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@Yenticha: Cool! Are you at Orsay? Do you live around Guichet? Or do you commute from the city?
In general I wanted to give a few recommendations based on my own observations about going through grad school and now a postdoc.
Problems.
1. You will COMPETELY lose your sense of feeling smart enough. You stop having grades to know whether you feel like you belong, you have projects which rarely work, and they constantly drag down your stamina. You will probably (and naturally) start off by comparing yourself to other grad students and postdocs. One particular instance involved me at a party at a good friend's house. He was in physics, and there were a bunch of first year physics grad students in attendance. We were all (about 8 of us, me and my friend at this point are the only old guys there, being 4th years) chatting in a circle. Then the first year guys start sizing each other up, talking about where they came from and their grades. Once one person brought up their GRE scores, literally ALL the other first years came into the conversation saying "Well, I got a ### on my GREs, blah blah blah." But, it's what people think they have to do to belong.
2. Your boss turns out to be crazy and or really dumb. These horror stories are very real, and you will probably have at least one friend who has to deal with this. Friends of mine worked for PIs who more or less got their position because of relatives in the system. They seem OK at first, and come off as normal, but then they do not have their shit together. I experienced this in both France and the USA, so it is a universal situation. In France, it's tougher to deal with, you just have to try to avoid it as best as you can, since people cannot be fired and your PI may be too big to criticize. In the USA, there are pretty much always department resources that will protect your anonymity, and investigate the problem while respecting everyone's point of view as best they can. Some problems might be improper use of research funds, improper professor-student or professor-postdoc relationships, ridiculous work hours, research ethics violation, (i.e. making up data, adding random people as authors on papers, etc), racism, sexism, favoritism. All these can definitely happen.
Solutions/Prevention.
1. Don't compete, just don't worry about anyone else. You made it in for a reason. You probably won't be able to get out of the mindset at the beginning. I certainly felt inadequate, but, I started to realize that if you want to be happy, you really can't keep competing. Someone works harder than you somewhere, someone has better results, someone got luckier with their project and is TOTALLY badass. The lucky and/or harder working people might even be arrogant dicks about it; but, it's not your problem, and it doesn't affect your career.
I found having a good work/play balance greatly eliminates this. I played sports, some vidya games, went out with friends often, basically made sure I had sources of fun OUTSIDE of the lab. Also, being there for your friends and labmates when their shit isn't working (even if yours isn't working either) helps them so much, and they will naturally do the same for you. Finally, remember that you're operating at the limits of what we understand as humans, there are no textbooks that explain everything, and it will take longer than you first expect to add anything useful to the knowledge pool. Your professor knows this, they are hiring you for the person you are going to grow to be, and for the work you are going to do, not because you should be brilliant already.
2. Like the OP said, listen to gossip about certain profs and groups. There are a few red flags I would watch out for:
1) Asian professors who only have Asian (ESL) students. I truly apologize if this comes off as racist, but this really is a concern. There are plenty of Asian professors who are AMAZING. However, if they only have Asian graduate students/postdocs, make sure they are not treating their group as slave labor. I knew a prominent Asian professor who did this, and a postdoc came to him complaining about not being paid for a couple months, and the professor basically told him that he should be focusing on important things like his work. This could also be a problem with other foreign PI's, but I only have personal observations from Asian-led labs.
2) Professor puts two teams of people within his group on one project. In chemistry, this could mean having 2 teams working to synthesize one molecule. The first team "wins" and gets to publish, the second gets F'ed over. Either way the boss wins. This leads to a very competitive environment, and will not help you much in learning.
3) Professor does not share data, computational programs, lets anyone else write papers or communicate with collaborators. This is pretty shady, and was one of the symptoms of the psychology PIs who recently got caught making up data for a large number of papers. Exceptions, if there is an invention/patent involved, you should respect a professors hesitance when it comes to sharing data. Also, it is considered normal for a group to be secretive if they have very interesting results, but they don't want to get scooped. I remember when induced-pluripotent stem cells were discovered, the groups waited to publish because they wanted to get more of a head-start on other groups. What is a concern is when someone tries to keep others out of the loop, so watch out for gatekeeper-type professors.
