How quickly it goes! My three years of funding are nearly up.
Nobody at conferences really has a clue what you’re talking about when you get up on the podium.
Yeah, all students enrolled in the graduate school. (Which doesn’t include the law or business schools.) It’s not very many, something like four credits. Since regular classes are three credits, most people end up taking two classes in other schools as a result, or more if they’re interested. I don’t know what people in PhD programs do to fulfill the requirement, but those of us in the professional schools usually take cognates (which is what these classes outside of the program are called) in other professional schools.
This is the University of Michigan, btw. It helps that we have everything here. I think the only professional school we don’t have is a vet school. If you’re interested in public health, social work, urban planning, education, engineering, law, business, area studies, natural resources, you’re good, we have all of those schools here.
Anne Neville, thanks!
If it is published it is useful by definition. I’ve been in more or less the real world since I got my PhD, and I’m very technically active, but the introductions to most academic papers showing that they are interesting to the real world are just sad (and I’m in engineering.) People doing real things don’t publish as much as people doing academic things (we don’t have the time.) Which you prefer should influence your choice after you graduate, but in grad school remember you are in the academic world.
It’s been a while since I’ve been in grad school, but I have a daughter there now, so I’m not totally out of the loop.
Most important thing: your adviser. Be aware of departmental politics and power games. Does your adviser have tenure? Does he have a lot of lab space? There is usually a grad student pecking order - does he have the good ones? And of course, check out how many grants he has.
My first adviser had lots of money. When he died, I got one who was in the same area as another professor, but who was writing a book instead of prestigious papers. I switched schools, partly because he wasn’t interested in what I was interested in, but partly because he wasn’t going to last. My adviser in my new place had tons of cash.
Second, understand that the currency of academics is published papers. As soon as you can, write. Even if you get the first few papers rejected, the advice from reviewers will be useful. Your adviser will also like getting publications at low cost to him or her, and you will build credibility when you are looking for a job. My daughter and I have co-authored two papers, and she was amazed at how much clout this gave her.
Third thing, focus. Your goal is to write a dissertation. At my second grad school some students had a part time job working for the software company run by a few professors. This slowed them up. My colleague spent a lot of time working on macros to help get dissertations formatted - this was long before Word. He never quite got his dissertation finished.
Fourth, manage your adviser. When mine said that if he didn’t respond to a new chapter in two weeks it was okay, I knew I was home free since his queue was three weeks long. Another grad student gave me great advice - always submit a new version and the old version, to prevent him from looping between two ways of saying something.
Finally, and most important, have fun. Despite the Gloomy Gusses here, I had a great time in grad school. (Except when I was actually writing my dissertation, that is.) Assuming there is research you want to do, this is the one time in your life where you can work on what you want with relatively few distractions. Enjoy it.
One final thing - if there is a topic you really want to work on, push for it. I did. I’m not including it, since lots of people don’t have strong desires, and are happy to work on what is assigned.
That’s easy. That I had to switch schools after I graduated-I only found out about that one like a month before I got my BA. In my undergrad school everything was perfectly set up-I had a house, a faculty that I got along swimmingly with, and my research animal lived there locally. Instead I was forced to sell the house, move half a dozen states northward, had to migrate back south each summer to study my animal, and had to deal with a faculty that I didn’t get along with at all. All because I supposedly should “broaden my horizons” by switching schools. Bah humbug to that.
I’m not a grad student (yet)*, but I’ve been looking for similar advice and I might as well pass it along.
Make sure you really get to know a lab before joining. That means staying late at night with them, and ideally going out with them for a few drinks. Nobody will speak ill of their advisor during the Official Recruitment Lunch, and they’ll be a lot more honest about the lab when it’s late at night and experiments aren’t working. Then you can head to the bar, and get the real story about the PI and the lab. It ain’t worth it to spend years of your life with people that make you miserable.
Hmm… there are probably a few more things i can think of, but now is the time to escape the lab for the night.
*I’m a research tech now, but in an academic lab where I’m treated pretty much like a second or third year grad student – my PI assigned me a project, but let me run run with it.
Having done both, I must say that I do not agree. However, this deserves its own thread, so I will say no more.
Thanks a ton for all of the advice - this is exactly the kind of stuff I knew I was probably missing out on just due to lack of experience. In response to Ruken’s question, I’m interested in organic materials chemistry - specifically, the electronic properties of conjugated polymer systems.
Kyla, I didn’t mean to come off as unsympathetic or anything. Sorry. I’m sure I’ll have long periods where I’ll feel that way too.
I’m not really sure if there’s an answer to this, but how much does the actual school count in postgraduate job offers and whatnot? In other words, will potential employers see PhD’s from Harvard (or something) as vastly superior to those from the University of Colorado (or something), or is it more about your research and publications, etc.?
I think the reputation of your department counts more than your school in general. Your adviser having a reputation counts also. A lot of it depends on what you want to do when you get out. I went to industry, in a totally different area, so this stuff didn’t matter all that much. Plus there were something like only 168 CS PhDs when I graduated, so we were in short supply.
MA candidate in English (rhetoric & pro comm), large state university.
I wish I had known how important it was to teach 100 and 200 level composition. Not so much for my particular major, but to be part of the life of the department. I washed out of teaching after 2 weeks - just the organizational requirements stressed me to near breaking point, eg: I was blindsided by the need to organize computer lab classes without ever having taken one and with no specific instruction on how to do so.
As a result, I had (and have) almost nothing in common with the rest of my cohort. It probably didn’t help that I’m 18 years older than most of them, but in one’s social interaction, one talks about nothing but teaching, teachers, and what’s being taught. To really make friends, you need to stay part of that world - I couldn’t and didn’t.
Oh, no, I wasn’t expecting sympathy, no worries. I was just being honest. I spend a lot of time feeling overwhelmed and really stressed out, but I’m still glad I decided to do this. I started grad school eight years after I got my BA, so it was a decision I didn’t make lightly - I realized I needed this degree to make the career I wanted happen. And I think it’ll be worth it.
If you stay in academia, your department’s reputation will count more than the school’s as a whole. If you leave academia, it may be the other way round.