What are you looking for?
Three CIIS students share the honest truth about what awaits you in graduate school — and why the surprises might be your greatest teachers.
From the CIIS Student & Alumni Panel · April 2026
If you’re thinking of applying to graduate school, you probably have some expectations about the experience. Days in classes and late nights reading. Wrestling with ideas and writing papers as deadlines loom. The slow uphill work of becoming an expert in something you love. You might find all of this exciting, or intimidating — or most likely, both at the same time.
To help you sort the facts from the fears, CIIS brought together a panel of current students and alumni to discuss their hopes, fears, and actual lived experiences. What’s it really like to be in grad school, and what’s the specific CIIS experience? They describe unexpected challenges, and also unlooked-for joys that sustained them.
For Max, a current Ph.D. student and M.A. graduate in Ecology, Spirituality and Religion, the hardest part isn't the workload in the traditional sense. It's the weight of the content itself. "All three of my classes this semester are about ecological collapse and colonization and oppression," they shared. "You're reading about this, writing about it, seeing it happen in real time. And if you pop onto socials to see dog pictures, instead you're met with news story after news story." The emotional labor of working with such urgent topics meant they had to learn how to encompass and hold heaviness as a daily practice.
As hard as it is, I'm really grateful to be learning what I'm learning.
Max Sovine, M.A. graduate and Ph.D. student, Ecology, Spirituality & Religion
For Maia, an MFA graduate in Creative Inquiry and Interdisciplinary Arts, the unexpected difficulty was internal. Her program asked students to take themselves apart — to unwrap deep layers of identity and lived experience — before rebuilding a new relationship with their own creative voice. "Sometimes it was really challenging to find the right language that wouldn't trigger or open wounds," she reflected.
Simone, a first-year student in Somatic Psychology, found the challenge was the sheer volume of theory. When you're studying the minds of Freud, Jung, and countless others alongside developing your own clinical perspective, it can feel overwhelming to know which ideas to hold onto and which to let pass. "It's very hard to really focus on what I think and what I get aligned with," she said. "Eventually I need to shape my own view — my own style."
So what made it possible to weather these difficulties, and even thrive in the challenge?
For Max, it was the friendships. "I thought by being online it would be hard to form connections with my classmates," they said, "but it's actually been kind of awesome." There was a connection that had nothing to do with assignments. There were people who really got it, because they were going through the same readings, sitting with the same questions. Some of those friendships have outlasted graduation by years.
Maia expected to feel like an outsider, a blind woman with a guide dog arriving at a new institution with an unfamiliar cohort. Instead, she received emails from faculty she hadn't even met yet, offering condolences when her guide dog was diagnosed with terminal cancer. "I had never met them," she said, still moved by the memory.
The fact that this department was holding space for this pretty much stranger for something so vulnerable — I knew I was in the right spot.
Maia, MFA graduate, Creative Inquiry and Interdisciplinary Arts
And Simone, who had spent years building physical strength but feeling disconnected from her interior life, found herself undone by authentic movement practice. "I always visualized myself as a stone, frozen," she said. "After a couple of classes in somatic movement, I just became fluid. It was my first time to experience what fluid even is."
I always visualized myself as a stone, frozen. After a couple of classes in somatic movement, I just became fluid.
Simone, M.A. student, Somatic Psychology
No one arrives at – or even applies to – grad school with all the answers. But for anyone eager for an early preview of the CIIS community at work, the current and former students offered their heartfelt advice.
Max would tell you to stop worrying about whether what you say in class sounds smart enough. And Maia would remind you that there is no deadline in depth. It's okay to move slowly. It's okay to luxuriate in a pocket of curiosity rather than rushing to the next requirement.
Simone said it most simply: "Take time to live with the uncertainty."
Integral education for therapists, thought leaders, creatives, and activists since 1968.
Dane Cervine '84 has spent four decades weaving together clinical psychology, contemplative practice, and poetry — a life he traces back to CIIS.
Associate Professor Sara Salazar shares how CIIS’ B.A. in Interdisciplinary Studies creates space for students who have started and stopped their degrees to finally complete on their own terms.
How one CIIS alumna moved from seeking answers about consciousness to living — and leading — inside the inquiry.
