Graduate Professionalism Beyond Productivity: Why Bodies, Time, Technology, and Relationships Matter

Ask any graduate student what it means to be successful in their program, and they will likely give you a list including completing courses, passing comprehensive exams, defending proposals, attending conferences, and publishing research. These milestones are real and important. They signify intellectual growth, disciplinary membership, and professional readiness. However, they do not tell the full story of how graduate students persist, belong, and develop into scholars. There is a quieter story happening alongside the official one, told through sleep schedules, skipped meals, hours lost to social media scrolling, gym shoes that never leave the bag, the missed field day or family reunions, and friendships outside the university that slowly fade away. Graduate education has historically treated these as private matters, irrelevant to scholarly development. The costs of graduate education must be acknowledged; it is crucial for how we design, support, and think about graduate education.

The Hidden Curriculum of Everyday Life

According to Ardeljan (2021) and the University of Pennsylvania Graduate Student Center (n.d.), graduate programs are well known for their hidden curricula: the unwritten norms, social codes, and informal expectations that students must navigate without anyone teaching them directly. Ardeljan (2021) noted how much graduate success depends on things like learning to write habitually, building intentional networks, and simply knowing the procedural rhythms of a graduate journey– aspects which no syllabus reviews. But there is a layer of the hidden curriculum even deeper than the social and procedural. It lives in the body, in daily time, in the devices we carry, and in the relationships we keep outside the academy.

 Research shows that these dimensions shape graduate students’ sense of belonging and emotional wellbeing in powerful ways. For instance, sleep deprivation impairs the cognitive flexibility required for thesis/dissertation writing (Suardiaz-Muro et al., 2023). Habitual social media use, particularly passive consumption, is associated with reduced self-worth and increased social comparison (Anto et al., 2023), both of which are already activated by the competitive culture of academia (Bai et al., 2025). And the slow erosion of relationships outside the university, which often accelerates in the third and fourth years of a program, can leave students without the very anchors that sustain their sense of self. None of this is incidental to scholarly identity; it is baked into character formation by default rather than by design.

Reframing Professionalism as Character Formation

The language of graduate professionalism tends to cluster around productivity: output, visibility, networking, grant acquisition, and publication records. This framing is not wrong, but it is dangerously incomplete. It treats the graduate student as a professional-in-training whose development is legible only through institutional outputs, while ignoring the holistic individual being formed in the process. Character formation provides a more honest frame, which takes into account who graduate students are becoming, not just what they are producing. Character is not formed only in seminars and dissertation chapters. It is formed in the habits that structure daily life: how a person rests, how they move, where they place their attention, who they let into their life, and who they lose touch with.

This is not a call to moralize graduate students’ personal choices. Instead, it is a call to acknowledge that higher education institutions are already shaping these habits, through funding structures that create financial stress, through program cultures that normalize overwork, through advising relationships that can consume or neglect students, and through the isolation built into independent research. It is no surprise that researchers have found PhD students struggling most when they are left with no life outside their studies, and perfectionism, imposter thoughts, and financial insecurity set in, and when supervisory relationships disappoint ( Jackman et al., 2024; Martínez-García et al., 2024; Pervez et al., 2021). Institutions are not passive bystanders to their students’ everyday lives. The question is whether they will be thoughtful participants and support the holistic lives of students.

Introducing the Embodied Graduate Professionalism Framework 

Embodied Graduate Professionalism Framework 

Note. The diagram shows the proposed model linking the body, time, technology, and relationships as determinants of scholarly identity development.

The model above is the Embodied Graduate Professionalism Framework (EGPF), a conceptual tool for making this argument concrete. It proposes that graduate professionalism rests on four domains that operate alongside traditional academic milestones, each contributing to the core outcome of scholarly identity development. These four domains include the body, time, technology, and relationships. 

