Morré Frédérique
Yonsei GSIS Newsletter, Editor

The final months of a semester always arrive with the same strange mix of relief and disorientation. One moment you are deep in the weeds of comprehensive exam prep, running on iced Americanos and sheer stubbornness, and the next you are sitting very still in a quiet room wondering what to do with your hands now that they are not holding a highlighter.

As I wrap up my sixth semester at Yonsei (the final semester of coursework, and the one where I fought my way through comprehensive exams, which are the final exams you have to pass as a PhD student before writing the dissertation) I find myself looking back on the past three years with a whole different set of glasses. When I first arrived on campus in 2023, I fell almost immediately into a common trap: the deeply ingrained idea that surviving academia means romanticizing your burnout, pulling twelve-hour library shifts, and making your research your entire personality. After all, that approach had gotten me through a master's and a postgraduate program, secured me scholarships to live abroad, landed me internships, and ultimately built the resume that got me accepted into a PhD in the first place. I had always taken pride in the effort I put in.

But speaking as a recovering overachiever, I learned a hard truth fairly quickly: treating a doctoral program like a lifestyle aesthetic is a fast track to losing your mind.

If you want to know how to navigate the academic grind while actually protecting your sanity, your boundaries, and your identity outside the campus walls — keep reading. Here is what it really takes to survive.

1. Treat it like a job, not an identity

A PhD is something you do, not someone you are. Set working hours and, within reason, stick to them. The romanticized twelve-hour library shift fueled by iced lattes and existential dread is not a badge of honor. It is just exhausting, and it is the kind of exhaustion that compounds quietly until it becomes something harder to shake. You are allowed to close your laptop and stop thinking about your readings for the evening. That is not laziness. That is called being a person.

2. Demand spaces where you are not being evaluated

You need hobbies that have absolutely zero connection to your research. Whether that is a sport, learning to knit, or losing yourself in a romance novel with a spectacularly implausible plot, you have to protect the parts of your brain that just want to play. Not everything needs to be productive. Not everything needs to go on your CV. Some things can just be for you.

3. You do not need to be the smartest person in the room

This one took me longer to learn than I would like to admit. Because I am a PhD student taking seminars alongside master's students, there was this invisible, underlying pressure to always seem more prepared, more insightful, more put-together than everyone else in the room. As if the degree I was working toward required me to already have all the answers, all the time.

It does not. And carrying that expectation around on top of an already significant workload is a special kind of draining. Your value in a seminar room is not determined by whether you say the smartest thing!! Rather it is in whether you are genuinely engaged, genuinely curious, and willing to sit with uncertainty rather than perform confidence you do not always feel. The moment I let go of needing to be the most brilliant presence in every conversation, I actually started enjoying the seminars.

4. Do not get trapped in the bubble

It is remarkably easy, especially in a field like history, to become so absorbed in your specific niche that you gradually lose track of the present. The archives, the footnotes, the very particular debates that matter enormously within your sub-field and approximately nowhere else… they will consume you if you let them. Stay engaged with the world outside your research. Read broadly. Talk to people who have no idea what your field is about. Keep adapting. The bigger picture does not pause while you are in the stacks.

5. Curate your feed ruthlessly

Perhaps this is a particular personal quirk, since I am a content creator on social media on the side, but it is one that I had to ruthlessly apply. 

Mute the productivity accounts. Unfollow the people who make you feel like you are perpetually behind. We are all so accustomed to being online constantly that it becomes second nature to measure our progress against whatever curated matcha-colored version of someone else's life appears on our screen at 11 p.m. It is, ultimately, not useful information. Build a digital environment that actually inspires you rather than quietly feeding your imposter syndrome. Your nervous system will thank you.

Thinking about a PhD? Ask yourself these three things first.

Before you apply, before you reach out to potential supervisors, before you start romanticizing the reading lists… sit with these questions honestly.

Am I doing this because I genuinely want the degree, or because I am simply good at school? A PhD is about producing new knowledge, not just passing courses. Being an excellent student is a wonderful thing, but it is not the same skill set, and it will not be enough to sustain a multi-year research project on its own. You need a passion that goes beyond the campus walls.

Can I handle the unglamorous logistics? The isolation, the applications, the administrative bureaucracy that no one warns you about (especially if you live abroad!)— are you genuinely prepared for the parts of this that are neither intellectually stimulating nor particularly interesting to talk about?

Where does my sense of self-worth come from? If your self-esteem is almost entirely tied to academic validation, a doctoral program will, at some point, break your heart. You need a reasonably solid sense of who you are outside of your grades and your output before you step foot in the archives. One of the professors I worked with told me that the ego is the first thing that needs to die in the PhD, and mine has bled out quietly in the snow for several semesters before it did.

So is it worth it?

A PhD is, at its best, an extraordinary thing: years of dedicated time to think carefully and carefully about something that genuinely matters to you, surrounded by people doing the same. I do not regret for a moment putting time into the things I’ve read, the inspiring people I’ve met, the borderline insane things I’ve learned. But it is not an aesthetic. It is the work, and the life you build carefully around it, that make it worth doing.

Good luck out there. Keep your hobbies close and your working hours reasonable.