Speaker 1: Welcome to Grad Life Grind. If you're new to this channel, thank you for checking it out. And if you're already a subscriber, thanks for being back again. My name is Arielle and I'm a Ph.D. student in clinical psychology. And in this channel, I bring you information about the mental health field and talk about my journey as a Ph.D. student. Hey. In this video, I just want to give a recap of how my first two weeks as a second year Ph.D. student have been going. And it's been a while since I've done a recap video because I've been covering lots of other topics about how therapists are trained, what the difference between different degrees in psychology are. I've also talked a bit about the application process. So I took a little break from recaps, but like I said, I'm a second year student. I'm in a clinical psychology Ph.D. program. So I just want to walk you through how my schedule has been for this quarter so far. And it'll give you a picture of what it's like to be a Ph.D. student, at least in my program. And also, if you're into these recap videos, let me know in the comments because it's hard for me to know what you want to see if you don't communicate with me. So please, please, please leave a comment and let me know if you want more recap videos or if there's another type of video that you want me to cover. I just want to hear from you. So if you were watching any of my recap videos while I was a first year student in this program, then you know that back then I was only doing coursework, just taking classes. Now that I'm a second year student, I'm juggling a lot more, including classes, my clients for therapy, and research. Oh, I also have a part-time job. So on Mondays, I wake up at 5 a.m. and I work from 5.30 to 7.30 usually. And I work at a job that's kind of like a front desk type of thing, so I can get a little bit of work done during that time. And then I come home and I have class. On Mondays, I have child and family psychotherapy. So in that class, because everything is online right now, we meet on Zoom for a certain amount of time, but there are also pre-recorded lectures and other videos that I have to watch ahead of time. After that class, I have a little bit of a break, and then I usually have a client in the afternoon. And then I have a big block where there's nothing in my schedule that I have to go to, no Zoom meetings to attend, but I've blocked out that time to work on the assignments or the readings for my classes. And in the evening, I have a meeting with my research lab. And it's an optional meeting, but I'm trying to attend it because it's designed for the students in our lab who are preparing for their dissertation. And I'm not working on that yet because I'm still a second year, but it's nice to hear how people are formulating their ideas, how other students give feedback, how my supervisor or research advisor gives feedback to the other people in the group. So I try to attend that when I can. That means my day is starting around 5, and my work day is ending around 7. And like I said, there's some breaks in between. And obviously, I have time to eat and time that I just disconnect for a little bit. But it's a pretty long day. And then Tuesdays, they've been pretty hard for me. It's been about two weeks so far. But same thing, I go to work in the morning, and then I have class. The first class that I have is called Intellectual Assessment. And it's basically walking us through this big cognitive assessment called the WACE that's really popular in the field of psychology, especially in neuropsychology. And we have lab and we have lecture. That class is, I believe, it's four hours. So that's a lot of Zoom time. Obviously, we take some breaks here and there, but it's pretty taxing. Then I have a one-hour break, which is usually when I eat and try to stay off my computer and stuff. And then I have another class, which I'm loving right now. It's called Community Mental Health. And it's basically the real deal of what clinical practice is like because we learn a lot of things in our classical training classes, like evidence-based therapies. We learned about research methods, and we learned about the clear-cut way to be a therapist and be a researcher. But Community Mental Health is explaining to us how is it on the ground, how things are different than maybe a treatment manual because we're working directly with the community. And what's really cool about it is not only that I'm learning more real-world things, but also we're talking about issues of diversity and inclusion and how the field needs to adapt to serve certain communities. And that's the work that I'm interested in. My program has an emphasis called Diversity in Community Mental Health that I'm really interested in. I haven't officially claimed it, but Community Mental Health is one of the requirements for that class, so I guess it's kind of an elective. And so far I'm loving it, and I love the conversations we're having in that class. So I'll keep you posted on that. And then usually on Tuesday evenings right after class I have my group supervision. And I covered a video about how therapists are trained and how we get supervised. And you can check that video out if you haven't already. But I have a two-hour supervision with my supervisor, my clinical supervisor, and then all their other supervisees, so other peers of mine. And we talk about our cases. We may play some videos from our cases. And we also sometimes have a little bit of didactic or lecture style so that we can learn about new types of therapy. And then on Wednesdays, today is Wednesday, I go to work in the morning, and then I have class. I'm taking Cognitive Behavioral Therapy, so CBT. And that class is all about what CBT is, how to do CBT. And I'd like to cover that in a video one day because CBT is very, very popular. And if you're working in the field of psychology, you probably already know about CBT. And if you're somebody who's interested in going to therapy, if you're looking for a specific type of treatment, one of the common ones is CBT. There's tons of research on this treatment, and it's useful for a lot of different types of disorders. So I'm learning kind of session by session how to deliver CBT. We talk as a group about the history and stuff like that. That's also a class that we're having on Zoom. So again, lots of screen time. And thankfully, after that, I don't have any more class for the rest of the week. So I have CBT on Wednesday mornings, and then the rest of the day I pretty much dedicate to my clients. So I have a couple of different clients on Wednesday afternoon, and then I also have my individual supervision, which is one-on-one time with my clinical supervisor to talk more specifically