I Know I Know I Shoulda Known Better but I Didnt Know I Loved You Until You Were Gone

Editor's Note: When Andy Greenspon wrote this article, he was a first-year student in Applied Physics at Harvard. Now he has completed his PhD. — Alison Bert, June 23, 2021

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If yous are planning to employ for a PhD programme, yous're probably getting advice from dozens of students, professors, administrators your parents and the Internet. Sometimes it'southward hard to know which advice to focus on and what will make the biggest difference in the long-run. So before yous go back to daydreaming near the mean solar day you lot accept that Nobel Prize, here are nine things you should give serious thought to. One or more of these tips may relieve y'all from anguish and help you make amend decisions equally you lot embark on that path to a PhD.

1. Actively seek out data about PhD programs.

Depending on your undergraduate institution, there may be more than or less support to guide you in selecting a PhD program – only there is generally much less than when you applied to higher.

On the website of my physics department, I found a folio written past one of my professors, which listed graduate school options in physics and engineering along with resources to consult. As far as I know, my career center did non send out much information about PhD programs. Simply after applying to programs did I discover out that my undergraduate website had a link providing general information applicative to most PhD programs. This is the kind of information that is available all over the Internet.

And then don't wait for your career center or section to lay out a plan for y'all. Actively seek information technology out from your career center counselors, your professors, the Internet — and particularly from alumni from your section who are in or graduated from your desired PhD program. Beginning-hand experiences will well-nigh always trump the knowledge you become second-hand.

two. A PhD program is not but a continuation of your undergraduate program.

Many students don't internalize this idea until they have jumped head-first into a PhD program. The goal is not to complete an assigned set of courses as in an undergraduate program, but to develop significant and original enquiry in your area of expertise. Y'all will have required courses to take, especially if y'all practise not take a master'due south degree yet, but these are designed merely to compliment your research and provide a broad and deep knowledge base to support y'all in your research endeavors.

At the end of your PhD program, you lot will be judged on your research, not on how well you did in your courses. Grades are non critical equally long every bit you maintain the minimum GPA requirement, and you should not spend likewise much time on courses at the expense of research projects. Graduate courses tend to exist designed to let you to have abroad what you will find useful to your enquiry more than to drill a rigid set of facts and techniques into your brain.

3. Have a break between your undergraduate teaching and a PhD program.

You lot are beginning your senior year of college, and your classmates are asking you lot if yous are applying to graduate school. You call back to yourself, "Well, I like studying this topic and the associated research, and I am going to need a PhD if I want to be a professor or practice independent research, so I might also become it done as soon as possible." But are you sure about the blazon of research y'all desire to practise? Do you know where you want to live for the next five years? Are you prepared to stay in an academic surroundings for nine years directly?

Many people burn out or end up trudging through their PhD program without a thought about what lies outside of or beyond it. A intermission of a twelvemonth or two or even more may exist necessary to proceeds perspective. If all y'all know is an bookish surroundings, how tin can you compare it to annihilation else? Many people take a job for v or more years before going back to get their PhD.

It is true though that the longer you stay out of school, the harder information technology is to go back to an academic surroundings with lower pay and a lack of ready work hours. A one-year break volition give you vi months or then after graduation before PhD applications are due. A two-year gap might be ideal to provide time to place your priorities in life and explore different areas of research without having schoolhouse work or a thesis competing for your attention.

Getting research experience outside of a degree plan can help focus your interests and give y'all a leg upward on the competition when you finally make up one's mind to employ. It can too help yous determine whether you will enjoy total-time research or if you might adopt an alternative career path that still incorporates science, for example, in policy, consulting or business — or a hybrid research job that combines scientific and non-scientific skills.

I will be forever grateful that I chose to exercise research in a non-academic environment for a year betwixt my undergraduate and PhD programs. It gave me the chance to get a feel for doing nothing merely research for a full year. Working at the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory in the Infinite Sectionalization, I was the manager of an optics lab, performing spectroscopic experiments on rocks and minerals placed in a vacuum chamber. While my boss determined the overall experimental design, I was able to make my ain suggestions for experiments and use my own discretion in how to perform them. I presented this inquiry at 2 national conferences as well — a first for me. I was too able to learn virtually other research being performed there, determine which projects excited me the most, and thus narrow down my criteria for a PhD program.

