As you may remember from last week, in March I'm going to be talking about the four main obstacles grad students face, and this week I'm going to be talking about cognition challenges.
Cognition is the mental action or process of acquiring knowledge and understanding through thoughts, experiences, and the senses.
Here, I'm being a bit more specific and defining cognition as the thought processes, experience, and effort needed to complete tasks in grad school, which are usually focused on reading and writing.
There are a lot of other aspects of cognition, such as memory, attention, cognitive operations, processing, etc, but here I'm just going to focus on reading and writing, as those are the two most common areas presenting challenges to cognition in grad school.
I believe it's important to monitor your reading and writing challenges in grad school because they are very common and can often spill over into other areas, such as motivation.
For example, here are some questions to get you thinking about possible challenges with reading and writing:
Reading:
What do you have to read each week?
How are you organizing your reading?
How do you know which readings are important?
Where are you doing your best reading?
What types of readings are difficult for you? Easier?
How do you take notes during reading?
Writing: This is a big category in grad school and requires a lot of cognitive effort for the various components
Feedback: How do you ask for feedback and how do you handle feedback?
Organization and planning: How are you planning your writing? What times of day are you getting your best writing done?
Citations: Do you use a citation manager? Do you do this as you go or once a week or save it until the end?
References: How are you formatting your references? How do you find other references?
As Becca and I talk about in the fifth episode (season 2) of the How To Grad School podcast, I share two resources that I found extremely useful when I was writing my dissertation.
I think one of the reasons why writing a thesis or dissertation can be so challenging is because you're managing a lot of reading AND writing at the same time.
By monitoring your reading and writing, along with other cognitive processes, you can identify possible challenges, which can then help you seek solutions.
A great way to identify possible challenges is by talking to other grad students to see what they do when they are having challenges in this area, or even better, having a weekly or biweekly meeting with other thesis- and dissertation- writers so that you can support each other during this often isolating and difficult process.
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