Speaker 1: Hello, and welcome back to the Academic Society. It's Toyin here, and I'm glad to be back to be sharing more videos with you. So I want to talk a lot to the incoming graduate students. So I've been on Twitter and seeing that a lot of you have been accepted to graduate school recently. So I want to help you prepare. I want to help you figure out what to do to prepare for grad school. So thank you so much for watching this video. I'm Toyin. I'm the founder of the Academic Society. I got my PhD in math and landed my dream job as a lecturer at a university. And I also create these videos for grad students and academics all about time management, productivity, as well as my academic lifestyle. And so today, I want to talk about expectations and what expectations you are going into your first semester of grad school with. I know we hear a lot of stories about the first semester of grad school and how it can be so difficult, how it can be so overwhelming, and how people want to quit. After their first semester of grad school, and I think a lot of that is related to the expectations that you have when you come into graduate school. So I want to share a story about a graduate student that I've worked with. So there is a graduate student in my community. She was very proactive about preparing for grad school. She started following me when she was in undergrad. And before she even was accepted to graduate school, she started purchasing my resources. She bought my book, Hashtag Grad Boss, and she purchased my program, Grad School Prep. And so she took, I think, maybe a year or so off of school and went to work in her field in chemistry. And so this past fall, fall of 2021, was her first semester of her PhD program in chemistry. And I actually just talked with her a couple weeks ago, and she told me that she was so grateful for the resources that I helped her with and shared with her, that actually grad school was kind of like a little easy for her. Like not as difficult as it seemed like it is for everyone else. And I believe that this is because her expectations were managed, and she did some things in her first semester that most grad students don't do. So I want to talk about managing expectations in your first semester of grad school and what you should be thinking about and what you should be considering as you go into your first semester. All right, so one thing that that student that I worked with told me about that she did that I think is awesome, right? She took my grad school prep course, so she knew exactly what to expect in the first semester of grad school, and she knew going in that it was going to be quite overwhelming. So one expectation that she had was she wasn't going to be able to keep the same schedule that she had before, right? I always talk about creating a daily and weekly schedule for yourself. So this grad student actually has her own business, and so this is going to be relevant if you have a business or not. But she has a digital business, and she knew that starting grad school was going to be an adjustment. So she consciously made the decision to put her business on hold for the first semester just so she could really focus on grad school and figure out what her life was going to be like in grad school before adding back in her business activities. And so I was talking to her about her business a couple of weeks ago, and she was like, oh yeah, I'm ready to get back into business because I figured out how to manage graduate school, and I now know that I do have time to work on my business, and I have a way to fit it into my schedule. So when you're thinking about starting graduate school, I think it's really important to know that your schedule may change completely. You may be a little bit overwhelmed, and grad school may kind of take over your life a little bit. So one thing that I always recommend that you do is to figure out what are your non-negotiables, right? If everything in your life can't stay with you in your first semester of grad school, what are the things that you want to make sure that you commit to doing in your first semester of grad school? Whether it's things that you do for self-care, spending time with your family, working on your business, hanging out with friends, what kind of things do you want to make sure that you can keep in your schedule, and then kind of build your grad school schedule around that, right? So grad school is a time commitment. I was a full-time graduate student, so I basically treated grad school like a job. I would go into my office, I had an office on campus, around 7.30 a.m. and leave around 3 to 4 p.m., and I know I needed all of that time to really work with the material that I was learning, as well as my TA responsibilities. And so the student that I was working with, who's getting her PhD in chemistry, she's also a TA. So not only is she managing the new experience of grad school, she's managing her coursework, she's working in labs, but she's also TA-ing classes as well. That is a lot, and it made me feel so proud and so happy to know that she said it wasn't that difficult to manage because I had taught her how to manage her time in graduate school. And so I love that, and I want that experience for all graduate students. Like, what if all graduate students knew exactly what to expect in their first semester of grad school, so that their expectations matched what the actual experience of grad school was going to be? Like, what if you were able to go into grad school knowing exactly what to expect, right? I bet that would feel amazing. And so don't worry, I got you. I've created a free class just for you called What to Expect in Your First Semester of Grad School. And so I'll teach you my four steps for preparing for a new semester of grad school, as well as give you a sneak peek of what to expect inside of my course. I have a course called Grad School Prep. So my free class gives you a little sneak peek, a little preview, and it gives you a framework for how to prepare. But if you want to get into the nitty gritty, definitely check out my course, Grad School Prep. I highly recommend first watching the free class, What to Expect in Your First Semester of Grad School. And as a reward for watching that, I'll give you a coupon to get $100 off of Grad School Prep. All right, so I'm excited for this new experience for you. Don't worry, I'll be coming out with more videos on what to expect in your first semester of grad school and how to prepare. Thank you so much for watching. I'll see you in the next one. Have a great day, bye.