Written by: Tania Nainani and Sanam Rahimi Edited by: Ka’ala Bajo
Doctoral training in behavior analysis often feels like a carefully arranged schedule of competing contingencies. In a single day, we might move from teaching in a classroom, to supervising assistants, to mentoring newer staff, to attending evening classes, and finally attempting to make progress on research somewhere between dinner and bedtime. At any given moment, we are shifting between roles: teacher, supervisor, mentor, student, and researcher.
While the pace can feel intense, behavior analysts have a unique advantage: we actually study the science of behavior change. The same principles we use to teach skills, shape behavior, and design effective learning environments can also be applied to our own lives. Strategies like self-management, reinforcement systems, task analysis, and implementing the Premack principle are not just tools for the classroom. They can also help us navigate the demands of doctoral training. In many ways, graduate school becomes a real-life setting where we get to practice what we preach in arranging contingencies that make productive behavior more likely.
1. Modify Your Own Behavior
One of the most useful skills behavior analysts can develop during doctoral training is self-management. Rather than relying on fluctuating motivation (which, as we know, is a somewhat unreliable variable), self-management involves arranging antecedents and consequences to influence our own behavior.
Graduate school is actually an ideal setting for self-management systems. Many of the tasks involved in doctoral training—writing papers, reviewing literature, analyzing data, preparing supervision materials—require sustained effort over long periods of time. Reinforcement is often delayed, and expectations for large projects can feel vague or overwhelming. Without structure, it is easy to find yourself staring at a blinking cursor while wondering how exactly one “works on a dissertation.” Fortunately, behavior analysis gives us tools for breaking these challenges down into manageable pieces.
Start With Behaviourally Defined Goals
Clear and observable goals make a significant difference in productivity. Vague goals like “work on research” or “study for class” are difficult to measure and surprisingly easy to avoid. Behaviorally defined goals, on the other hand, create a clear starting point.
For example, a goal like reading and summarizing two research articles, writing three hundred words of a literature review, preparing tomorrow’s supervision agenda, or graphing and reviewing participant data provides a clear behavioral target. These kinds of goals are concrete, observable, and measurable, three qualities behavior analysts appreciate. They also make it much easier to contact reinforcement from completing tasks along the way.
Break Big Projects into Smaller Units
Many academic tasks feel overwhelming simply because they are too large. Task analysis, something behavior analysts routinely use when teaching skills, can be incredibly helpful when applied to our own work. Take writing a dissertation chapter. Thinking of it as a single task is enough to make anyone close their laptop and suddenly become very interested in reorganizing their desk. When broken down into smaller steps, however, the process becomes far more manageable.
A task analysis for writing a chapter might involve identifying relevant articles, annotating key papers, organizing themes across studies, developing an outline, drafting section headings, writing individual paragraphs, and then editing and refining the draft. Once the task is broken down in this way, progress becomes visible. Instead of waiting for the distant reinforcement of finishing a chapter, we can contact smaller moments of success throughout the process.
Measure the Behaviour
Another powerful self management strategy is simply measuring behavior. Tracking writing time, logging completed tasks, or maintaining a daily checklist can increase accountability and highlight patterns in productivity. Behavior analysts often remind their students that data drive decisions. It turns out the same rule applies to our own work habits. When we start measuring what we are doing, our behavior often shifts in surprisingly helpful ways.
Graduate school may involve juggling multiple roles, teacher, supervisor, mentor, student, and researcher, but self management allows us to structure our environments in ways that support those roles rather than compete with them. Instead of waiting for motivation to appear, we can design systems that make productive behavior more likely.
2. Build a Reinforcing Community
Graduate school may technically be an individual degree, but no one actually gets through it alone. Behind every doctoral student is usually a small ecosystem of people who are quietly reinforcing the behavior of “continuing to show up.” Friends, family members, partners, mentors, lab mates, and classmates often become the invisible support system that makes the whole thing possible.
From a behavior-analytic perspective, the people around us are part of our environment. They provide reinforcement, encouragement, perspective, and sometimes a much needed reminder to step away from the laptop. They celebrate the small wins, listen to the occasional dissertation related rant, and reassure us that revising the same paragraph for three hours is, apparently, part of the process.
Let Your Friends And Family Be Part Of The System
While they may not always know the difference between a multiple schedule and a multiple baseline design, the people closest to us play an important role in supporting us through graduate training. Friends and family often provide the kind of reinforcement that keeps motivation going when academic tasks start to feel endless.
Sometimes this looks like celebrating milestones, finishing a semester, submitting a conference proposal, or finally sending off a draft. Other times it simply means having people around who will listen patiently while you explain why a reviewer comment from three weeks ago is still bothering you. These relationships also serve as an important reminder that our lives extend beyond coursework, research deadlines, and manuscript revisions. Graduate school is demanding, but it is still just one part of a much larger life.
Learn From People Who Have Already Done This
Supervisors, professors, and more senior students also play an important role in the reinforcement system that surrounds doctoral training. They have already navigated the same milestones, coursework, qualifying exams, research proposals, dissertation drafts, and they often have practical advice that can make the path forward feel a little clearer.