• Domain I: The Body. The first domain is the body, including sleep, rest, physical movement, and basic health. These are not wellness add-ons, they are the foundation upon which sustained intellectual work is built. Sleep should not be recognized merely as a personal health issue but as a critical determinant of academic success and mental resilience (Suardiaz-Muro et al., 2023). A student who accumulates sleep debt is not simply uncomfortable; they are cognitively and emotionally compromised in ways that directly affect their scholarly work and their sense of being capable scholars. Rest, though closely related to sleep, is the deliberate pause that allows the mind to consolidate, recover, and return with clarity. Many graduate students have internalized the idea that productivity requires constant motion, that stepping away from the desk is a failure of discipline. But rest is not the opposite of work; it is what makes sustained work possible.

Physical movement matters in much the same way. A body that rarely leaves the chair but exists mostly as a vehicle to carry a mind to the library and back begins to register that neglect. According to the Committee on Physical Activity and Physical Education in the School Environment (2013), movement, whether a morning walk, an afternoon stretch, or a consistent exercise routine, is part of the conditions that make academic work coherent. Basic health, like eating regularly, attending to illness, managing chronic conditions, and not skipping doctor appointments because scholarly work feels more urgent, quietly shapes everything. Graduate students are not disembodied intellects. They are humans, and the state of their bodies is always present in the quality of thinking, the steadiness of emotions, and the capacity to keep going.

• Domain II: Time. The second domain is time. Not time management in the “productivity-hack” sense, but the deeper rhythms of attention, daily structure, and how hours are actually spent versus how they feel like they are being spent. Graduate students frequently report a disorienting loss of time structure, particularly after coursework ends. This population suffers from loneliness, psychological distress, stress, and anxiety, which can ultimately lead students to drop out (Martínez-García et al., 2024). Developing intentional daily rhythms is not a “nice to have”, it is a necessary professional competency.

• Domain III: Technology. The third domain is technology. Digital habits that shape attention, social comparison, self-presentation, and rest. The habitual, unexamined use of social media is often harmful to graduate students (Anto et al., 2023). The EGPF frames digital habits not as a distraction from scholarly development but as part of it, because how a scholar manages attention in a high-distraction digital environment is a real and underappreciated professional skill. Managing attention to technology also means developing awareness of different platforms and their effects. LinkedIn, for instance, can be a genuinely useful space for emerging scholars to make their work visible, build connections, and participate in intellectual conversations. But the same platforms, used passively, can become another source of social comparison, where watching peers announce publications and fellowships during the long, unmarked stretches of dissertation writing quietly chips away at confidence. The skill is not avoidance; it is knowing when you are using technology and when it is using you. 

• Domain IV: Relationships. The fourth domain is relationships outside the university. Graduate education tends to shrink students’ social worlds down to their department, the lab, and/or their cohort. This intensification can feel like commitment, but it often functions as isolation. Higher levels of impostor thoughts, perfectionism, and loneliness are strong predictors of depression, anxiety, and poor wellbeing among graduate students, with lack of belonging cited as a defining challenge of the PhD experience (Jackman et al., 2024). One of the risk factors for poor mental health outcomes is the absence of interests and connections outside the program (Martínez-García et al., 2024). These relationships are not in competition with scholarly development, they are part of what makes it sustainable.

Synoptically, these four domains feed into the development of scholarly identity: the growing capacity to see oneself as a legitimate, capable, and grounded member of a scholarly community. When all four are neglected, that identity tends to become brittle, dependent entirely on external validation, vulnerable to every setback. Yet when they are tended to, one’s scholarly identity becomes more robust.

What This Means in Practice

For graduate students, the EGPF offers a reframe rather than a prescription. It suggests that attending to one’s body (e.g., sleep, exercise, diet, etc.), time management, digital habits, and relationships outside the program does not cause distraction from their development as a scholar. These elements are part of the journey of scholarly development. Nor do these domains consist of the problems to solve after the dissertation is done; they are habits being formed right now, and they will follow graduates into their future careers (David et al., 2024).