4) PI has no money. Generally means you will have to teach, and will have trouble finding resources. This is why they often list grants received on their CVs.
5) Professors who do not make it a point to credit the grad student/postdoc/collaborators. This is a petty attempt to make the PI the genius behind everything. If the professor is the one coming up with all the ideas, this indicates that they do not let grad students/postdocs think for themselves, and will give you very little time to learn/develop as a researcher.
6) Grad student/postdoc alumni cannot find good positions/professor does not help with job searches. I have friends who feel completely abandoned by their PI after they graduated, and still (over a year after graduation) cannot find jobs.
7) Professors who do not take complaints/concerns seriously. If you have a problem and your professor shrugs the problem off, then they are probably not going to respect you.
Above all else, I recommend finding your group based on the group environment and professor mentality. Unless you have a specific industry you really want to go into, you will fall in love with whatever research you do. Honestly, it all presents interesting problems and solutions, and as long as it is evident that you are very thorough and methodical in your research, you will find somewhere to go. I remember going to grad school wanting to do some environmental research, and UCI has great environmental-chem research groups (and the PIs are also really good all around people, if you go to UCI chem, Don Blake is one of the coolest people you will ever meet), but I met with my future professor when I was visiting the school (he was too, since he was only just about to start there), and we hit it off. He just struck me as a great guy to work for, good work ethic, good research goals, and very open-minded. So, I changed to biomedical optics, and haven't regretted it once.
As I said before, if you do run into any of the above problems, there are almost always (I think required by law) solutions if you have problems with a particular person, even if it is a professor. I had a friend who had so many problems with her professor, and clearly explained them to her research committee, backed up with evidence. They sided with her wholeheartedly. The only time I had a problem with my professor, I emailed him about it (he made me feel quite stupid at a group meeting) he immediately responded, let me know that he thought a lot of my work/progress etc., and made sure that we were all cool. He was/still is a really good guy, but I cannot say I have personally had to go through anything more serious than that, thankfully.
Best of luck to those who go into it. I can't promise you any specific outcome, but if you PM me, I can give you more advice/answers than you will probably ever want. Thanks again for starting these Zaranth, it's nice to hear how similar others experiences were even for large distances.
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If you care at all about having a career, I would not recommend this route. I myself attended a top 10 graduate school, earned my Ph.D. in genetics and have been toiling as a postdoc for the last 4 years with no career prospects in sight. Now before you go calling me a crap scientist or the exception to the rule consider this; no one that I have ever known in this field (even people who were postdocs when I started about 11 years ago) has a career as a researcher except two people who are now assistant research professors, one that's an assistant teaching professor and three that are in biotech.
Literally out of the hundreds of people I know in this field, 6 have careers. Everyone else has jobs such as deadend postdoc positions, is an adjunct professor in junior college, or has gone back to school to earn a different degree.
Keep in mind again if you will, I earned my Ph.D. from a top 10 school and did two postdocs at two separate top 10 schools.
I basically went through hell to earn this degree and I can't find a job that is considered a career to save my life and neither can my friends in the field. I have a full time postdoc position and I teach classes at two different community colleges at nights as an adjunct professor. I even tried becoming a full time professor at these community colleges and found out that it takes an average of ~4 years for a position to open up in junior college and for you to be hired full time! I have to literally kill myself working and applying for jobs to make 48K/year. And that's IF I ever land one of these jobs.
TL;DR
Don't do a Ph.D. in Biology, you will likely never have a proper career and be stuck as a postdoc / instructor forever.
