The importance of prioritizing time with people

In the United States, we are now over three months into a reality shaped by COVID-19 lockdowns and varying degrees of social distancing guidelines. While everyone has been affected in different ways, everyone has been affected in some way. Even after a few months, I find myself noticing movie scenes in which people are hugging, or in a crowd or restaurant, and thinking, “oh yeah, that’s a thing we used to do.” The initial shock of the pandemic subsided and we adapted to virtual social lives, but as we begin to resume in-person activities, I’m realizing how much I’ve missed them.

Eating at a restaurant with friends in early March, for what would be the last time before the lockdowns.

This pandemic has made all of us recognize the importance of spending time with people, and how adversely our lives are impacted when we are not able to do so. And yet, this is a struggle that – to a lesser extent – graduate students have to fight even under normal circumstances. Before the coronavirus pandemic, we had a mental health pandemic in academia, and it’s not surprising. Grad students, in particular, tend to be overworked, underpaid, and underappreciated, while facing constant critique, uncertainty about the future, and long hours alone in labs.

Moreover, each student’s living situation introduces its own unique suite of benefits and challenges. On the one hand, those who are married and/or parents have less flexibility and time to devote to their work, but they also have more social interaction built into their home lives. Others without family commitments *can* work all the time, but that doesn’t mean they should. The reality is that, whether you’re single, married, or have kids (or not), everyone needs social interaction. This is one reason why the coronavirus pandemic has been particularly challenging for those who live alone: all of our social interaction comes – by necessity – from outside our households, but these are the very people we’re discouraged from seeing according to social distancing guidelines. Thankfully, we do have great video conferencing technology, which is absolutely better than nothing (though not the same).

So my advice for grad students, researchers, and everyone, is this: no matter how busy you are, make sure that you prioritize time to spend with people (even if it has to be “virtual”).

Throughout my graduate program, I haven’t always done this well. I definitely remember turning down invitations to social events in those early years because I thought I was, “too busy.” To be fair, we all go through hectic periods in our lives which force us to budget our time more carefully. But at that point, I think was still seeing people frequently enough in classes that I didn’t feel as much of a need to prioritize extra events.

During one phase of my PhD project, I manually measured thousands of sand grains in thin section images. I would work all day, then go back to my room and continue measuring grains late into the evening. After several days of this, I remember realizing that I hadn’t really interacted with anyone, even though I lived on campus with a roommate at the time. This became a turning point for me: I made a decision that I wasn’t going to live like that (an experience which also prompted the development of sandstone disaggregation methods to replace manual grain measurement, but that’s another story).

As the years went on – especially after I finished classes and began working exclusively on my research – I realized that spending time with people was something I had to fit into my schedule no matter how busy I was. Even during some of the craziest seasons, like the two months before my defense, or the time I was giving four lectures a week for a class I had never taught before, I found that taking those breaks became so important. Unfortunately, our work-focused culture (which is particularly prevalent in academia) makes it easy to get wrapped up in our research and forget this.

I had planned to write a blog post on this topic before COVID-19, but recent events have only further emphasized the importance of spending time with people. If there is one good thing that comes out of the pandemic, it is that we are all realizing how many “normal” things we take for granted. I hope that we will be able to look back on this time and be more thankful for people and in-person social interaction as these activities resume.