How to Use Notion to Organize Your Research, Classes, and Grad School Life

2024 is the year of Notion! This notetaking and organization app is the BEST I have found. Notion is a web and app-based tool that allows you to create aesthetic and functional d templates for almost anything! Using Notion for graduate school is a fantastic way to keep your work organized in one space. And it automatically backs up, so you don’t have to worry about losing files!

I have been using Notion since 2021 to organize my graduate school life. As a Ph.D. student, I had to keep track of my research, coursework, and personal life. I found it hard to manage these aspects of my life using a notes app, paper planner, notecards, and lab notebook. I found myself losing files and notes! It was frustrating having everything spread out across different formats. Especially with the pandemic, I didn’t always have access to my lab notebooks at the University while working from home. Today, I use Notion for everything!

Over the past few years, I’ve developed several Notion templates for grad school, and I figured I’d share them all with other grad students so they can get organized too! So, in this post, I’m sharing with you all the grad school Notion templates I developed. All the Notion templates are available through the She Sciences Gumroad and Etsy Shop. One thing to note: these grad student notion templates are geared more toward STEM graduate programs, so you’ll see more references to experiments in these templates. Even if you aren’t a STEM graduate student, you can easily translate these Notion templates into your field of research.

Simple Graduate Student Notion Dashboard

The first Notion template I made was a simple graduate student Notion dashboard. This template is great if you’re starting out with Notion and you want something simple to organize your stuff. On this grad student dashboard, there is a weekly schedule where you put tasks and deadlines for the week. This way, you have a simple week at a glance!

Below the weekly schedule, there are several pages for Classes, Teaching, and Research. These pages contain templates that help you organize each area og grad school. Keep track of your classes using the Course Schedule and Class Notes pages. These templates contain easy-to-use tables that keep your work organized! Similarly, you can use the Course Schedule and Lesson Plan pages to manage your teaching.

Under research, you’ll find the research dashboard, a page for group meeting notes, and a customizable table for literature review! On this page, I have everything I need at a glance. There is a weekly schedule and to-do list, a page for your thesis or dissertation chapters, pages for each project, and a long-term Gantt chart. You can organize each chapter into a simple table on the chapters page. In this table, you can create pages for each chapter, organize them by topic, and add at-a-glance notes about the chapter goals. The long-term Gantt chart shows your long-term project planning, including when you want to focus on writing and working on each project.

Research Lab Notebook Notion Template

Since research is the biggest aspect of grad school, I decided to develop the research lab notebook Notion template to focus on just research and experiments. This template is designed for project management and for logging daily research activities. It includes a database for daily entries and a functional task list to categorize and track your progress over time. You can easily create new tasks and entries with the click of a button on the homepage! There are databases as well for literature review and protocols that can be easily linked to projects and lab notebook entries.

Ph.D. Degree and Dissertation Planner

After I learned some of the more advanced features in Notion, like relation properties, I decided to develop a graduate student Notion template with a dissertation focus to automate your task lists for research, coursework, and other Ph.D. milestones. There are a lot of milestones in a Ph.D., from completing courses to conferences to qualifying exams to manuscripts. So, I wanted to integrate all of that together into a single Notion template, so I made the Ph.D. Degree and Dissertation Planner. This planner uses a task database linked to all the Ph.D. milestones. Each milestone has its own page and template in a database so you can track your progress for each item.

The one thing I loved about building this homepage was the automated lists for daily tasks and weekly tasks! I added progress bars throughout the template for visual progress tracking. Within the last year, Notion added automated buttons, which I love for quickly adding tasks and entries to the database!

Ultimate All-in-One Graduate Student Notion Template

The all-one-one graduate student Notion template is the largest and most functional template that I’ve been able to develop. The all-in-one graduate student Notion template integrates your personal and graduate school life. It combines everything from the Ph.D. degree and dissertation planner with personal life and professional development.

The homepage of the All-in-One graduate student Notion template is the “second brain” of the template. This template uses more advanced features in Notion, like automations, formulas, and relations, but these features are already set up for you, so all you have to do is get started! Here’s a glance at the pages that are included! This is where everything is available at a glance, and databases are automated to populate, making it easy for you to see what needs to be done that day.

The template includes over 20 pages for coursework, research, professional development, travel, finance, goal setting, and more! Here is a quick look as the many pages included in this Notion template!