EPTSo yeah, avoid PI who look like big frauds, labs with no money, and super crappy schools, but I'd say that the one thing you can have the best estimate *a priori* is how much you are interested in a topic. This has been the determinant factor for my choice and I don't regret it (my PI has turned out to be, after a few months, super awesome, and I didn't really know that before I picked him).
Grad School: Biology PhD Part 4: Surviving - Page 3
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Yenticha
257 Posts
So yeah, avoid PI who look like big frauds, labs with no money, and super crappy schools, but I'd say that the one thing you can have the best estimate *a priori* is how much you are interested in a topic. This has been the determinant factor for my choice and I don't regret it (my PI has turned out to be, after a few months, super awesome, and I didn't really know that before I picked him). | ||
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WoodLeagueAllStar
United States806 Posts
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KaienFEMC
Canada127 Posts
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HanFuzi
Israel80 Posts
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HanFuzi
Israel80 Posts
On December 21 2012 04:59 WoodLeagueAllStar wrote: In my grad school you can get under a B but... you fail. There are like one class you can C on but of course its pretty negative on your GPA. A B is a very implicit way of saying they don't think you really belong, but they'll still take you if you pay. Should be getting A's in every graduate class as a PhD student. | ||
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Yenticha
257 Posts
On December 28 2012 07:01 HanFuzi wrote: A B is a very implicit way of saying they don't think you really belong, but they'll still take you if you pay. Should be getting A's in every graduate class as a PhD student. Totally depends on the grad school. In some, B is already very good. In some, you are paid (have funding) and pay a very small tuition. ... In short, what you said is completely false for many grad schools. Please, when you share your knowledge/experience, be specific about the context. What you are doing is like plotting a graph with no labels on the axis. | ||
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Incze
Romania2058 Posts
I'm so god damn scared man | ||
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Reasonable
Ukraine1432 Posts
On January 06 2013 08:33 Incze wrote: Your article made me shiver while reading it. I'm so god damn scared man Unless your research is in the field of biology AND you are in one of the elite universities like UMass, I wouldn't be very scared. You know there are many thousands of universities around the world that do research and manage to deliver despite not being "top tier". I don't feel the pressure like the author explains here in Ukraine researching agricultural economics. I'm more concerned about finding or creating something worthy. Unlike in the U.S., where the salary of PhDs is somehow held in the margins of $90-120k per year, in most countries you can also get $100k per year but your chances of being unemployed or working for a miserable wage of like $5-10k a year are quite high. And the salary is determined by significance of your scientific achievements. It is not some requirement that keeps me reading 5-10 articles every day or analyzing countless data on weekends, but the desire to get a better salary, which is wildly determined by a market. Which system do I like better? Hard to say, considering that I probably would have never made it even to my bachelor in the U.S. due to the cost of education. | ||
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Zaranth
United States345 Posts
@Incze are you planning on starting a PhD soon? Where and for what discipline? | ||
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Incze
Romania2058 Posts
It's still scary as fuck | ||
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TallMax
United States131 Posts
During grad school: The stipend was about $1500/month (after taxes iirc) for a grad student (this can also be up to a few hundred dollars more per month depending upon funding sources), and I asked around and it was 35-40K for post docs in the dept (it could be a few thousand more depending upon where the funding came from). Even masters students got paid, since they were always teaching a class. From experience, chem and physics students are paid roughly the same, but bio students generally make more money, probably due to the immediate applicability and generally higher impact of their research (you really do have to teach yourself to not begrudge people who have it just slightly better than you, remember humanities grad students get hella-boned in comparison). They had on-campus housing available for $550-750/mo. That and an Albertson's club card made living reasonably affordable. After grad school: I knew a lot of people who were synthetic chemists and left with a masters degree (sometimes just burned out, but sometimes for other personal reasons). They found jobs working for pharma companies fairly quickly with a starting salary around 60k/year. Unfortunately, this was before the economy tanked, so the market is a little worse now, but there is still a demand for masters-level synthetic chemists. The average time it took someone without a masters to graduate was 5-6 years. With a masters, it could be as fast as 4 years. I knew people who stayed in California as well as people who ended up on the east coast as well as Texas, or, in some cases, returned overseas to work in England. On the P-chem side of things, the average time to finish was 4-5 years without a masters and could be 3-4.5 with one (though there are always exceptions). Since the field is so varied for p-chemists, I can really only say that all my friends (some with masters degrees, some with PhDs) had easy enough times finding jobs, though I didn't ask how much they make. One guy more or less indicated that it was ~80k/year working at a well-established company in SoCal (don't remember the name). Some friends or labmates went to Intel, some to laser manufacturers (I have to assume the starting salary is at least 70k/year for the PhDs, though I am not sure), some also went to optics companies like Leica and Olympus to design microscopes and other optical systems. Again, you can end up in many different places around the world. For international students, you do NOT pay to attend grad school. Your PI will basically pay 50k or so (I don't know the exact figure) for you to work for them. A lot or most of that will go to the school to pay for your tuition, the rest is to give you a reasonable