Well, for one thing you could ask the professor how the results of a particular project could be used in the real world.
One thing that I would do is look up some of the papers that have come about from this research in Google Scholar or Web of Science and see how often they have been cited and by whom. If they are cited infrequently or mostly incestuously, that is a bad sign. If they are widely cited, it might still be purely academic wanking but at least it is widely appreciated academic wanking. If you are leaning more towards academia, that is a good thing.
If you are leaning more towards industry, then you need to look at how the skills you develop could help you in industry. Is the project looking to improve or expand an existing area? Or is it pie in the sky type of stuff where the commerical application is always five years away?
It’s not much like undergrad. Therefore, going because you did well as an undergrad and are scared of the Real World™ is not a good idea. Nor is it likely to go well if your reason for going is that you enjoyed the lifestyle of an undergrad. The grad student lifestyle just isn’t that much like it. The dreaded Real World is closer, in some ways and with some jobs.
Never pick a grad school where there’s only one person you’d want as an advisor. That relationship may not work out, and it’s a lot easier to change to a different advisor in the same department than it is to transfer to another school.
Cost of living varies greatly between cities. Graduate student stipends don’t. You may want to take this into account when selecting a grad school.
Picking a grad school because it’s near someone you’d like to be near, is really not such a terrible idea. If I’d gone to a different grad school, I might have gotten a Ph.D., but I probably wouldn’t have ended up married to Mr. Neville. Most people really are better at picking a potential life partner at age 22-23 than they are at 18, so this really isn’t as bad as picking a college to stay near a high school boyfriend or girlfriend.
Before you decide to go into academia, try to get a look at the faculty selection process. In astronomy, at least, it’s brutal, and going through it well and truly sucks. If I were given a Ph.D. in astronomy tomorrow, I still wouldn’t try to get a faculty job. I’ve seen what it was like for Mr. Neville.
It can do that. It can also make you feel like a failure if you don’t end up getting a Ph.D.
Here I am. I dropped out of astronomy grad school with a master’s and went to work in IT.
I’m assuming by grad school you mean a Ph.D. program. There will come a point in your graduate studies … it could be in one year, it could be in three years, five years … when you will question the wisdom of having entered graduate school. I guarantee it. It will be because of some disgusting politics in the lab, the infernal qualifying exams, the non-stop applications to get new grants, an overbearing advisor, or maybe the lack of progress in your dissertation topic. Don’t know what the reason will be, but that’s the time to suck it up if you want to finish! (BTW, the people who don’t finish just fall away, never to be spoken of again in the lab!) Also, at the start of grad school your goal will be to do groundbreaking Nobel-worthy research, but by the end you will just want to graduate and get the hell out into the real world. Best of luck in your rollercoaster ride.
As a corollary, have a long-term plan. In other words, what do you want to do after grad school? Why will grad school help you achieve that goal? And, as Anne points out, make sure you approach your long-term plan with open eyes and understand what, if anything, else you have to do after grad school to achieve your goal.
This attitude varies from faculty member to faculty member (and I suppose from field to field and from school to school). In my experience, most faculty members want to graduate proteges and send them out into the world. But some had a rep for keeping students longer than was strictly necessary. In any case, keep your ears open.
ETA: and this is why having a long-term plan is a good idea. Toughing it out is easier when you’ve got a goal firmly in mind.
If you don’t have a long-term plan, drifting in the Real World is better than hiding in grad school. The pay is better, and the hours are better.
In other words, don’t go to grad school just because it seems like the next thing to do, or because you’re scared of the Real World. The Real World isn’t as bad as being miserable in grad school. I know this, firsthand.
Talk to the older grad students in a lab before you join it. The ones in their first couple years are still enthusiastic and hopeful, so they get tapped to take the prospective grad students out to lunch. If you want the real scoop on advisors and labs, talk to the guy who lost his funding three times and is TAing graduate thermodynamics in the daytime and doing his research at night.
I’ve heard this before, but I’m always somewhat confused as to what exactly it means - a long-term plan as in “I want to graduate with a PhD in five years and then move to X and do Y for company Z” or something more along the lines of “I want to be in industry, I’m not really sure academia is for me”? It seems to me that without knowing what my research will be (I mean, I have a vague idea at this point, but nothing specific at all) it is kind of difficult to formulate a long-term plan based on what I’m going to be doing in graduate school.
