And this goes double for picking a postdoc lab!
This is excellent advice! Especially about remembering to tend to your life, too, while in grad school. Exercise and good drinking buddies were the key for me getting through grad school and the final dissertation push without having a full-fledged breakdown.
I can second that you definitely want an advisor who can tell you when to cut your losses and move on. I had a cheerleader and for a little too long I made the mistake of buying into his unfounded optimism about our overly ambitious project (he'd never built equipment anything like what myself and another graduate student were trying to build). It turned into a death march that left me twisting in the wind.
Learning when quit was a very difficult but important skill to learn.
I just want to thank you for your honest mention of depression. Too often, in graduate school and in other settings, depression is minimized, and those who suffer with it are expected to pick themselves up by their own bootstraps. These unrealistic expectations are both extrinsic (coming from others: PIs, labmates, classmates, etc.) and intrinsic (self-imposed).
We are coming into an age where mental illness in general and depression in particular are receiving unprecedented levels of understanding and compassion, but we still have a long way to go.
Every time depression is mentioned or described as a clinical disorder with real medical treatment options is a baby step forward.
Propter Doc: I expect so! Though really, I would expect postdocs to be much less vulnerable because y'all know more.
Jane, in my experience those who don't end up wretched (or at least highly irritating) shells of their former selves. If I'd had more drinking buddies my first three years...
Kristin: the reason I know this is because I have one right now who's like that! A year of the sitting-in-the-dark-crying project really drove that one home, especially in retrospect. I'm sorry to hear that it was a death march (shudder).
VJ: I speak from personal and bitter experience. It's true there's still a huge social stigma- some of my relatives are definitely of the buck-up-and-take-it-like-a-woman variety. Of course, none of them have ever been depressed.
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