4. Your current area of study does not dictate what y'all have to report in graduate school.

Y'all might be studying the function and regulation of membrane proteins or doing a computational assay of the conductivity of different bombardment designs, but that doesn't mean your PhD project must revolve around similar projects. The transition betwixt college or another research job to a PhD program is ane of the main transitions in your life when it is perfectly acceptable to completely change inquiry areas.

If you are doing computation, y'all may desire to switch to lab-based work or vice versa. If you are working in biology but have always had an interest in photonics research, at present is the time to try information technology out. You may find that yous dearest the alternative research and devote your PhD to it, yous might hate it and autumn dorsum on your previous area of written report — or you may even discover a unique topic that incorporates both subjects.

One of the best aspects of the PhD program is that you can make the research your own. Remember, the answer to the question "Why are y'all doing this enquiry?" should non be "Well, because it's what I've been working on for the past few years already."While my undergraduate inquiry was in atomic physics, I easily transitioned into applied physics and materials science for my PhD program and was able to apply much of what I learned as an undergraduate to my electric current research. If you are moving from the sciences to a not-STEM field such as social sciences or humanities, this advice can still utilise, though the transition is a bit more difficult and more than of a permanent delivery.

five. Make sure the PhD programme has a diverseness of research options, and acquire about equally many research groups equally possible in your first twelvemonth.

Even if you believe y'all are committed to one research area, you may find that five years of such work is not quite what you expected. As such, you should find a PhD program where the professors are not all working in the same narrowly focused research area. Make sure in that location are at least three professors working on an array of topics you could imagine yourself working on.

In many graduate programs, you are supposed to pick a research advisor earlier even starting. Only such arrangements ofttimes do not work out, and you may be seeking a new advisor earlier you lot know information technology. That's why many programs give students one or ii semesters to explore different inquiry areas before choosing a permanent research advisor.

In your outset year, y'all should explore the research of a various set up of groups. Later on touring their labs, talking to the students, or sitting in on group meetings, you lot may find that this group is the right one for you.

In addition, consider the importance of who your research advisor volition be. This will be the person you interact with regularly for 5 straight years and who volition take a crucial influence on your inquiry. Do you like their advising style? Does their personality mesh with yours? Can you get forth? Of grade, the inquiry your advisor works on is critical, only if yous have large disagreements at every meeting or do not get helpful advice on how to proceed with your research, y'all may not exist able to succeed. At the very to the lowest degree, you lot must be able to handle your advisor's management of the lab and advising style if you are going to be productive in your work.

The Harvard program I enrolled in has professors working on research spanning from nanophotonics to energy materials and biophysics, covering my wide range of interests. By spending time in labs and offices informally chatting with graduate students, I found an counselor whose personality and research interests meshed very well with me. Their genuine enthusiasm for this advisor and their excitement when talking about their research was the best input I could have received.

six. Location is more important than you remember — but name recognition is not.

The beginning consideration in choosing a PhD program should be, "Is there research at this university that I am passionate about?" Afterwards all, you lot volition have to study this topic in particular for four or more years. But when because the location of a academy, your first thought should not be, "I'yard going to be in the lab all the time, and so what does it matter if I'thousand by the beach, in a city, or in the middle of nowhere."

Contrary to popular belief, you volition have a life outside of the lab, and you will take to be able to alive with information technology for four or more than years. Different when yous were an undergraduate, your social and extracurricular life will circumduct less effectually the university community, so the environment of the surrounding area is important. Do you demand a metropolis atmosphere to be productive? Or is your platonic location surrounded by forests and mountains or by a embankment? Is beingness close to your family important? Imagine what it will be like living in the area during the times y'all are non doing research; consider what activities will you do and how often will yous want to visit family unit.

While many of the PhD programs that accepted me had research that truly excited me, the just place I could envision living for five or more years was Boston, as the urban center I grew up near and whose environment and culture I honey, and to be close to my family.