I think I’ll spend some time doing exactly this - I originally found the programs by searching the DGRweb for topics I was interested and seeing where there were numerous groups doing something I’d be interested in, but it hadn’t really occurred to me to check their citations as well.
This is exactly the backwards thinking that people are trying to warn you against. You want to think, “For my real job, I want to do research on improved agricultural chemicals” (or whatever). Then you look at whether such research is being done in academia (no) or industry (yes). Then you look at whether you even need a Ph.D. to do such research (likely yes, but I don’t know). Then you decide who you might want to work with/for on a Ph.D. that will qualify you to do such research. Then you decide if working in that lab would suck your will to live.
ETA: (Note that I did not do anything remotely like this. I also took seven years to get my Ph.D. in a department with a median time of 4.5 years, and then left research entirely and became a patent lawyer. I did approach law school like this and was much happier.)
When I was studying for my prelims, A&E showed Hornblower and the Fire Ship. I was struck by the similarities between that movie and studying for prelims.
I still have occasional nightmares about the physics GRE.
There are basically two approaches that a graduate department can take. The first is to accept only people who they think are capable of getting a Ph.D. from their department. The other is to accept a lot of people, then use prelim exams, qualifying exams, and what not to weed out some of them (this has the advantage for the department of providing more low-level grad students to be TA’s). Being a grad student in the first kind of department is much better than being one in the second kind. Find out as a prospective grad student what percentage of people pass prelims or quals.
For the majority of planning jobs, requirements include a degree in planning or any number of other fields; architecture, public administration, civil engineering, and landscape architecture to name a few. I’d be more recession-proof if I got a got an architecture or public administration degree; I’d have something to fall back on if I couldn’t find a job in planning. If I had to do over again, I probably wouldn’t have gotten a MUP, but rather a MPA, MLA or MArch.
Also, in grad school, you’re more isolated from the day-to-day life of the rest of the school. ALL of your classes are going to be in your major, and you’ll seldom stray far from the part of campus where your department is located.
I’d recommend reading through the archives of PhD Comics. It does describe grad school life in a humorous way. The grim humor so matches my experience that I can only laugh because all the pain is behind me.
Actually my real honest answer to your original question “What do you wish you had known before you entered grad school”: Med school is the better choice.
I’m having a very glum week and I’m feeling very unmotivated re: school at the moment. All I feel motivated to do right now is sleep and read (but not for school) and drink wine and watch illegally downloaded TV shows.
FTR, I’m in the second year of a two-year masters program.
I agree that you spend your time with your classmates, but the rest is not necessarily true. My university requires that we take a certain number of credits outside of our degree, and my own program allows us a fair amount of flexibility. I’m in policy school and I’ve taken two urban planning classes, one education class, and I’m currently taking an environmental studies class. I know people who have strong policy focuses in specific areas who have spent even more time in other schools. A friend of mine who’s really into environmental policy, for instance, has taken something like five or six classes in the school of natural resources.
That I learned (after I finally did graduate) that my advisor had told other members of the faculty that “It took me seven years to get my doctorate, and I’ll be damned if I let any of my students finish in less than that.”
It is for chemistry. He’ll probably take 6 classes tops, all chemistry classes. Taking irrelevant classes would not be a wise decision. Some people in a cross-disciplinary area might take a class in something closely related, but that’s irregular.
They require this for everyone:confused:
Like I said, he may only take five or six classes total. In all likelihood no one will ever ask what he took or what his grades were, because the classes aren’t what getting a Ph.D is about.
If you have a lab (advisor) in mind that you’d like to work with, make sure to talk to the grad students you’d be working with. Grad school is much more like a workplace environment than school–those people will be more like your coworkers than your classmates. Good signs are if they aren’t too busy to chat with you, they take you out to lunch, and they give you the low-down on EVERYTHING. A bad sign is if they’re all too busy with their benchwork to even properly introduce themselves and they don’t ask you any questions about yourself.
Also, see how well they get along with each other. There’s nothing worse than being in a lab full of people who don’t get along…even if the professor is great. The truth is that your fellow lab mates are going to be the ones who help you with experiments, let you bounce ideas off of them, and cover TA assignments for you when you’re sick. You’ll even have to room with these people when you go to conferences, so it’s important that you get a good vibe from them. The advisor is important, don’t get me wrong, but don’t overlook the people who you’ll be spending most of your days with. Chances are you’ll see your advisor a few times during the week (I’d see my advisor maybe once or twice during the week, for just a few minutes at a time), and they may too busy or too whatever to listen to you whine about experiments gone wrong. But your labmates, if they’re nice, will be there for you when the shit hits the fan or when you’re just plain clueless. The comraderie of grad school is what I treasure the most about that time. I don’t know what I would have done without the family-like atmosphere of my lab.
