Dear Editor,

For some 20 years, I have been teaching a theory course-one of the first courses for new graduate students. Gerard and Walker offer good advice to prospective clinical nurse specialist students in their article previously published (Vol 17, Issue 4). However, on the basis of my experience, I have some additional advice to prospective and new students. I call it My Wonder Woman Spiel, and although it is directed to women in my course, it's a message for anyone who is feeling like she/he is having trouble just keeping up and is experiencing guilt and anxiety about all the other stuff in her/his life that isn't getting done while they attend to the demands of graduate school.

First, engage your significant others in this dialog, whether partners, kids, parents, or friends. They need to know what to expect, what you need, and how they can help. The divorce rate among graduate students (generally, not just in nursing) is high. It has been my repeated experience that graduate students, especially of the female kind, take on the demands of graduate study without relieving themselves of any of their other responsibilities and often without discussing, with their significant others, any anticipated changes in their lives. As if that weren't enough, many students also start new jobs, get pregnant, or buy a first house at the same time or, unbelievably, join a reserve branch of the military-I kid you not!!

Something's gotta give. And it shouldn't be your physical and/or mental health. You wanna go to graduate school and reap its rewards? Then make some room for it. Your physical and mental well-being is precious. You are precious. But others won't treat you as precious if you forget to show them how or, even worse, give them a poor example by treating yourself as expendable.

Going to graduate school is time-limited. But you need time to study, time to think, time to go to the library, time to read, and time to discuss. It isn't humanly possible to do all that and keep right on doing what you have been doing before you took the school responsibilities. So if you're somebody who has been suffering under the belief that you can do it all, I ask you to set it aside and instead go into your problem-solving mode and figure how you can make getting through graduate school a sane and rewarding experience.

When you are feeling as if you're able to rise to meet the challenges that life presents you, your relationships with others will benefit, as will your scholarly endeavors.

That's my sage advice.