Ask Slashdot: Advice For Summer Before Ph.D. Program? 228
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samzenpus
from the work-or-play dept.
from the work-or-play dept.
First time accepted submitter tookul03 writes "I'm a graduating senior from a small New England liberal arts college, and have secured a spot in a Biological Science Ph.D. program for the next five years. I realize this coming summer will be my last out of the lab for a long time and am not sure If I am interested in doing something related to my research interests or use it as an opportunity to find some new hobbies/interests. I figured the Slashdot community had a number of individuals who were/are in a similar position (albeit different fields) and could shed some light on things they (or others) had done. Thanks."
Travel! (Score:3, Informative)
Travel! Don't do research but travel and charge your batteries for what comes ahead.
(Currently writing up PhD thesis and in desperate need for a vacation)
The PhD is not an end-point (Score:5, Informative)
First of all, you need to find something else when you finish your PhD. Usually, academics went for a post-doc and non-academics went to industry. The game is a little different now, though, and pretty well everyone needs an academic post-doc, even to go to an industry position. Hence you should be thinking now about what you want to do when you finish, figuring out how to get there from where you are about to go. It really is never too early to start thinking about that. Some people say that the most important thing you do in grad school is line up a post-doc position.
Second, networking is critical. I highly recommend that you try to get to as many conferences as you can manage when you are a grad student.
Third, the job market for post-docs right now is terrible, unless you are in the right field at the right time. Right now it seems structural biologists are in high demand but in 5 years it could be something else entirely. Keep an eye on where the job market is going and know how to market yourself to the demand.
Fourth, start thinking right away about your committees for your time in grad school. You'll probably have a qualifying committee, an advisory committee, and a thesis exam committee. Obviously your advisor will be on all three but the rest might or might not carry over much between the three. Know how to deal with those people, how to keep them happy, and how to get them to help you graduate and network.
Fifth, if you don't have an adviser already, start talking to current students in the labs of advisers who are looking to pick up students. You want to know what your life will be like, and how long potential advisers generally keep their students around for before they graduate.
In other words, don't take this summer to escape academia. Take it to prepare for it. If your school graduates most PhDs in 5 years you really don't want to be the person who takes 7 due to lack of preparation.
It depends on your professional track... (Score:3, Informative)
Re:It's never too late... (Score:4, Informative)
In almost every case it is acceptable to use a comma before "and". In the case of a series, it's a Harvard/Oxford/serial comma (and is either present or absent, depending on the editorial style of whoever you're writing for). In the case of a compound sentence, it is required. And in the case of a compound predicate (as in this sentence), it is considered optional. As a rule, you should not use a comma in a compound predicate unless the sentence is fairly complex. I probably would not have put in that comma, but I also probably would not have objected if someone else had put it in.
The only situation I can think of in which it is actually wrong (as opposed to being required or being a style issue) to use a comma before the word "and" is when you're writing a simple series of two things, e.g. "The boy, and girl went to the store."
Best to get started (Score:3, Informative)
Move to your new university and use the summer to do (at least one) research rotation.
Here's why: you said "for the next 5 years." I'm not sure where you got that time period from, but if you're doing your PhD in the US, you're going to find that it's a completely open ended process. This is *really* important to internalize, because every other form of education that you've had experience with has a fixed term: you do what they tell you to for the prescribed time period and at the end they hand you the diploma. You can't run down the clock on a PhD. You don't graduate until you can convince your advisor that you've done enough to merit the degree. And it's generally against your advisor's personal interests to let you graduate.
So, if you want to complete your degree in a reasonable period of time (e.g. 5 years), you have two tasks: 1) Find a lab with a research advisor who you like and trust, because you're putting your life in his or her hands. If you wouldn't give him/her copies of your keys and your ATM PIN, you shouldn't be in that lab. 2) Get established in that lab so you can start organizing and taking charge of your own project and working toward first-author publications.
The first step towards this is doing lab rotations. Summer is often a good time to do these, because your first year is likely to be filled up with classes which will make it difficult to spend enough time in a lab to really get a feel for it. Just make sure that the PI in whichever lab you're rotating in is going to be around (sometimes they are gone for months at a time in the summer) because the most important thing you need to get out of the rotation is deciding whether you trust the PI.
I suspect there will be several threads of people recommending various voyages of self-discovery or self-education. If you had something that you really *wanted* to do, I wouldn't try to talk you out of it, but from the way you've phrased your question it doesn't really sound like there is, and there's no point finding a new hobby this summer that you won't have time to continue once you start your program.