As far as skills go, make sure you aren’t a neophyte to Microsoft Excel. Learn how to organize spreadsheets, write formulas (even better macros), and make charts. Learn how to use the library and the various search indices (like Current Contents) for journal articles. Familiarize yourself with journal articles; if you don’t know how to dissect one already, learn how to. If you’re in a good lab or program, chances are they’ll be a paper discussion group. You won’t feel so alienated if you’re used to reading papers with a critical eye.
One thing about grad school is that it’s easy to feel like everyone’s smarter than you are. The truth is that there will be one uber smarty-pants, but everyone else will just be winging it. At first you will too, but eventually you’ll become the smarty-pants guy that everyone looks up to. You just can’t give in to the fears that will plague you during that first year.
Such a big question. Let me see if I can come up with anything halfway coherent. (disclaimer: I’m doing a PhD in the humanities, and all statements are purely subjective)
Look at not only funding and academics, but the community of schools you look at. Competitive funding and cutthroat classmates provide a very, very different experience from supportive friends and colleagues. I can’t tell you how much I have needed the support of my fellow grad students.
Kyla’s right. It can be seriously, seriously depressing. A lot more depressing and demoralizing than even I expected. This may be overly alarming, but make good use of whatever mental health resources your school offers sooner rather than later - the last thing you want is to let it take over. Which brings me to #3:
You have to love what you’re doing. LOVE it. To heck with goals and real-world aspirations and stuff, what will get you through the depression described in #2 is knowing that, deep down, this is where you want to be. I feel for my research as I feel for my non-housebroken puppy: it often depresses me and makes me feel inadequate, and I don’t always like it, but I always love it. No matter how bad things are, there will be a moment in the middle of it all when I get excited about what I’m doing all over again. That moment is what keeps me going.
Boy, that was an impassioned little speech. Can you tell I’m having a really good day for my research? I’m sure more things will occur to me when I’m far, far away from the computer.
MagicXylophone, if you care to share loosely what sort of chemistry you’re interested in, I and others might be able to comment on job prospects and planning.
I’m assuming you’re at the point now where you’ve heard back from most programs and are trying to figure out which ones to visit? You really ought to visit your top few choices, just in case you were contemplating otherwise. I’ve found that most people tend to find more than 5 visits overwhelming, although a few crazy folks do more than that. They’ll all pay for you to visit unless you’re somewhere really far away, although you probably know that already.
Also if you’re going to be doing any sort of preparative chemistry, not sucking at Chemdraw will save you some time. Most groups I’ve seen also have their students do periodic Powerpoint presentations. Only a few times a year in one lab I was in, and every month for another.
Mostly what ENugent said, although I don’t think you necessarily need to be that specific. What you want to do is fill in the blanks here:
What I really want to do is ______________. Going to graduate school will help me achieve that because _________________.
The blank can be as specific or general as you like, as long as it helps you fill in the second blank. “Spend the rest of my life playing with chemicals” is a perfectly fine answer for the first blank, so long as you know that “having a PhD will mazimize my chances of becoming a research chemist, which ideally fits this goal” will fit in the other. Likewise, “work for Archer Daniels Midland as the lead scientist on their nitrogenated fertilizer projects” (I made that up) is also fine, so long as you know “ADM requires an advanced degree for their lead scientist positions” is your reason.
(As an aside: There’s no problem being flexible with your goals, having broadly stated general goals, or even changing your goal as you go along. Lord knows I did. But “having flexible goals” != “having no goals.”)
There’s a couple reasons for this piece of advice. The first is what nivlac alludes to: Just like anything else that’s ultimately worth doing, graduate school will have points that suck. Sometimes a lot. If you have a long-term goal that graduate school is just a piece of, it’s a whole lot easier to remind yourself that the sucky parts are worth it.
The second reason is what ENugent is saying. You should be directing, at least in part, your graduate school experience. You’ll have a lot of opportunity to make decisions on your field of research, the direction of your thesis, how what type of classes to take, how much time you spend teaching, the number and variety of papers you write, and so forth. Make those decisions based on what you want to do after graduate school so that you put yourself in the best position possible to achieve your goal. And make sure you understand that graduate school may (depending on your ultimate goal) may only be one step in reaching your goal.