As as graduate student I don't have the most freetime. I have to teach and grade for a course(for free), do my 20-60 hours a week or research, and have 3 classes. Each of these individually is almost a full load for any person. I am not special, most graduate students have loads similar to mine. I have noticed that as the teaching and class load increased, my research has suffered. This is due in part to my research at this point mostly being to play catchup to a field I just entered, but also because I just don't have enough time to dedicate to thinking creatively about problems in my field. I find I can only make my brain be useful for so many hours out of the day. How many USEFUL hours do other graduate students manage to squeeze out of their day? If I can get 4-5 hours of very creative thought I'm usually pretty happy(plus another 10 or so of labor, note taking, and keeping track of small details about my work).
This begs the question though, in the small amount of freetime that we do get as graduate students, what do people do with it? I brew beer, some educational reading, and a lot of time just vegetating my brain on tv or movies. Its like television, or a book is the least effort my brain can manage to process sometimes. What does everyone else do?
On an aside, a question I have been wondering, in everyone's experience do you think that people in graduate school drink more or less than equivalent age people working(assuming same field, socioeconomic position etc). Ie your friends that finished college and worked at that engineering firm, or research lab...do they drink more than you in graduate school, or less?
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