It sounds like you might be feeling extra stress because you feel inadequate or like you don’t belong. I think most grad students feel this way at least for the first couple of years. But after you pass your prelims/comps, you should feel more secure within yourself. And if that’s not the case, then you may be feeling more stress than what’s usual.
Graduate school wasn’t a cake walk at all for me, but I don’t think the entire process was stressful. Actually, my undergrad work was probably more stressful, all things considered. The reasons why are simple for me to see. I felt very insecure when I was an undergrad. I’d hadn’t taken calculus in high school and my school only had a couple of AP courses to choose from. When I got to college, I was surrounded by kids who had taken all these advanced classes, had scored near-perfect SAT scores, and just seemed smarter than I was. The thought loop that would play in my head all the time was, “I just don’t belong here. I’m just not smart enough. I just don’t belong here!” Eventually I chilled out some, but I never got away from that feeling of “not being good enough.”
When I got to graduate school, though, I felt the complete opposite. I had just graduated from a very respectable undergraduate institution, I had top-notch GRE scores and great letters of recommendations. My grad advisor immediately took to me, and all the other graduate students perceived me as being smart (albeit in a geeky way). Professors liked having me in their classes because I would speak up and I had better writing skills than many. Plus, I was a novel entity–a black girl from the Dirty South who could rock ecology with the best of them. I had all kinds of confidence that I had lacked when I had first entered undergrad, and it stayed with me pretty much throughout my five years in the program.
It also helped that I did not have to teach. I could focus exclusively on my research and not worry about fitting it in between teaching sections like my classmates. In addition, although family/churchlife can help other people cope, in my case being “unhindered” by adult responsibilities also took the edge off. If I was having a bad day in the lab, I could just hop across the river and stroll the streets of Manhattan till late at night. I had full permission to be perfectly selfish and self-absorbed. I would constantly read–not just stuff for school but “pleasure reading”–play on my keyboard, eat junkfood, go for long walks, ride my bike all across NYC, let my apartment become a cluttered sty, and do anything else that would keep things “balanced” for me.
You know what also helped? I know this sounds strange, since I do not come from “money”, but I don’t think I spent a single minute worrying about what I was going to do for a living. I didn’t start thinking about that until I had pretty much wrapped up my studies. Now, maybe if I had worried a little bit about it, I wouldn’t have had that long summer of sending out dozens of CVs, crying about failed interviews, and playing the coulda-woulda-shoulda game. But in restrospect, it probably was good thing that I waited to worry. I was able to focus only on the here-and-now, instead of the here-and-now plus the future. My stress level has dropped tremenduously now that I taken to just living for the day instead of worrying about all the “what-ifs” waiting ahead.
