Title: Opening Up About Stress In Graduate School
Headings: Opening Up About Stress In Graduate School
Opening Up About Stress In Graduate School
Live CHAT: Grad School Stress
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Content: According to a 2011 survey by the nonprofit group Grad Resources, 43% of U.S. graduate students who participated reported experiencing more stress than they could handle. And a 2014 study conducted by the Graduate Assembly of the University of California, Berkeley, found that 47% of UC Berkeley Ph.D. students who responded to the survey reached the threshold considered to be depressed. Stress continues to be one of the biggest mental health issues that graduate students face, and although attempts have been made to mitigate the problem, the issue of stress largely flies under the radar, quieted by the unrelenting pressure to publish. Gregory T. Eells, associate director of Gannett Health Services and director of counseling and psychological services at Cornell University, says few studies have looked at the issue of graduate school and mental health. “ This is an area where there are not a lot of hard data,” he says. “ It’s partly because graduate students are in that in-between zone: They’re not the undergrads who get a lot of the attention, and they’re not faculty members.” RELATABLE
Credit: PhD Comics
Graduate student stress is a topic that comes up regularly in the popular comic strip “PHD Comics” (www.phdcomics.com) by Jorge Cham. A second movie based on the comic strip is coming out this month.