Best of luck with your program.
advice from current graduate student (Score:5, Informative)
Since your spot is secured, you either have obtained grants, you have an academic advisor, or both. Spend the summer reading everything your advisor has written, and read everything in your field. If you are coming into a new PhD program you will most likely have a comprehensive exam (ours is verbal) where your committee will test your knowledge in the field to the point they would be comfortable allowing you to research independently. If you have not formed a research committee, use the summer to select internal and external examiners for your project. Selecting your committee is like drafting for a hockey team: there are heavy hitters and there are marginal academics. you may even encounter, as i have, a committee member that will attempt to sabotage your research. that's all part of grad school, so investigate who you're working with through previous students. Your prospective committee's individual publications is a good first step.
Spend the summer reading to the level where you can converse with someone in your field and be able to drop first and last names of the most pertinent research done between the last 50-100 years ago; much of this research (at least in my field of fish larval development) will be in the stacks and in the library; it is incredibly irksome to encounter a PhD candidate that has no references out of what they could pull out of an online paywall. A lack of understanding the foundational research makes the researcher rootless; it is as if a leaf has no idea it is attached to a tree.
Don't stop reading. keep reading. you should be reading already, but keep reading throughout the summer. clearcut an entire state of trees if you need to; keep reading. This is a primary failure mode of the graduate student: not everyone can take graduate school because not everybody can stand having their brain physiologically rewired on a daily basis as they encounter conflicting research, bad research, obscure research, and science-related gossip. Read until you feel comfortable holding conflicting ideas in your head. read until you find yourself asking a question that leads to no answer, and begin to formulate your project from there.
Changing gears slightly, the second most important thing to knowing your pertinent research intimately is the ability to communicate science to non scientists. My program stresses and indoctrinates strong presentation skills. i would highly recommend reading a book like Randy Olson's Don't Be Such a Scientist [amazon.com]. Learn the jargon, and learn to internalise the jargon and be able to speak to non-technical audiences. the more you can communicate your message and research, the better you will be.
Good luck!
Re:Reconsider. (Score:4, Informative)
Turn back while you still can.
I second this. Do you have any idea how many biological science phds there are? Any idea how much suffering and frustration you'll get doig a phd? Do anything else. I'm serious. You will make more money with just a masters or even a BA. You will feel better about yourself, still have your hair, have fewer ulcers, lower blood pressure and possible even be able to afford a family.
A phd ruined my life. Don't let it happen to you.
Re:Reconsider. (Score:4, Informative)
Turn back while you still can.
While you're going to ignore this, I know I would have, it's probably some of the best advice you'll ever get.
I'm a semi-recent PhD from a top-tier biochemistry program, and it was fucking terrible. I only know of one graduate of my old department who doesn't rabidly hate the place. We're talking nearly nervous breakdowns just seeing the outside of the building hate. I got the hell out as fast as I could and now work in industry.
Good luck on that "secured a spot for 5 years" thing. 5 years is the fairy tail they tell all incoming students. The median is more likely closer to 6, and I've known 8 plusers. Oh sure, 6 instead of 5 doesn't sound that terrible, right? Wrong! When you hit your 4th year of 6 day weeks and asshole professors and time slows down to a crawl, you'd sell your soul to be out just one week earlier.
The professors at universities, at least the good ones, are not there because they're the best and brightest minds. Sure, they're geniuses, alright, but the real reason they're at the university is because their personalities are too fucked up for the real world. The only people who can make through to getting tenure are warped, horrible people, and they become even more warped and horrible the longer they stay in that environment. I've seen so many students back stabbed and screwed over by PIs in my day. I was in a meeting where a professor, who was at that point on the short list for the Nobel Prize, absentmindedly talked about using his grad students as canon fodder for a larger goal, that sure changed my mind about joining his lab.
I have a good job now. I'm doing interesting research and have great coworkers. I met my wife in grad school. But in the time that it took me to graduate, I could have easily done a bachelors and masters in an engineering or CS field and be making more money in the area I live, and I would also have an interesting job with good coworkers.
Everywhere you look, cities, regions, and countries have mission statements saying that they want to be a biotech center. These are lies. There's probably only 3 places in the US with enough company density to reasonably consider living. They're all nice places, but they're expensive. The dirty secret about the biological sciences in general is that the only job you can get with a bachelors degree is technician, Most companies have policies in place that they won't promote you higher than essentially senior technician without a doctorate. So you're forced to do post-graduate work if you don't want a mind-numbing job. So now there's too many PhD's, so you can't even get a job with that anymore. You need a postdoc, so now those are even more of a competetive nightmare than they used to be.
Change your mind. Go to law school, or business school, or hell, go back for a degree in something that will get you a good job without post graduate work. Those will take a fixed amount of time (and less than a PhD) and money, which will let you plan your future while avoiding the horrible scars of a PhD.
TL:DR
Run!!!!