So grad school sucks you say? Part II

What?  The "advice" I was given didn't really help?  Grad school still sucks?  Sorry.  Most of Chris' advice was rather tongue-in-cheek, but grad school will probably continue to suck no matter how good the advice is.  It's kind of the nature of the beast.  Some days are fine and a few are fun, but there will always be days that suck.  Whenever I complain about grad school my non-grad-school friends tell me there are crappy days in whatever they're doing, too.  Bummer.

While there are definitely days when I think I made the wrong decision to go to grad school, and I wonder how anybody ever finishes, there are definitely things you can do to make these +/-5 years less terrible.  Here are my suggestions.  A lot of them are rather interrelated.  Depending on your personality, some of them may not apply to you.

• DO STUFF OUTSIDE OF SCHOOL.  Go to the gym, go to church, go to the miscellaneous local fairs and festivals.  Anything. Something.  I don't care how much you love whatever field you're in, you can't possibly do only that and come out of graduate school with your mental health and social skills intact.  Find a hobby.  It doesn't matter what, anything will do.  Read the entire Master and Commander series.  Take a pottery class.  I don't care.  This is probably the biggest, best piece of advice I can give you.
• Some people might disagree with me, like all the Chinese students in my lab who alternate between Burger King and Chick-Fil-A, but I think eating fairly healthy (most of the time - I promise I understand the value of a bowl of ice cream) and working out regularly go a long way.  One of the reasons I live within walking distance of campus is so that when I'm too busy/stressed/tired to get up early to work out I still get at least a bit of exercise walking 15 minutes each way to school.
• Along with doing stuff outside of school, make friends outside of your program/department.  Get involved in activities.  For me this wound up happened by living with random people I met via Craigslist and working with the high school youth group at my parish (bonus, community service is good for fellowship applications).  I'll admit I got really lucky on the roommate front - many of the girls I've lived with in Tucson have become great friends that I've gone on crazy backpacking trips and on road trips in foreign countries with, and now it seems we're taking turns going to each others weddings.  When you exclusively hang out with people from your program, you wind up "talking shop" more often than not, which doesn't give you that much needed break.
• At the same time though, friends in your program/department/grad school are a good thing.  They're the people you'll grab coffee or lunch with, or celebrate with when you have a good data day or pass your oral.  They're also the people who can totally understand when you just have to vent about whatever sucks.
• Speaking of which, I'm all for some amount of venting/bitching about whatever it is that sucks.  You've seen me do plenty of it here.  Watch it with this one though, because too much and you're just a Negative Nancy who's never happy with anything.  After all, there's always somebody who's got it worse.  But there really is something to be said for a good bitch and/or cry fest.  When it's really that bad you really do feel better afterwards.
• On the other hand, celebrate everything.  My first year a lot of us would head to the bar after a cume.  Even if you think you blew it, hell, you took it.  Finished a class?  Had a good day in lab?  Finally got an experiment to work after trying it 14 times?  Gave a talk without making a fool of yourself?  Finally got revisions back from your advisor?  Won the battle with the 3rd reviewer?  Passed your oral?  Got an abstract accepted?  Opened a word document and wrote exactly 17 words of your dissertation?  All these things are worthy of a beer, or a celebration of some sort.  (Passing your oral is worthy of several beers.  Or 2 long islands and a half dozen shots.  Including a Harry Potter shot.  As is your defense.)  My research group has a tradition of popping a bottle of champagne after successful orals and defenses.  Even if it's 10 am we're pouring bubbly into incredibly silly Bruker champagne flutes.
• Make lists.  I love them.  Short term and long term lists.  They help me focus and get more done (which makes me happy), and crossing stuff off them feels so good.
• Be proactive about your own happiness.   Can you change something about whatever it is that sucks?  Yeah, you have to take and pass classes, and cumes, and your oral, and jump through a million hoops.  Is that class that sucks required?  Can you drop it?  (I really should have dropped one of my classes my first semester.  It was an awful, miserable experience with a terrible teacher and I learned absolutely nothing.)  Do you hate your teaching assignment?  Before the next semester go ask the lab coordinator about teaching the course you are interested in.  Hate your research project?  Talk to your advisor.  Maybe you can work on what does interest you on a part time basis.  Or maybe you're willing to teach in order to work on a project you do like.  Doesn't always work out, but sometimes it does.  Is your advisor a crazy slave-driver?  Or verbally abusive and unethical?  Switch groups.  In chemistry at least it happens.  The earlier in your grad school career the better, but people switch groups, and as long as you're polite and professional about it (yes, even if your advisor is a horrible person) it generally works out just fine.  Maybe it takes you a semester or a year longer to graduate, but better that than utterly miserable and maybe not getting a degree at all.  Not everything can be changed or is in your power to change, but at least nothing is permanent.
• This goes hand and hand with the last point, but learn to say no.  Seriously.  No, you can't go to that oral practice.  No, you can't drive around recruits on both Friday and Saturday night.  No, you don't have time to proofread your labmate's entire dissertation.  No, you won't do this set of experiments for your lazy labmate who should have graduated already.  No, you won't take on a new project in your fifth year.  I'm not that good at this point, but I've gotten better the older I've gotten.  Or maybe I'm just getting crotchety in my old age.
• Go to students' final seminars/defenses. Throughout grad school, I have found these the most encouraging and interesting seminars.  A research seminar is always more interesting coming from somebody you know.  And a final seminar, a nice, tidy presentation of a dissertation project is the most encouraging, obvious sign I can think of that yes, people do graduate.  It's also good to get an idea of how a project can come together when you're stuck in the unending, seemingly hopeless middle part.  Bonus: free caffeine and snacks to accompany your hour out of lab.
• Step away from the lab bench.  Sometimes you need to take half an hour and go for a walk.  Get some fresh air.  Maybe a coffee.  Heck, you're a grad student.  This isn't a real job.  Get lunch beers. The time you spend clearing your head will be at least partly made up for by less time banging your head against the wall and less time wasted when you mess something up in your frustration.  Sometimes you just have to call it a day and GO HOME.  Better than hurting yourself because you were a little too aggressive cleaning glassware or breaking something really expensive because you were a little too rough with that $10,000 printed circuit board.
• Take advantage of the flexibility of being a graduate student.  Unless your advisor is brand new and/or crazy, there's rarely a reason why you have to work specific hours.  Outside of some set meetings or designated instrument time, there's no reason I have to be here between certain hours.  You will most likely work more than 40 hrs/week, but there's no reason that the first 40 of those hours have to be between 9 am and 5 pm.  You were in lab really late?  Sleep in the next morning.  Have a couple errands to run to businesses that are only open 9-5?  Run them.  Not a morning person?  Work out in the middle of the day and work a bit later.  Heck, maybe you can time it so an experiment is running while you head to the gym.  It's nice to be around for some part of "business hours" so you can find people you need and people who need you can find you, but it's nice to sleep in every now and then or stay home to wait for the repairman without it being a problem.  You may be more productive working "off hours" - I know for me at least it's a heck of a lot easier to get stuff done without people around to pester me.

Some days (and sometimes a LOT of days in a row) will still suck, and not everything is something you can change/influence.  But a lot of stuff is, and there are a lot of little things you can do to make things bearable and sometimes even fun.

That's all I've got.  Anybody else have suggestions?