For faculty and advisors, the framework is a reminder that advising students well means more than tracking their chapter progress. It means being attentive to the whole person, asking occasionally how they are sleeping, whether they have support from those around them, and whether their days are structured. The answers to these questions hold keys to substantive support—not as therapy, but as mentorship that takes scholarly identity development seriously.

For administrators and program administrators, the EGPF points to a gap in how graduate professional development is typically structured. Workshops on grant writing and conference presentations are valuable, but programs may also create space to discuss time management, rest, digital habits, and life outside the university, perhaps within the kind of cross-level mentorship silos proposed by frameworks like the Siloing Formal-Informal Mentorship Model (SFIMM; Agorsor & Apedo, 2025), an approach we argue would be more honest and complete.

Conclusion

Graduate education shapes who students are becoming, not just what they know. The everyday practices that sustain graduate life, such as how students sleep, move, manage their attention, navigate technology, and maintain relationships, are not peripheral to scholarly development. They are central to it. Overlooking these dimensions does not make them go away. It just means institutions are shaping them without acknowledging that they are doing so. The EGFP provides a foundation for framing scholarly identity development. EGFP provides a conceptual framework that invites scholars to take seriously the bodies, rhythms, and relationships that graduate students bring to their work every day and to recognize that honoring the holistic student is not a distraction from academic excellence. The domains of EGFP may be some of the most important conditions to support academic excellence.

 

References

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Anto, A., Asif, R. O., Basu, A., Kanapathipillai, D., Salam, H., Selim, R., Zaman, J. & Eisingerich, A. B. (2023). Exploring the impact of social media on anxiety among university students in the United Kingdom: Qualitative study. JMIR formative research, 7(1), e43037. https://doi.org/10.2196/43037 

Ardeljan, J. M. (October, 2021). Navigating graduate school: It’s all about the process. Inside Higher Education. https://www.insidehighered.com/advice/2021/10/18/how-navigate-unwritten-rules-graduate-school-opinion  

Bai, F., Zhang, F., & Xue, Y. (2025). Mechanisms of anxiety among doctoral students in China. Behavioral Sciences, 15(2), 105. https://doi.org/10.3390/bs15020105  

Committee on Physical Activity and Physical Education in the School Environment. (2013). Educating the student body: Taking physical activity and physical education to school. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK201501

David, L., Biwer, F., Crutzen, R., & De Bruin, A. (2024). The challenge of change: Understanding the role of habits in university students’ self-regulated learning. Higher Education, 1-19. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10734-024-01199-w 

Jackman, P. C., Slater, M. J., Carter, E. E., Sisson, K., & Bird, M. D. (2023). Social support, social identification, mental wellbeing, and psychological distress in doctoral students: A person-centred analysis. Journal of Further and Higher Education, 47(1), 45-58. https://doi.org/10.1080/0309877X.2022.2088272

Martínez‐García, I., De Witte, H., García‐Martínez, J., & Cano‐García, F. J. (2024). A systematic review and a comprehensive approach to PhD students' wellbeing. Applied Psychology: Health and Well‐Being, 16(4), 1565-1583. https://doi.org/10.1111/aphw.12541  

Suardiaz-Muro, M., Ortega-Moreno, M., Morante-Ruiz, M., Monroy, M., Ruiz, M. A., Martín-Plasencia, P., & Vela-Bueno, A. (2023). Sleep quality and sleep deprivation: Relationship with academic performance in university students during examination period. Sleep and Biological Rhythms, 21(3), 377-383. https://doi.org/10.1007/s41105-023-00457-1 

Pervez, A., Brady, L. L., Mullane, K., Lo, K. D., Bennett, A. A., & Nelson, T. A. (2021). An empirical investigation of mental illness, impostor syndrome, and social support in management doctoral programs. Journal of Management Education, 45(1), 126–158. https://doi.org/10.1177/10 

University of Pennsylvania Graduate Student Center. (n.d.). Uncovering the hidden curriculum in graduate education at the University of Pennsylvania Graduate School. https://gsc.upenn.edu/uncovering-hidden-curriculum