Like most things in academia, this varies widely depending on your advisor. In my time in grad school (physics), my advisor was very fair with my time and my workload was similar to my current workload in industry. However, most of my fellow grad students at my institution that I interacted with had significantly higher workloads and were often working late and on weekends.

When I was visiting grad schools during the admissions process, this was something that I always asked current grad students about, as it was very important to me to find an advisor that allowed a good work/life balance. It is also something I advise undergrads interested in grad school to consider.

This is classic academia. I didn’t realize how janky our entire academic lab infrastructure was until I moved into industry. When the freezer started alarming and couldn’t maintain temperature, the contents should have been moved right then. Instead, they decided to leave the freezer running not quite right and keeping juuuust cold enough for stuff to not thaw.

As a quick story, we had to replace our -80 freezer once when I was in grad school and we found samples frozen in the back of it that were literally older than my advisor that have been handed down over the years. These are tubes with cell lines preserved that, as far as I know, are the only preserved samples.

In fact, during grad school, I wanted to study a strain of bacteria that had a series of papers written about it back in the 70’s and 80’s. When I reached out to the authors, they told me that they lost those cultures due to equipment failure decades ago, and that is why they stopped publishing papers about it.