Seeking guidance from people who have gone through the process before can help clarify expectations and reduce unnecessary uncertainty. Sometimes the most helpful thing a mentor can say is simply, “Yes, this part is hard, and yes, you are doing it the right way.” There is something surprisingly reassuring about realizing that even highly accomplished researchers once sat exactly where you are sitting now, trying to figure out how to write their first literature review.
Lean on Your Peers
Peers often become some of the most reinforcing people in graduate school. Other doctoral students understand the pace, the workload, and the oddly specific frustrations that come with academic life. They are the ones who understand why finishing a difficult reading feels like a genuine accomplishment, why a well formatted graph can feel deeply satisfying, and why submitting a paper sometimes deserves a full celebratory dinner. Peer relationships often evolve into informal support systems, writing groups, study sessions, shared conference travel, or simply the occasional message that says, “Is anyone else staring at their data right now and hoping it magically analyzes itself?” In behavior analytic terms, these interactions provide natural reinforcement for persistence. They remind us that the process of becoming a behavior analyst is not something we navigate in isolation, but something we move through together.
Some of the most meaningful reinforcement in graduate school comes from the people going through it alongside you. We (the authors) met on a subway car at 50th Street at 6:45 in the morning, both on our way to the same school, and that chance encounter turned into a friendship that has carried us through the program together. We celebrate the small wins, vent through the frustrating moments, and share the overwhelming parts of training that only someone in the same place can truly understand. There is something uniquely reassuring about having someone beside you who knows exactly what this experience feels like, because they are living it too.
Graduate school may involve long hours of independent work, but the community around us plays a powerful role in sustaining that work. A strong support system does more than make the experience easier. It makes the entire journey far more reinforcing, and sometimes, if you’re lucky, it even gives you a friendship that lasts well beyond the program itself.
3. Use Reinforcement Systems
One of the more ironic realizations during graduate school is that many of the systems we design for our students work remarkably well on us too. Doctoral training is full of delayed reinforcement, abstract outcomes, and long-term goals. Finishing a semester, publishing a paper, or completing a dissertation chapter are reinforcing outcomes, but they often sit far enough in the future that day to day motivation can start to fade. Intentionally arranging reinforcement systems helps bridge that gap. By building small, consistent contingencies into our routines, progress becomes more reinforcing and momentum becomes much easier to maintain.
Token Economies For Productivity (They Work For Adults Too)
Token economies are a familiar tool in many behavior-analytic settings, and they translate surprisingly well to graduate school. A simple system might involve earning tokens or points for completing tasks such as finishing grading, writing five hundred words, or submitting a draft of an IRB proposal. Those tokens can then be exchanged for small but meaningful reinforcers, a coffee break, a workout class, watching an episode of a favorite show, or meeting a friend for dinner. These systems help bridge delayed reinforcement by allowing smaller tasks to contact reinforcement sooner, and there is something particularly satisfying about earning that coffee after a productive writing session.
The Premack Principle in Action
Another strategy many of us use, sometimes without even realizing it, is the Premack principle, the idea that high probability behaviors can reinforce lower probability behaviors. In graduate school this often looks like pairing a less preferred task with a more preferred activity. Writing first might be followed by meeting a friend for coffee, grading papers might come before a walk outside, or finishing data analysis might be followed by watching an episode of a favorite show. It is essentially the adult version of “first homework, then play,” or in slightly more graduate student terms, first manuscript revisions, then matcha latte.
Graduate School As A Personalised System Of Instruction
Graduate training also shares many similarities with Personalized Systems of Instruction, where progress is often self paced, mastery of content is expected before moving forward, and large projects are broken down into clear performance units. Thinking about major academic tasks in this way can make them far less overwhelming. Instead of the vague instruction to “work on the dissertation,” the project becomes a sequence of achievable steps, identifying key articles, writing a literature synthesis, or drafting a conceptual framework. Each completed step becomes an opportunity to contact reinforcement, making progress visible and sustaining motivation across the long arc of graduate training.
4. Protect The Setting Events
Behavior analysts spend a lot of time thinking about the variables that influence behavior. When working with students or clients, we quickly consider how sleep, hunger, stress, or illness might be affecting performance. Graduate school is no different, except now we are the ones whose behavior is being influenced. Long days, packed schedules, and competing responsibilities can easily become setting events that make focus, patience, and persistence harder to maintain. Protecting the basic variables that support our own performance becomes an important part of sustaining the work that doctoral training requires.
Prioritise Sleep And Movement
Sleep and physical movement are two variables that strongly influence attention, mood, and productivity, yet they are often the first things sacrificed when deadlines start piling up. It is easy to convince yourself that staying up late to finish one more paragraph is the productive choice, but fatigue has a funny way of turning a one hour task into a three hour one. Movement can be just as important. A quick walk, a workout class, or simply stepping outside for a few minutes can reset your attention and make the next stretch of work far more manageable. Sometimes the most effective intervention for a stuck paragraph is not more typing, it is standing up and leaving the laptop alone for twenty minutes.
