It wasn’t until I was in my doctoral studies that I realized how much my day-to-day life was going to be changed by it. I’m starting to think I’m not great at looking ahead. My and my family’s routines and rituals that offer comfort and connection were temporarily scrambled.
For my doctoral program, classes were all online, synchronous, and exclusively evening, weekly meetings. Each class I took met synchronously for three hours from 4pm to 7pm. That schedule is very convenient for working professionals, but it does make for quite the slog in the evenings. Three hours on a zoom call after a day of work is exhausting to the point of mind numbing. Even the best online facilitators would find it difficult to engage my brain at that point.
As you’re exploring programs, take a look at the actual course schedules and see if it works for you and if it is something you can manage. Are the classes from 4pm-7pm in the evening (Mountain Time)? If so, imagine yourself sitting for three hours in front of a computer screen as the light from the outside world fades to evening.
And thus, our family lived our life during the academic year in that manner. I would drop off the kids at school. Do work. Pick up the kids and jump right onto a Zoom call. Afterwards my brain was 100% fried and I barely had the stamina to engage with my family. And again, I didn’t have a full time teaching job.
Geoff’s typical PhD coursework day
| 8:00am | Drive kids to school |
| 8:30:am | Grocery store on the way home |
| 9:30am | Work on my supplemental income projects, start slow cooker |
| 11:30am | Scarf down reheated leftovers from last night’s slow cooker dinner |
| 11:35am | Coursework (writing, reading, research) |
| 3pm | Go get the kids |
| 4pm | Rush home, plant self in front of computer for 3 hours while the world moves around me |
| 7pm (or earlier if I had a break) | Eat the slow cooker meal I had prepared earlier. Sometimes the family would join, other times they’d have already eaten |
| 8pm | Clean up, get ready for the next day. Grab an ice cold pop from the ice box. Turn on the NBA on TNT (Tuesdays and Thursdays) or Fire Emblem: Three Houses (Nintendo Switch). |
Sometimes I would go on a run if there was a perfect combination of motivation, good weather, and either being caught up or wanting to avoid my work.
Dinner time is a semi-sacred ritual in our family. We eat together every day, nearly without exception. We talk, we share jokes, we talk about plans for the week. Having class smack dab in the middle of that time was more disregulating to our routine that I’d have thought. It felt like something was missing on the days I had class. Then again, it would have also been challenging to meet multiple times a week, and I don’t think I learned as much from some of my asynchronous courses.
I’m also the cook of the family.. And 4pm-7pm is prime dinner-making and eating time. This meant a lot of slow cooker meals that I could make beforehand and scarf down during a break (which were always appreciated) or after class. (Appendix A includes some of my favorite slow cooker recipes.)
And this was my day for three days a week. Don’t get me wrong, it’s not a bad way to live. I genuinely, truly don’t know how long it would have taken me to complete the program if I had a full-time teaching job. I could have maybe done it, but it would have taken several more years and I’m certain my teaching would have suffered.
In fact, eventually, I did take teaching jobs at UW and Community College in order to get more post-secondary teaching experience. Thankfully those days were typically not during my class days. I’ll talk more about teaching in the next entry, Part 6: Teach.
“There’s no way out but through,” as they say. You’re going to have courses and coursework. Because everyone’s situation is so unique and personal, it’s tough to give concrete advice other than (as in Part 2), take stock of your and your families needs, routines, rituals, and lifestyle. Understand that you’ll have to adjust some portion of these. Maybe it’ll be a small adjustment, maybe a large one.
It’s also helpful to have a supportive family. On top of a supportive spouse, my kids (both teens when I started) were excited for me going back to school. In truth, I think they just thought it was funny that I was going to school while they were in school. Their enthusiasm helped us have the conversations about what life may look like now that Dad’s in school and his evenings are gobbled up with classes.
Mostly, just be aware of how your schedule will change once you’re taking classes. There may be no way around it, but at least you can start preparing yourself and your family for the shifts in the homestead.
Takeaways:
- Be mindful of your routines and rituals that give you comfort and connection.
- Structuring your life around doctoral coursework and classes can be difficult, particularly when you have additional responsibilities
- If you’re the cook of the family, get to know your slow cooker if you have evening classes (see Appendix A – coming soon!)
- If you have a full time job, consider when you’ll have opportunities to do coursework. This goes double if writing doesn’t come naturally to you.
All posts in this series:
Part 1: Why (not) to get your PhD in Mathematics Education
Part 2: Finding the right program
Part 3: What a Math Education Doctoral Degree is (and what it isn’t)
Part 4: Do you like to write? You better.
Part 5: Classes, Coursework, and You
Part 7: Let’s Talk About Your Dissertation: the thing that people just don’t want to do
Part 8: Your defense committee: Prelims, Quals, and the moving of mountains
Part 9: What comes next (for me and for you)?
Appendix A: Slow cooker meals
emergent math 