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@GreatFall. I have no doubt that you are not a crap scientist, and that you probably did/do well as a postdoc. Professorships are daamn hard to get. I just have a few questions about your troubles. Are you looking to be in a certain part of the country? That is, are you limited in your choices by location? Also, is there a possibility that you can postdoc doing something outside of hardcore genetics to increase/expand your skillset? I admit that I do not know how bio degrees generally spring forth into careers. For the people in biotech, do they still use the knowledge they gained while studying? Or do they branch out a lot?
Also, with your genetics experience, is it easy to translate into bioinformatics?
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@GreatFall. TallMax is right, you need to consider moving around. U.S. education system is under heavy pressure from globalization, which puts pressure on salaries. The policy has been such that salaries for education specialists (as well as in many other sectors) are held high to prevent decline in the GDP. This forces higher productivity. Many scientists, no matter how good they are, can't produce enough to maintain 100k a year salary no matter how hard they work. It is basically because guys overseas are catching up with technology and can do the same work for 20-30k. As a result, structural unemployment hits many good specialists. Since there is no light at the end of the tunnel for the U.S. policymakers, I would suggest you explore some opportunities elsewhere. With your skill level, you will be coveted in China, ASEAN countries, and very welcome in Europe. Although you will not be paid 100k a year there (although you just might), your cost of living will be so low that your savings will surprise you.
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On January 21 2013 13:45 GreatFall wrote:
TL;DR
Don't do a Ph.D. in Biology, you will likely never have a proper career and be stuck as a postdoc / instructor forever.
Way vague bro
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I disagree about how bad Greatfall describes the situation to be, but I agree research is difficult and ungrateful. I have seen excellent scientists not be offered positions following their post docs because of hidden rules that no one discusses after one completes their post doc. For example, in the past decade, at McGill, one of the powerhouses of Canada with world standing, several departments have not hired a single person who did not complete 5 years of post doctoral research outside of Canada. This is a tough reality to discover for people who did their post docs there and a couple friends of mine ended up being nailed as a result. What's most difficult is that by the time people end up completing applying for and completing post docs, they are often less mobile as they can have young families.
Furthermore, the nature of what gets funded has changed over the past decade with a stronger emphasis on translational, more applicable research, over basic science. This is in addition to differences in funding available in different fields. I ended up completing a combined MD/PhD because I knew that in the long term, it would offer me superior job security and open doors to certain kinds of research and approaches I saw would be in much higher demand. Similarly, a friend completed an MBA after his post doc and is now in industry.
In summary, the long term of research is highly political and you need to learn the rules of the game and even then, sometimes you lose.
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Just gotta throw a big "Thank You" to Zaranth and TallMax for their insight into this area  Thinking about PhD programs for my future and this has been a big resource, many thanks!
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@GuiltyJerk Awesome glad it has been helpful! PM me if you have any specific questions or whatever, I'm happy to discuss stuff.
Part 5 should be coming out soon! :D
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Oh wow, cool. I just started my PhD in Biological Sciences at Texas Tech. I study ecology of amphibians (mostly, but we have a community focus). Cool to see other SC fans out there pursuing the same thing.
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Concerning poster presentations, let me share one little bit of insight from my own PhD (theoretical physics).
I was at a conference in Sapporo, Japan. Big thing, flew over with my prof all the way from germany. There were thirty-odd graduate students who all presented posters. Now the thing I hadn't seen before at other conferences was that they allowed all students to give a two-minute presentation of their poster. Total time allotted for this program point: 60 minutes.
I was lucky enough to be among the first five or so people, so the audience wasn't completely flooded with rapid-fire science spam yet. Most people tried to cram as much as they could into two minutes of presentation, which if you think about it seems like a lot of time, but in fact isn't. You can get out maybe 8-10 sentences, that's it.
My solution was to basically say "I did this and this and that with these methods, and our results seem to indicate blah and blah. If you are interested in the topic, meet me at poster 123 and I'll be happy to give you more details." The rest of that hour was so bad (and I don't mean that in a purely derisive fashion), I sometimes had to bite my lip (hard!) to not burst out laughing at people who tried to read out their whole poster or derive obscure mathematical formulations. It was so trashy, I still can't believe it.
