According to Essential Life Skills, personal boundaries "are the physical, emotional and mental limits we establish to protect ourselves from being manipulated, used, or violated by others." In graduate school, you must set boundaries to ensure you won't overload yourself with work that will not benefit you or let your work in graduate school define you as a person. Take some time to meditate, thinking about your personality and what you hope to accomplish in graduate school. Write this down in a journal. Next, set boundaries with regard to relationships, treatment by others and work. Decide with whom you will develop personal relationships, to what extent you will deal with treatment you dislike and under what circumstances you will take on class or extracurricular work. Be specific, and write down these specific boundaries.
If you feel satisfied only when your professors and classmates congratulate you on your work or feel unsatisfied and unhappy when they critique it, you could have poor relationship boundaries. Similarly, if you feel happy when you hear about others doing poorly or upset and competitive when others are doing well, this is a sign that you are letting others define you instead of defining success on your own. Finally, you decide with whom you are going to have a personal relationship and with whom you want to maintain only a professional relationship. If you find yourself giving in to pressure to share personal information with professional contacts you want to keep professional or to see them socially, this is also a sign of a poor relationship boundary.
When starting graduate school, you should expect to take some criticism. If you don't allow your professors and classmates to offer criticism, then you won't learn to improve your work in order to be a competent professional in your field. However, you do decide how you will let others treat you and to what extent you will accept others' rude or mean behavior. If you constantly allow other students or professors to mistreat you without discussing the issues, you probably have poor boundaries. If you usually let others violate your boundaries, Essential Life Skills notes that you're probably overstepping someone else's, as people who have poor boundaries are more likely to be boundary breakers themselves.
Graduate school is and should be exhausting. It is hard work that will eventually head you to a positive outcome -- an advanced degree that can open other academic and professional doors for you. However, you should only take work in graduate school that will benefit you. That doesn't mean that you have to be paid for everything that you do; some work you will do in order to give your resume a boost. If you find yourself accepting jobs you don't really want to take on, or if you feel guilty when you say no or like you can't say no, you probably have poor work boundaries. In addition, if you are valuing your worth only by the number of things you've done or offers you're made, it's likely that you're not setting good boundaries about what defines you as a person and a student.