After waking up between 7 and 8 a.m. and driving to Kent State, Morgan Chaney begins each day sitting in his office, where he works all morning long. At 1 p.m. he gets in his car and drives to go teach at the College of Podiatric Medicine.

After a long day of teaching or working, Chaney will head home to relax, eat dinner and spend time with his wife. The only difference between the work Chaney does and some of his colleagues is that Chaney is still a student.

Living in Kent with his wife Kaylee Heiremans, Chaney is a PhD candidate in the School of Biomedical Science in the human evolutionary biology program. Chaney started his degree back in the fall of 2013 and is set to graduate in spring of 2021.  

Before starting in the doctoral program, he received his Masters of Arts in anthropology in 2015 and taught for two years at Palestine-Wheatley Middle School.

Although Chaney admits his story may be different from other graduate students due to his wife, there are still many experiences he shares with others. One he experiences is the sense, or lack, of completion.

“Grad school is very much task-based … you don’t just walk in and put your time card in and you get credit for being there,” Chaney said. “You have to produce something. And many of those products sometimes take a good amount of thought and consideration.” 

This is something Chaney struggled with especially at the beginning of his journey as a graduate student. He started out as a teaching assistant and faced many hardships as he tried to understand what he was doing. 

“So my first year or two was really, really rough because I was also trying to do my genetics research and (teaching) and it just got really overwhelming at times,” Chaney said.  

Since starting his dissertation, he hasn’t faced as many issues but now has to juggle making progress in it. Since dissertations are different per person, it’s hard to see how much work has done by comparing to others.

“While you’re trying to produce things sometimes the things you are trying to produce are very much in your head,” Chaney said. “And you’re working through something, and it’s very meditative and it’s not a lot of actual tangible product.”

With it being hard to see the progress that they make, many graduate students struggle to feel like they are accomplishing anything, which can cause many personal things to fall behind as sociology doctoral student Tim Rose has found.

“You’re not going to go do laundry because you’re stressing about working on things,” Rose said. “Or you’re working on things (so) it’s easy to fall behind on taking care of everything back home.”

Being in his fifth year of the doctoral program, Rose has discovered that life doesn’t only revolve around school work.

“You have to learn to keep the non-academic parts of yourself alive because if you don’t make a conscious decision to do that you won’t be able to because the natural suck of time,” Rose said.

However, as Rose finishes out his 10-year college career, the one difference he realized between his time as an undergraduate and a graduate student was what he learned by the end.

“I always had to tell my younger graduate student friends this because you forget when you come here,” Rose said. “You were primarily a student when you’re an undergraduate, but you have to remember as a graduate student you’re not going to grad school to learn to be a student, you’re going to grad school to learn to be a professional.”

Rachel Karas covers graduate education and research. Contact her at [email protected].