In summary: if you give talks, don't try to cram stuff in, it just doesn't work.
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On January 21 2013 09:57 TallMax wrote:
1. You will COMPETELY lose your sense of feeling smart enough.
I can't stress this enough! I'm a third year PhD student in chemical engineering and I feel so low at times. Most common lab instruments have been developed so well that it takes months get up to speed. Don't get me started on troubleshooting...
Part of this isn't our fault. In the U.S., we don't learn about recent innovations. Much of what I learned as an undergrad is exactly what my advisor learned 30 years ago, which means our generation is totally lost when we get our B.S. and go work somewhere.
You're right that competing will bring about a large feeling of inadequacy. After all, we're now measured by the same stick as people who had their PhD before I was even born! It's best to take what's in front of you, MASTER it, and continually add tricks and tips from those you work with.
I found having a good work/play balance greatly eliminates this. I played sports, some vidya games, went out with friends often, basically made sure I had sources of fun OUTSIDE of the lab.
I want to point out that this isn't a "free pass" to slack off. Grad school is the academic equivalent of boot camp and it's expected you'll put in a good 50ish hours a week.
Also realize that grad school is a marathon, not a race. You need to pace yourself, reward yourself, and cope with the stress. Sure, you can work 70 hour weeks and sleep four hours a night, but is this keeping you physically and mentally healthy? There will always be more work to do, so make sure you're setting realistic goals and timelines AND set aside some time to relax.
On that note, scientific research is SLOW. At the end of your studies you could probably recreate your research in a fraction of the time. You may have high expectations for yourself, so be sure to give yourself a break since it's oh-so-easy to get caught up.
you will fall in love with whatever research you do. Honestly, it all presents interesting problems and solutions,
This is SO true. I went to grad school in hopes of studying environmental transport, but I ended up in heterogeneous catalysis. I definitely found a comfortable niche
On January 29 2013 22:32 Dr.Sin wrote:
Furthermore, the nature of what gets funded has changed over the past decade with a stronger emphasis on translational, more applicable research, over basic science.
In summary, the long term of research is highly political and you need to learn the rules of the game and even then, sometimes you lose.
I'm not sure I completely agree with this. Yes, funding for applied research is greater than basic science. Applications yield money, especially if you're cashing in on hot topics. The two are NOT mutually exclusive. Take my research : I'm funded by a local company, yet I've discovered a number of things about existing catalysts that were previously unknown or understudied.
I totally agree with knowing how the politics work. Grad school is all about building a set of skills that you can apply to a broad, yet specialized area. In my field a TON of research money is going out to supported gold catalysts for CO Oxidation and steam reforming, improved efficiency of proton exchange membrane fuel cells, and synthesis of chemicals from biomass (all related to the U.S. "energy crisis"). You can choose to study whatever you want and have a hard time getting funds, or you can apply your skills to areas getting a lot of attention. It certainly is an interesting game...
I also want to add that there are a TON of brilliant scientists out there, not just the ones fortunate to be at the right place, right time, and with the right talent. Industry and academia use a lot of different scales to measure researchers. The ones I know of are: total research dollars, number of federal grants, publications per year, citations per year, publications in high impact journals, hirsch index, number of patents, pedigree (attended top school or studied under famous advisor, or both), number of former students with jobs...the list goes on. Academic departments (especially deans) seem to care more about total grant money, though that isn't necessarily the best measure. My advisor, for instance, doesn't have a lot of federal money, but he gets a fair number of industrial contracts and all of his former students in the last ten years (even undergrad student workers) have found jobs within a couple months of graduation. He is coveted as a consultant and has a reputation as one of the best process engineers in the state. Another advisor got a multimillion dollar federal grant and frequently publishes, yet some of his recent graduates had a lot of difficulty finding employment (one tried for nearly a year). Even though he spent half his career in industry, he isn't often tapped for help (it may seem like I'm ripping on him, btu his greatest strength is his communication and ability to pull people together - truly an invaluable skill. There are pros and cons in multiple areas and the point is to judge the whole package, not special pieces others find important, and find what best suits your future aspirations.
