then immediately leave your room, or else you'll never get anything done.

Read. If it's a good day and you have a sizable hunk of unread sources to get through, you could be reading anywhere between 4-6 journal articles or a book or two in one day! If it's not a good day, it could take hours to get through just one article and take sufficient notes before your brain goes mushy.

Write. I usually try and set a goal of somewhere between 500-1000 words per day, but if it's a good day, you can go way beyond that amount. If it's a bad day, you generally end up making ceaseless edits to chapters you've already written, writing maybe 20 more words, and questioning your mental capacity.

Read and write and repeat. Seriously, this is a never ending process. And by the time your brain has run out of juice and you're not sure if it's safe to inhale another cup of tea or soda or coffee, and you aren't sure if you remembered to eat at all, it's better just to proceed to the next step.

Go home. It depends on what kind of progress you've made as to what time you go home, and what state your mind is in. You could go home early at 5:00 feeling quite satisfied with yourself and your progress. You could be in the office until late that night, distracted by cat videos but very firmly not letting yourself leave until you reach that word count. Or you could leave at 8:00, having done nothing significant and feeling rather defeated. Please note that all three of these examples generally occur all within the same week.

Job search. Or if you're staying on for a PhD - panic about funding. For me, it's panic about jobs. I try to make it a goal to apply to at least one or two jobs a day, or scope out potential applications. Usually afterwards I end up wanting to rip out what little hair I have left and my brain has turned into a ball of highly flammable and destructible paper with a lighter posed nearby. Self-depreciating thoughts are prone to infiltrate your brain during this mental state. Believe me, that specific thought process is beyond fun. Self-doubt is a hungry emotion, and will eat all of your confidence in the blink of an eye.

Numb the brain. As a result, you want to turn on some addictive television show (at the moment it's Gilmore Girls) and watch a few episodes all in a row before claiming you're going to go to bed, but really you'll shut off the computer and either think into the sleepless night for a few more hours about your progress or lack-there-of, or play some senseless game to keep self-doubt at bay long enough to fall asleep.

And then wake up and do it all over again.

The results of this? Hopefully some half-decent, original, Masters-level research on Scottish monasticism and the Hebrides and a nice little job lined up. But in the short term side of things, results include forgetting what day it is on a daily basis, forgetting to eat a full meal and running to Sainsbury's at 10:30 pm or making a sandwich if it's not a weekend and you aren't going out to a pub to decompress and enjoy some well-made food, getting increasingly annoyed with the foot traffic and closed roads during Commonwealth Games season which impair your ability to reach campus via a decent route, and some half-formed thoughts about theory that'll hopefully merge all together in the end.

Okay, so I might be exaggerating a little bit; but I do, and I'm sure some of my colleagues will also testify on their own work if asked, a lot of work every day ~~(that I have motivation)~~ and though it seems like we're online all the time and not doing anything, it's because we constantly keep lines of communication open so someone can come save us and be a welcome distraction in the middle of typing up theory or measurements for landmass of a Hebridean island. On good days, we love talking about what we're researching - because there's a reason we're reading and devoting time to it, even if we don't have all the answers. A Masters dissertation is a lot of original research and a lot of hard work, that'll hopefully be worth it all in the end.

It's definitely a mental strain, in my own personal experience, but at least I get to do some fun things, like visit islands (thank god, I hear you cheer out, at last she's stopped talking about how miserable - and yet she somehow likes it? - graduate life sounds). So far, not including my trips to Iona and Inchmahome that I have previously written about this past year, I have visited Lismore, Bute, Barra, Vatersay, and Mingulay, with plans to visit Inchcolm in the east/Firth of Forth this week. Enjoy the photos! Until next time...