stipend. I know examples where people were having kids, though not the norm (some of my female friends had kids during grad school, though of course they took longer to graduate; and some of the male students also had one or even two kids, though generally with financial help from family). Exams and such: In P-chem, you had about 1-1.5 years of classes. After the first year, you had a huge comprehensive exam which you had to pass reasonably well. You needed to maintain a B, but unless you were a total f*ckup that wasn't too tough, which is to say, you had to keep studying and trying as hard as you could, but it was doable. The extra half-year or so of classes generally had to do with what lab you wanted to join. I took an optics class and a class with the biology graduate students. Some people took another math or engineering class or two, or comp sci class. Again, it depended upon the specific lab. After the second year, we had an oral exam which had two parts. The first was about your own research and results, and the second was to design an advanced experiment to answer a question in a completely unrelated field (though generally still a science, a lot of people chose either a physics or biology topic) For the synthetic chemists, they took about half a year of classes, with no comprehensive exam. However, they had to give an oral exam at the beginning of their second year comprised of their research. I'm a little fuzzy on the details, since I didn't have to take the exam. However, after every major hurdle is always a nice go-crazy party. I have to note here, however, that I have heard of schools where there are NO exams, and just classes and research. While it is tempting to go to a school without exams, make sure that it's still a well-respected one. In general, I will not care what someone gets on their advancement exams, however, it was a real confidence-booster to pass my exams and feel like I belonged there. Confidence boosts are few and far-between in grad school, I'll address that in my next post. After exams Research, research, research. Sometimes you're discovering something new the whole world has never known (rare, but infinitely cool, even if you think at the time that it is insignificant), but most of the time you are discovering something new for yourself. In these latter cases, you really should stop and realize how cool the information still is. After 3-4 years of this, you write it all up into a giant "holy crap I never thought I'd write a giant book" book. I had to write mine fast (3.5 weeks) and it came out...meh. But usually you will have a couple of months in the USA to do it. You will learn about as much writing your thesis as you did in the previous 5 years or so. It makes all the difference when you have to organize it all on paper. In France, during my postdoc, the students started writing about 4 months in advance. But the bureaucratic process is longer there, and requires more coordination. I don't think one system has an advantage over the other when it comes to the writing part, it's just different. You give an oral presentation of your work which is theoretically "judged" by members of your department and for us had to include a member from another STEM dept on campus. However, nobody defends unless they are ready, and I have not heard of anyone failing. Some people may ask dickish questions, but that was not my experience. For me, I had about 10 minutes worth of discussion/questions at the end of my presentation, in France they have a whole HOUR dedicated to it! That's about it for the numbers, I'll post up my advice for the chemists hopefully quite soon. Please feel free to PM me if you have any questions about chem grad school. | ||
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Reasonable
Ukraine1432 Posts
On January 10 2013 03:56 Incze wrote: I want to get my PhD in Computer Science but I don't know where. I'm only planning on getting to that in like ~5 years from now, unless I get sidetracked due to not having rich parents (<5k a year). Things may change in the meantime. It's still scary as fuck I can give you an advice as an economist here. You'll be swimming against the current if you choose to go for PhD in Computer Science right now. The IT field is bubbling big time due to inception of the "apps" and mobile device markets, which means salaries are very high and the skill requirements are relaxed. This is natural to any high tech field, but it doesn't last. Eventually the IT market will become over-saturated with labor force, while the new technologies will render many IT professions obsolete. This may happen in several years, but no one knows when until it happens. The proper way to go about it is to work for a business while the party lasts, but save as much money as possible. When the IT sector cools down, salaries will decline and work conditions will deteriorate, then you may quit the full-time job and enroll in a PhD program. It will be much easier because there will be no opportunity cost to your PhD program, i.e. you will not be sacrificing a high paid corporate job to do science because there will be no high paid job at that time available to you. | ||
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Zaranth
United States345 Posts
How did you score your French post-doc? How do you feel the American training compares to the French system? | ||
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TallMax
United States131 Posts
On January 17 2013 00:33 Zaranth wrote: Hey TallMax thanks a lot for your input! I'm interested in reading the second part. :-) Chem and Bio are pretty similar, it seems. How did you score your French post-doc? How do you feel the American training compares to the French system? Yeah, they are fairly similar. I will add that I do have one friend who finished her Bio PhD just a few months ago at UCI. She had taken time off inbetween college and grad school, and had a couple years of work experience. She went back to industry and had people coming to her to try to hire her, she didn't have to search for a job really at all. Given some of the responsibilities she's told me, I'd be surprised if she makes less than ~80k/year starting (though, you can't forget her several years of prior industry experience). To answer your question about how I got the position, there was a flyer posted on their website looking for postdocs in my field. Six months before I graduated, I applied, and didn't hear anything for about 3 months. While I was at a biomedical optics conference I ran into a grad student from the department (different PI) I was looking at, and we just chatted for a while. I mentioned that I had applied and never heard anything back. Next day, I got an email