Grad Students I’m Looking At You: 7 Things To Get The Professional Student In Your Life

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‘Tis the season that you may finally get to see your favourite professional student come out of their cave for a while. “Professional student” could be grad students, postgraduate fellows, anyone going back to school, a young scholar, etc. Basically anyone you think of as being in school, in love with school, or just somehow always seems to be involved in academic life in some shape or form. If you’re wondering what to get them, just know that they are pretty much the easiest person to shop for, and all of your gifts will be used…eventually.

1. A Heated Travel Mug

Your professional student friend can never have enough of these. In fact, if you want to go all out, you might even consider getting them a set of them – preferably with cute/inspiring quotes on them if you can make it happen. Why? Because they need all the inspiration they can get. And they want to reduce the amount of time they spend doing dishes so they can spend it on important things, like drinking a shit ton of hot beverages while crying and procrastinating their next assignment.

2. An E-book Reader

Whether it’s a Nook, or Kindle, or iPad, and despite all the protests you might get from the traditionalists who like to “feel their pages,” they are going to end up using it. Either because they realized that it’s a whole lot easier to read endless articles than to carry their folder of academic articles around (that is giving them severe shoulder pain), or to play games to distract themselves from actually reading their endless amounts of articles.

3. A Spa Day

Remember what I said about your professional student’s shoulders being in severe pain? It’s a real thing. When I was in grad school, a friend eventually forced me – she forcibly removed me from my apartment – to go and get a massage because rolling my neck apparently sounded like my bones were cracking on the inside. Are they going to be very happy with you insisting that they take time out of their not-enough-sleep schedule to do this? No. Will they thank you for this afterwards? Yes.

4. A Funny Non-Academic Book (Or Two Or Three)

Seeing as it’s the Holidays – which basically means nothing but more research to do for your professional student – it will be a much-needed fun break when they realize that they can actually read things that don’t involve 18-letter names! Seriously, the book should be funny, and have absolutely nothing to do with their academic passion whatsoever. Lest they be reminded that they are spending time reading things for fun (and not work, like their entire reading experience has been reduced to doing).

5. A Wake Up Light

It may seem kind of silly to get your favourite professional student a wake up light because they are likely running on abnormally low amounts of sleep. But this is no ironic gift, a wake up light is the perfect light therapy for someone who probably spends way too much time hunched over a computer and research books, and has forgotten that sleep is a thing that human beings should actually aspire to doing. As opposed to “resting one’s eyes” somewhere between the wee hours of the morning and dawn. Anyway, this wake up light gives the illusion of natural light and can be therapeutic – much-needed for your professional student’s stress levels.

6. A Gift Card To Their Favorite Dessert Place

Stressed spelled backwards is desserts, am I right?! Desserts are the best friend of professional students who sometimes go back and forth between only going to events for food, and forgetting to eat for entire days because what is food when you realized you have a 10-page paper due in 8 hours and it’s noon? Nonetheless, every once in a while, your professional student might just need to cry into a half-dozen batch of red velvet cupcakes, while contemplating how to go on a second night of no sleep. That gift card to a place that sells red velvet cupcakes will come in handy.

7. A Cheque Or Cold, Hard Cash

There are many people who think giving someone cash or a cheque over the holidays is not thoughtful. Those people have never been broke in grad school, I assure you. There is not a single gift that your professional student appreciates more than cash. So be a doll, and write that cheque in their name, and in the memo, put, “Don’t spend it all in one place. Just kidding – pay your phone bill on time next month.” Wow, this just got too real for some of you didn’t it?