How To Set Goals That Work in Grad School (Goals, Part 3)

For the past two weeks, I've been writing about goals in grad school.

First, I talked about the importance of setting goals in grad school and then I talked about three situations where goals are helpful in grad school.

Today, I'm going to dive a bit deeper into how to set goals that work in grad school.

And, of course, this is assuming that you are wanting to set a goal because you need to work on a task that is challenging, you can't get started on a task, or you have a specific task to do in a specific amount of time (see last week's blog for more details).

If one or more of the previous criteria are met, then setting CAST goals can be an effective way to set goals in grad school.

CAST goals are goals that students set to work on tasks in a set period of time, usually 90 to 120 minutes (adapted from Hadwin & Webster, 2013).

There are four parts of a CAST goal:

C - Content: What course concepts/ideas to focus on while studying/working

A - Actions: How to work with or process the content

S - Standards: The concrete measure of progress you set

T - Time parameters: The time and length of the study session

An example of a non-CAST goal that likely wouldn't get attained would be: This morning, I'm going to read three articles relevant to my thesis topic.

How do I know? Because this is what I would do if I had to do something I wasn't really looking forward to. I'd end up procrastinating or giving up or feeling frustrated that it was taking longer than I thought it would.

An example of a CAST goal for a grad student would be: Between 10 am and 12 pm on Wednesday, I will summarize two research articles in a table where I list the participants, research methods, analysis, and findings.

I know that this type of goal works because I had to set goals like this all the time when I was writing my dissertation.

CAST goals can help grad students reduce their procrastination, boost their self-efficacy because they actually know what to do, and be more efficient with their time.

Yes, taking the time to write a goal like this can seem like a lot of work, but over time you'll get more used to this and how much time are you wasting procrastinating anyway?

Let us know what you think about CAST goals for grad students by commenting below! Next week, I'll talk about another type of goals we use with our grad students - MAST goals!