saying they were interested. While I have no idea whether he said something to the professor, I have a tough time believing it was that big of a coincidence. Anyways, I told the professor I was still finishing up, but I was definitely interested in working for him. I Skyped with him and another permanent researcher the summer after I graduated (about 2-3 weeks after, iirc), we all hit it off, got the OK from my fiancee (she's also a PhD, but in synthetic chem), and started late September 2010. It doesn't sound particularly difficult with the after-the-fact details, but it's always more intimidating when you are the one doing it. I had a decent CV, 3 first author papers, one each in Applied Optics, Journal of Biomedical Optics, and J. Phys Chem B, and 1 second author paper in Optics Express. I'm not listing the journals to brag, in my field they're considered decent enough journals, but they're obviously not Nature, Science, PNAS, or Phys Revs. So, you don't need to be absolutely outstanding to make your mark. You'll be attractive to labs who do similar things no matter what, as long as you get good rec letters, present yourself as knowledgeable but still very driven. Seriously, as long as you appear inquisitive and knowledgeable to some extent, you'll get pretty far, same thing goes for undergrad too. You can also just straight-up email profs who are not advertising, especially if they already know of your professor. Are you looking to postdoc, or go the industrial route? Any idea where you want to go geographically? The training between the USA and France is different, at least I found it so. I prefer to give specifics since it might vary, but I was at Ecole Polytechnique, just outside of Paris. The department was a biomedical optics group, we had hardcore biologists, and hardcore optical physicists, but everyone had absorbed enough of each others disciplines to understand each other fairly well, and everyone knew what the other side would and would not understand. There was a main director, and under him were basically the professors. However, they also have permanent researchers who eventually get the ability to train grad students (I forget the titles in French). The professors typically had about 2 grad students and 1 postdoc. There was TONS of face time with your professor, which was awesome. Especially since my advisor was super awesome. A quick aside, after about 5 months, a bunch of us were talking during lunch about all the video games we liked to play. I mentioned Starcraft and he chimed in "I am the MAN at Starcraft." So, I was assured from that point on that I would get along with my advisor. I liked the system because I had a lot of filling out of my skillset to do, and the large amounts of interaction gave me the chance to do it. Additionally, the PhD students I worked with were EXTREMELY smart, but also very humble about it. They never bragged about the hours they worked, their test scores on anything, whatever. I felt dumb in a lot of ways based on how much more I felt they knew than me, but they were happy to help. That was a bit different than the competitive atmosphere I had found in the USA (and had heard about from just about everyone I knew, even at other universities). However, my wife was in another lab in Paris, and she found a lot of people who were competitive, so it might just be the lab I was in, or the discipline. Also, you don't generally work weekends, and it seems like that's the norm for Europe from what I've heard. The people who were ~45+ years of age were all gone by 6:30-7ish most nights unless they had a better reason to stay, and the grad students and post docs would generally be gone by 7:30ish or so unless they had a reason to stay. Sometimes earlier if they had families. Everyone treated it like a job they loved. I never saw anyone on facebook at work (stark contrast to what I found in the US). The publications that came out were generally fewer but went into higher-end journals. I know, however, that I got a bit lucky with this lab. I have heard extreme horror stories about the French bureaucratic system in other labs, and it is terrible. People can do plenty of things to make someone unable to do work efficiently. So find your lab carefully if you cannot visit. If you're used to using a particular piece of equipment, and it's routine across your discipline to do something yourself, make sure that the lab you are interested in will let you do it yourself. I know people who were not allowed to take their own NMRs (the lifeblood of synthetic chemistry), and the person in charge of it was lazy and didn't like to work. Their work suffered greatly for it, and the guy could never be fired, given how difficult it is to fire anyone in the French system. So, be careful, you can't expect the unexpected, but they tried to make it sound like it would be easier since they had a dedicated technician who would do all the work. That does not happen. And, I'll write up my recommendations for grad school soon, just got bogged down with a conference paper I have to finish. | ||
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danana
United States321 Posts
and btw, I have a bit more time now so I can try to help if anyone has any questions about MD/PhD programs! | ||
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Zaranth
United States345 Posts
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llIH
Norway2142 Posts
I'm 3rd year med school. And I can definetly feel you on some of this stuff. Good job! | ||
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Yenticha
257 Posts
-be aware of the possible administrative nightmares, they happen, and as said, they can be hard to solve (administration has big inertia and lots of power) -work atmosphere is not very competitive, very friendly and relaxed. Hours are reasonable (9 to 6 or 7pm), no work on week end except under deadline pressure (which does not happen too often because we publish less but in "good" journals/conferences) -and yeah, you are usually supposed to become relatively friendly with your advisor, eat lunch together, talk about video games, movies, news... At least it's the case in my lab/with my advisor. | ||
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Kezzer
United States1268 Posts
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llIH
Norway2142 Posts
She only commented that the ceremony was way more difficult than she was aware of. I was there. One of the professors (I can't remember his name). Acted like he was negative on absolutely everything. The day after I spoke to some of her colleagues and found out that this guy acts like this on every single ceremony! :D | ||
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