On a final note, a grad student will spend considerable time building skills that may seem unrelated. I do experimental work, so I've spent most of my three years repairing broken equipment, troubleshooting electronics, and building reactor systems with automated process control from scratch. Most equipment isn't under warranty, so becoming a de facto technician/machinist/electrician/repairman is inevitable. Several friends do computational research and spend a vast majority of their time coding. Seeing as we're CHEMICAL engineers, things like programming languages and complex simulations (like first principles simulations) seemed irrelevant. Nevertheless, each area of study has several contributing factors where you're woefully inexperienced. These are also areas that others, even with your degree, spend entire careers. This is where a ton of your time is spent, especially in the first few years.
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Good resource for those who want to pursue a phd in life sciences, GJ OP. I myself am a 6th year PhD student and just got an unofficial permission to write, pending my paper submission. It's really a marathon, and it's quite common for students in my lab that nothing works for the first 3-4 years. Literally all of my data that I'm planning to submit for publication comes from the last 1.5 years... which is a bit depressing given that I spent half of my 20s on doing nothing but hey, better than having dropped out with nothing having come out of it.
While GreatFall might sound overly pessimistic, I pretty much agree with his sentiments and am planning to gtfo of research once I get my phD. Probably going to head into intellectual property straight away.
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Godness, I have my first ever "fair" (in that case it's a undergrad fair) for which I have a poster. But I have no idea what do people want to hear when they will come to me ?!
I mean should it be complementary from the poster (because obviously the poster does not show everything) or should it be deeper information; IDK IDK OMG HELP.
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@ anatase: Your first poster session! That's great! The majority of people that come to your poster will want you to walk through the poster with them. You should be prepared to explain each step of your procedure and the results. Some of them will ask you specific questions either about your experimental set-up or about your results, and you should be prepared to discuss the finer points and details of each step. It's true that the poster should be able to stand alone, but the point of you being at the session is to lead people through it and answer their questions.
When someone approaches you, smile at them and ask them if they would like you to walk them through your poster. Most will say "yes" but some might say "no" and take a quick glance and leave. Don't feel bad if this happens, they're not snubbing you or your research, they may be browsing the posters.
Something you should also prepare is a quick, 30 second to 1 minute verbal overview of your poster. Make sure you can quickly and easily summarize your research into a few sentences, perhaps with one brief reference to a figure for clarity. Some people just want to hear the conclusions of your research. Something along the lines of "I used X technique to show that Y is true, and that led us to investigate Z, using Q, and thus we were able to show that ... RESULT! This is very interesting because ..."
Bring a bottle of water with you, and wear layers with comfy shoes.
I hope those tips help! Good luck - please report back and let me know how it went.
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This may be easier to understand if you reformat it in terms of build order and supply count
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On January 21 2013 13:45 GreatFall wrote:
If you care at all about having a career, I would not recommend this route. I myself attended a top 10 graduate school, earned my Ph.D. in genetics and have been toiling as a postdoc for the last 4 years with no career prospects in sight. Now before you go calling me a crap scientist or the exception to the rule consider this; no one that I have ever known in this field (even people who were postdocs when I started about 11 years ago) has a career as a researcher except two people who are now assistant research professors, one that's an assistant teaching professor and three that are in biotech.
Literally out of the hundreds of people I know in this field, 6 have careers. Everyone else has jobs such as deadend postdoc positions, is an adjunct professor in junior college, or has gone back to school to earn a different degree.
Keep in mind again if you will, I earned my Ph.D. from a top 10 school and did two postdocs at two separate top 10 schools.
