Over the past few years, several computer science PhD graduates have taken time to write about their personal experience during graduate school. Here is an incomplete list of these reflections I could find on the internet. Of course, I am definitely missing some, so let me know if yours is missing, and I will add it. The links below are organized by date.

Interestingly enough, the list of students skews heavily towards systems and programming language researchers. Of course, this is probably a selection bias. Having said that, it would be interesting to hear from the TCS side!