How to Use PhD Student Case Studies

If you’re a PhD student, you are in great company.  But "being in great company" has a very special meaning that's important not to overlook -- it means you are not alone.  Your bumpy PhD experience is surprisingly universal across different schools and different programs.  If you’re a PhD student in microbiology, you have more in common with a PhD student in history than someone in medical school.  If you’re a PhD student in economics, you have more in common with a PhD student in physics than with an MBA student.
 
Despite this universal experience, many, many PhD students feel very alone.   They feel anxious about their uncertain future, anxious about their abilities, and anxious about a personal life that seems to be passing them by.  
 
Having been an informal confident to many PhD students in different majors or with different advisors, I’ve found that many of their real concerns are difficult for them to talk about.  This further magnifies their feeling of isolation because they don’t realize how many other people have faced and often conquered a similar problem.  There’s power in knowing someone else found a path out of the same woods you feel you’re in. 
 
For about 20 years I taught an interdisciplinary PhD course at the University of Illinois and then at Cornell.  Aside from the academic objectives, one of my personal objectives of this course was to help students begin to conquer these anxieties.  One way we tried to tackle this was by asking students if they wanted to volunteer to write a short description about a “friend” who was facing a troubling problem.  Many weeks we would discuss one of these anonymously written “case studies” for 10-15 minutes during class.

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PhD Student Case Studies
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File Type:	pdf

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Two good things happened almost every week.  First, the 8-16 students in the class all realized that they weren’t alone in some of the problems they faced.  Second, they heard a wide range of rational (non-emotional) solutions and perspectives to each problem they probably wouldn’t have heard from an officemate or a partner. 
 
There are three examples of PhD Student Case Studies in the downloadable pdf, and they can be used in a number of different ways.  
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1.  If you’re a professor who teaches a PhD seminar, use these if you think they will help your students.  One of them could be used as a class filler on a slow day, or they could be used as topics of discussion on the last class session in a course.  
2. If you’re a counselor or in mental health services at a university, use these if you think they would be helpful in group discussions.  
3. If you’re the PhD student in charge of your workshops or seminars, you might find one or two of these to be a useful change of pace to your usual sessions. 

 
There’s power in knowing there are a lot of different ways a PhD student can get out of the woods.  ​