Make Time To Reset
Graduate training requires sustained effort over long periods of time, which means small moments of recovery become surprisingly important. Whether it is journaling, meditation, or simply stepping away from screens for a few minutes, these moments create space to reset before jumping into the next task. Many students discover that when they build small breaks into their day, they actually return to their work with more focus. Also, there is only so long any human can stare at a dataset before it starts looking back at them.
Remember You Are A Person, And Not Just A Graduate Student!
One of the easiest traps to fall into during doctoral training is letting the program become the entire structure of your life. Coursework, research, and supervision are all important, but they are still just pieces of a much larger picture. Spending time with friends, exploring the city you live in, or doing something that has absolutely nothing to do with behavior analysis can provide important sources of reinforcement. Sometimes, the most effective intervention for a stuck research question is leaving the apartment and remembering the world exists beyond Google Scholar.
5. Give Yourself Grace
Doctoral training is, in many ways, a long shaping process. No one begins a program already knowing how to design a perfect study, supervise flawlessly, write polished manuscripts, and present confidently at conferences. Those skills develop gradually through practice, feedback, revision, and sometimes a few uncomfortable learning moments along the way. When viewed through a behavior analytic lens, mistakes are not failures, they are simply data points that guide the next approximation.
Mistakes Are Data
Graduate school naturally involves critique. Papers come back with comments, presentations are followed by questions, and supervisors offer feedback that can sometimes feel very direct. While it can be tempting to interpret these moments as evidence that something went wrong, they are actually part of the shaping process that builds professional competence. Each revision, correction, or suggestion provides information about how to improve the next attempt. In other words, what might feel like criticism in the moment is often just the environment delivering very useful data.
Look For Wins Along The Way
It is easy during graduate school to focus only on the next deadline or the next item on the task list. Taking a moment to recognize progress can be surprisingly reinforcing. Finishing a difficult semester, submitting a conference proposal, completing a dataset, or finally understanding a complicated article are all meaningful steps forward. These moments may seem small in isolation, but together they add up to the larger journey of becoming a behavior analyst.
Graduate school will always include moments of frustration, uncertainty, and a healthy amount of revision. Giving yourself a bit of grace along the way makes the process far more sustainable. After all, shaping takes time, and the behavior we are shaping here is nothing less than a professional career.
Practicing What We Preach
As behavior analysts, we spend a lot of time arranging contingencies for everyone else. Graduate school is where we discover whether we can actually arrange them for ourselves
Doctoral training in behavior analysis is demanding, but it also gives us something many other graduate students do not have, a science that can help us navigate the experience itself. The same principles we use every day in classrooms, clinics, and research settings can also be applied to our own lives. Self management systems help organize our work, reinforcement systems keep motivation going when deadlines feel far away, supportive communities make the journey more sustainable, and protecting the variables that influence our behavior helps us show up at our best.
Of course, knowing the science of behavior does not mean we execute our own self management plans perfectly. There will still be days when the writing does not happen, the data analysis takes longer than expected, and the “quick break” somehow turns into reorganizing your entire desk. That is part of the process too. Behavior analysts may understand contingencies, but we are still human participants in them.
In the end, doctoral training is not just about producing research or completing coursework. It is also about shaping ourselves into thoughtful practitioners, researchers, supervisors, and mentors. Along the way, we learn to build systems that support our own behavior, surround ourselves with reinforcing communities, and occasionally reward ourselves with a very well deserved coffee.
And if nothing else, graduate school teaches one final behavior analytic lesson, sometimes the most powerful reinforcer is simply knowing you made it through the day, submitted the assignment, and lived to analyze another dataset tomorrow.
Tania Nainani, M.A., BCBA
Tania Nainani is a doctoral student in Applied Behavior Analysis at Teachers College, Columbia University. She earned her Master of Arts in Applied Behavior Analysis from Teachers College, Columbia University, and her undergraduate degree in Psychology with a minor in Counselling from the University of British Columbia. She currently works as a special education teacher in a preschool classroom, where she supports young children with developmental disabilities in building communication and social skills. Her research focuses on non arbitrary relational frames and bridging conceptual work in relational frame theory with applied interventions in educational settings. She is also interested in understanding how language develops and can be supported in learners with diverse needs, with a focus on articulation in speech. In her free time, she enjoys running through Central Park, reading, and traveling.
Sanam Rahimi, M.A., BCBA
Sanam Rahimi is a doctoral student in Applied Behavior Analysis at Teachers College, Columbia University. She earned her Bachelor of Science in Psychobiology, with a minor in Cognitive Science and a specialization in Computing, from UCLA, and her Master of Arts in Applied Behavior Analysis from Teachers College, Columbia University. She currently works as a special education teacher in an early intervention classroom for young children with developmental delays. Her research interests focus on early vocal verbal behavior, including improving articulation and individualizing instruction to increase functional vocal repertoires in naturalistic settings. In her free time, she enjoys discovering new restaurants with friends, watching reality TV, and walking around the city.