Ever ended a long work-week feeling too tired and worn out to get out of the house and do something fun? Or, are you so tied up with Zoom calls and meetings throughout the week that you end up sacrificing your entire weekend, just to catch up on your own work? If this is true then, like many others in the academic community, you’ve probably struggled at some point to achieve a healthy balance between your work and personal lives.
Discussions around work-life balance and how challenging it can be to achieve and sustain this balance are not new in academia. Despite this, a trend of imbalance between researchers’ work and personal lives seems to be consistently increasing. Results from the CACTUS Mental Health Survey showed that over 40% of surveyed researchers didn’t have sufficient time for hobbies, recreation, or other family/social activities. Moreover, the lifestyle changes and demands brought on by the pandemic have further blurred the boundaries between work and life beyond work.
One way to tackle this challenge is by hearing from and talking to other researchers who have both struggled with and succeeded in setting up a healthy balance between their work and personal lives. These shared experiences will help us broaden our perspective and learn ways to take better care of ourselves. To enable all of this, we invited PhD researcher Shruti Turner to talk about the importance of work-life balance, and explain how we can work towards achieving a better integration between work and other aspects of our lives.
In this session, Shruti talked about:
- The importance of work-life balance in academia
- Some of the factors that could result in poor work-life balance
- The negative consequences associated with work-life imbalance
- Her own experiences of times when she has succeeded and failed in achieving work-life balance
- Advice on how can we establish a better work-life balance, based on strategies that have worked for her personally
Date and Time: March 30, 2021 | 10:00 am ET (2:00 pm UTC)
Click here to view the session recording!
About Shruti Turner:
PhD Researcher, Imperial College London; MSc in Biomedical Engineering and BEng Aeronautics and Astronautics, University of Southampton
Shruti started a PhD with the Royal British Legion Centre for Blast Injury Studies at Imperial College London in In January 2018. It combines her passion for education and research, while also allowing her to help amputees in need. It is focused on understanding the clinical utility of pressure sensors in lower limb prosthetic sockets to improve fit and evaluate what is meant by ‘good fit.’ Prior to this, Shruti did an MSc Biomedical Engineering and BEng Aeronautics and Astronautics at the University of Southampton. She also maintains an interesting, insightful blog about her time as a PhD student called Shruti’s PhD. Shruti believes that work-life balance is important first and foremost to look after our mental health. Sometimes, looming deadlines and tight schedules might force us to shift our balance a bit, but she says that “life happens and we should be able to feel like we can adjust accordingly.”