I basically went through hell to earn this degree and I can't find a job that is considered a career to save my life and neither can my friends in the field. I have a full time postdoc position and I teach classes at two different community colleges at nights as an adjunct professor. I even tried becoming a full time professor at these community colleges and found out that it takes an average of ~4 years for a position to open up in junior college and for you to be hired full time! I have to literally kill myself working and applying for jobs to make 48K/year. And that's IF I ever land one of these jobs.
TL;DR
Don't do a Ph.D. in Biology, you will likely never have a proper career and be stuck as a postdoc / instructor forever.
How many publications do you have and how many publications do those other people have? You need over 20 after your postdoc to get a job at a major university.
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On March 04 2013 02:59 Hydro033 wrote:
How many publications do you have and how many publications do those other people have? You need over 20 after your postdoc to get a job at a major university.
That's not exactly true. They look at quality and quantity, also the type of research is fairly important. Certain subfields are booming with candidates, so while they make for good graduate studies because something is a hot field, eventually you have a lot of people competing for the same position when they all try to become professors. Also, a lot of people will start out at smaller schools, do high-impact research, and move to other, more prestigious universities. So there are ways of moving around.
In chem, I've known faculty with as few as 6 publications getting professorships, starting at a major university. Especially in synthetic chemistry, you can spend a lot of time optimizing and running reactions, that shiz just takes a long while.
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On March 04 2013 03:33 TallMax wrote:Show nested quote +On March 04 2013 02:59 Hydro033 wrote:
How many publications do you have and how many publications do those other people have? You need over 20 after your postdoc to get a job at a major university. That's not exactly true. They look at quality and quantity, also the type of research is fairly important. Certain subfields are booming with candidates, so while they make for good graduate studies because something is a hot field, eventually you have a lot of people competing for the same position when they all try to become professors. Also, a lot of people will start out at smaller schools, do high-impact research, and move to other, more prestigious universities. So there are ways of moving around. In chem, I've known faculty with as few as 6 publications getting professorships, starting at a major university. Especially in synthetic chemistry, you can spend a lot of time optimizing and running reactions, that shiz just takes a long while.
Well of course there is a quality/quantity tradeoff. A publication in Science can probably net you a top position whether you even have any other publications or not.
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On March 04 2013 10:27 Hydro033 wrote:Show nested quote +On March 04 2013 03:33 TallMax wrote:On March 04 2013 02:59 Hydro033 wrote:
How many publications do you have and how many publications do those other people have? You need over 20 after your postdoc to get a job at a major university. That's not exactly true. They look at quality and quantity, also the type of research is fairly important. Certain subfields are booming with candidates, so while they make for good graduate studies because something is a hot field, eventually you have a lot of people competing for the same position when they all try to become professors. Also, a lot of people will start out at smaller schools, do high-impact research, and move to other, more prestigious universities. So there are ways of moving around. In chem, I've known faculty with as few as 6 publications getting professorships, starting at a major university. Especially in synthetic chemistry, you can spend a lot of time optimizing and running reactions, that shiz just takes a long while. Well of course there is a quality/quantity tradeoff. A publication in Science can probably net you a top position whether you even have any other publications or not.
It wouldn't, you'd need at least 2-4 others if you have one in Science/Nature, otherwise it could be a fluke. Plus, it depends upon whether you're first author, and how groundbreaking the work is.
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I didn't mean to imply that basic science doesn't get any funding, but at least in the biological sciences, there is a significant, increasing pressure in that direction.
Re conferences: Learning to communicate is a hugely important skill that people need to develop during their PhDs. It takes a lot of practice and it shows the mastery of a subject to be able to speak to different kinds of audiences so that they will understand what it is you're talking about. It is also very difficult to narrow down a talk in language an audience can understand in short presentations while still being able to show the key elements of your data without overwhelming your audience in data. Ultimately this ends up being good practice for the defence because it needs to summarize your phd in 20 minutes and the questions you are asked by your committee have often been asked by many other people before them.
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EPT
