The Lessons Learned and Experienced Gained Navigating (Graduate) Student life as a Dad and Mentoring a First-Generation Graduate Student

The Lessons Learned and Experienced Gained Navigating (Graduate) Student life as a Dad and Mentoring a First-Generation Graduate Student

Parenting often presents challenges on its own. Combining it with challenges of graduate studies and financial instability brings additional challenges and puts a higher pressures to handle everyday life situations. In this talk, I will present two experiences from my life. First, I will highlight my path of being an international graduate student while raising two little kids. Following, I will focus on my experience of (partially) mentoring a first-generation graduate student while being a postdoc. In the first part, I will discuss about the challenges of students as parents. I will provide an example of how I took my first exam in the US as a graduate student with a wrist band from a hospital when my son was born. In addition, I will discuss about financial and emotional balancing of graduate student life, while also taking care of two little kids, due to my wife working 80+ hour shifts. In the second part of the talk, I will discuss about my experiences when I was partially mentoring a first-generation PhD student while I was a postdoc. During those times, I had an opportunity to observe some of the challenges of that student, due to a limited support from student’s family and how important it was to provide not just academic support, but also a moral support to keep the student continuing with the studies.