Admitted phd engineering student: are stanford grad students happy?

Current PhD candidate in chemical engineering here, been around a while. The answer to this depends very heavily on both the department you're in, and the culture of the research group you join. You can't easily generalize across such a wide range of experiences. In my department, I would even go so far as to say that most students don't work on weekends, and if they do it's not a full 8 hours. Maybe an exception has to be made for the people working in bio labs. I've personally found my time here to be very valuable and would say I've been happy for most of it. You'll find many grad students in years 1-2 to be stressed because they're still trying to be the top student (impossible for almost all), and slowly most everyone learns to put blinders on and just focus on their own progress, rather than comparing themselves to their peers.

Being a grad student is hard and everyone adjusts to the new expectations differently.

/r/stanford Thread