How to Increase your Interest in Grad School

Interest enhancement is the next motivation regulation strategy discussed in Wolters (2003). Interest enhancement is when students use strategies that are designed to increase their immediate enjoyment or interest in a task.

You may have heard of gamification – well this strategy can include making a game out of a task or something that makes it more fun. This could be true especially for tasks that are boring or repetitive.

Being interested in a task can increase your intrinsic motivation, or the types of motivation that are within you as a student. In contrast, extrinsic motivation is usually focused on some sort of outcome.

I think this strategy is most effective for grad students for boring or repetitive tasks and when you can do a bit of planning in advance. When you’re in the middle of a boring task, that may not be the best time to come up with how you can make the task more fun.

For example, when I was writing anything – a manuscript, a conference paper, my dissertation – I always had other people read my work and provide feedback.

But, sometimes getting that feedback and reading through it was quite a drag, so I would try to make it a little bit fun to help motivate myself to review the often extremely helpful feedback. Also, reviewing feedback can be challenging, to say the least, because it often means you have more work to do.

If the feedback was on a conference paper that was about 5-10 pages long, I’d try to read through the feedback and write a note to myself for each piece and try to get it done in a short period of time. What this did was force me to move a bit faster and just pull off the band-aid and immerse myself in the task.

Then, what usually happened was because I read the feedback quickly, it made it easier to go back and take a look at the comments that would be easy to fix and ones that would require more time and effort.

You may want to try interest enhancement in grad school if you are facing a task that you’ve been putting off, and try to make it a bit more fun to help you get started or even better, get it done!