in detail about what's going on with my clients, if I need help with something, and stuff like that. So I'm taking four classes. I also have clients and supervision twice a week, and I also have research. So on Thursdays, I don't have class. I don't have clients at the moment, but I do have my weekly lab meeting. And I covered a video about what being a research assistant is like in undergrad. In grad school, it's a little bit more involved, but if you're in a research lab, there's typically weekly lab meetings. So I attend those, and we pretty much are all working on different projects, and we give a report of how it's going, what we've done in the last week. And then I pretty much have the day to myself, but I don't because I'm a grad student, and I have to do some of the work from the classes that I attended earlier in the week. So I have a little bit more flexibility in when I do stuff and how long I do stuff. But typically on Thursdays, it's a lighter load for me because I don't have work in the morning as I typically do. I usually don't have clients unless I really need to see someone, and I don't have supervision. I'm just really doing my research meeting in the morning, and then I have my just work time for each class. And the way that I structure my time is I dedicate a certain number of hours per week per class, and I already have that in my calendar so that when Thursday rolls around, I just look, okay, it's 12 p.m., which class am I supposed to be working on? And I go for it. And finally, when I crawl my way into Friday, I also don't have work, class, or clients. Well, sometimes I'll have a client. And it is not really a day off, but again, it's a day where I'm working on stuff, but I'm a little bit more flexible. I sometimes will schedule meetings for that time. There's a group or organization at my school called the Latinx Task Force, and it's basically a group of students and faculty that are working towards improving the representation of Latinx students at the university, and sometimes those meetings are on Fridays. I also mentor some students in the program, so if I need to meet with them, I do that on Fridays. So it's a little bit more free. If I want to go out or do something during the day, if I have errands to run, Friday's usually a good day for me to do that. And then comes the weekend. Right now I have nothing scheduled on the weekends, and typically that's the time that I try to rest the most. But in the past year, as I've been a graduate student, I also do homework and stuff on the weekend. It's hard to tell right now whether I'll be able to do all my schoolwork and clinical writing and training during the week, because last weekend I was away, so obviously I wasn't doing work. It's also the beginning of the quarter, so it was feasible for me not to do homework during the weekend. But what I'm trying to do is just contain my work, because if I let it bleed out all over, then it'll definitely take up way more time than I want it to. And something amazing that my professor said in community mental health this past week was if you're getting an A+, then you're misallocating your time. And that really spoke to me because, of course, I want to get good grades. I have gotten good grades in the past, but that was kind of eye-opening for me because I don't need to get a perfect grade. If I can get a B or an A-, that's totally fine. And then I can allocate that time to either self-care, research, volunteering for other things that I want to do, applying to grants, networking, all that. So now that I've had time to reflect on what she said, I'm thinking that the weekends might be time that I dedicate to other things rather than my coursework, but so far we'll see. Of course, I want the weekends, especially Sundays, to be self-care days. And what I've realized in grad school is that it's really hard to have a whole self-care day. What's really more feasible is to have pockets of self-care within the week because A, it rejuvenates you throughout the week, and B, it's hard to wait to the end of the week to take care of yourself. You should be doing self-care things for yourself every single day. So, yeah, that's how my quarter's going so far. It's only two weeks in. A lot of people that are in my cohort are taking five classes this quarter, but I decided as a self-care decision to only take four. I still feel like I have a lot on my plate, but so far it's going okay. And I want to make sure that even though I'm giving you an inside look at my schedule, that you try, try, try not to compare yourself to it because I'm doing a lot. I'm used to doing a lot, but your value is not any lower or higher based on the amount of work that you do. There's no trophy for being busy. There's definitely no trophy for overworking yourself. But I just try to give you guys a realistic picture of what I'm doing in grad school so that if you are in grad school, maybe it's helpful for you, or if you're thinking about grad school, you can get an inside look of what it's going to be like. And even if you are looking at this to see what it's going to be like, it still may not be accurate because I'm a specific type of program, I'm a specific type of person, and I work and function well at a specific type of way. So the point of this is take what you're seeing on here with a grain of salt. I'm trying to inform you. That's one of my major missions here is to provide access to information about higher education. But there are a million other ways to be successful at a PhD. There are a million other ways to be a great student. And I really encourage you to just do what works best for you. And if there is any part of this video that spoke to you, please let me know in the comments. If you have any suggestions for me, because this is an insane schedule, also let me know about that in the comments. And I hope that if you're not already subscribed to this channel, that you'll do that now. Also, please hit the like button. And if you want more of an inside look of how my life is and what I do on a day to day, I really, really, really would love for you to follow me on Instagram at gradlifegrind. I haven't had the page for that long, but I'm having so much fun connecting with people on social media about grad school, learning from so many of you. Also, it's so much easier to provide you with information on Instagram rather than on a long form video here on YouTube. So I would love if you followed me on Instagram. And I hope that you have an amazing day. And like I said, my name is Arielle. My goal is to inform you, to inspire you, to spark an interest in you, and hopefully also entertain you. Thank you so much for checking out Grad Life Grind, and I hope that you'll be back next time.