While location is more important than you think, the reputation and prestige of the university is not. In graduate school, the reputation of the individual department you are joining — and sometimes even the specific research group you work in — are more important. At that place, y'all will develop enquiry collaborations and professional connections that volition be crucial during your program and beyond. When searching for a job after graduation, other scientists volition look at your specific department, the people you have worked with and the enquiry yous have done.

7. Those time management skills you developed in college? Develop them further.

After surviving college, you may think you lot accept mastered the power to clasp in your coursework, extracurricular activities and even some sleep. In a PhD plan, fourth dimension management reaches a whole new level. You will not only have lectures to attend and homework to practise. You will have to make time for your research, which will include spending extended periods of time in the lab, analyzing information, and scheduling time with other students to collaborate on research.

As well, you will almost likely accept to teach for a number of semesters, and you will want to attend any seminar that may be related to your research or that but peaks your involvement. To tiptop it all off, you volition even so want to do many of those extracurricular activities you did as an undergraduate. While in the abstract, information technology may seem simple plenty to put this all into your calendar and stay organized, you volition discover quickly enough that the one 60 minutes you lot scheduled for a task might take 2 or three hours, putting you lot backside on everything else for the rest of the day or forcing y'all to cutting other planned events. Be prepared for schedules to go amiss, and be willing to sacrifice certain activities. For some, this might be sleep; for others, it might be an extracurricular activeness or a few seminars they were hoping to attend. In short, don't panic when things don't get according to plan; anticipate possible delays and be gear up to conform.

8. Expect to acquire inquiry skills on the fly – or accept advantage of the training your department or career middle offers.

This may be the offset time you will take to write fellowship or grant proposals, write scientific papers, attend conferences, nowadays your research to others, or even peer-review scientific manuscripts. From my experience, very few college students or even PhD students receive formal training on how to perform whatsoever of these tasks. Commonly people follow by example. Merely this is not always like shooting fish in a barrel and tin can be quite aggravating sometimes. Then seek out talks or interactive programs offered by your department or career center. The try will be well worth it when you realize you've become quite adept at quickly and clearly explaining your research to others and at outlining scientific papers and grant proposals.

Alternatively, ask a more experienced graduate pupil or your counselor for communication on these topics. In addition, be prepared for a learning curve when learning all the procedures and processes of the grouping you end upward working in. In that location may be many new protocols to master, whether they involve synthesizing chemicals, growing bacterial cells, or aligning mirrors on an optical tabular array. In addition, the group may use programming languages or data analysis software you are unfamiliar with.

Don't get discouraged but programme to spend extra try getting used to these procedures and systems. After working with them regularly, they will soon get second nature. When I first started my job at Johns Hopkins, I felt overwhelmed by all the intricacies of the experiment and definitely made a few mistakes, including breaking a number of optical elements. But by the stop of my year there, I had written an updated protocol manual for the modifications I had fabricated to the experimental procedures and was the "master" passing on my cognition to the next person taking the job.

9. There are no real breaks.

In a stereotypical "9-to-5" chore, when the workday is over or the weekend arrives, y'all tin mostly forget about your piece of work. And a vacation provides an fifty-fifty longer respite. But in a PhD plan, your schedule becomes "whenever you find time to get your work done." Y'all might exist in the lab during regular piece of work hours or you might exist working until x p.m. or later to finish an experiment. And the only time you might have available to analyze data might be at 1 a.thousand. Expect to work during part of the weekend, besides. Graduate students do become on vacations merely might still have to do some data assay or a literature search while abroad.

As a PhD student, it might exist hard to stop thinking about the side by side step in an experiment or that data sitting on your computer or that paper you lot were meaning to outset. While I imagine some students can bifurcate their mind between graduate school life and everything else, that's quite hard for many of us to exercise. No matter what, my research lies somewhere in the back of my caput. In short, your schedule is much more flexible as a PhD student, but equally a consequence, y'all never truly take a suspension from your work.

While this may seem like a downer, recollect that you should have passion for the enquiry you work on (most of the time), so you should be excited to call up up new experiments or dissimilar ways to consider that data you take collected. Even when I'thou lying in bed almost to autumn asleep, I am sometimes ruminating about aspects of my experiment I could alter or what information I could exercise a literature search on to gain new insights. A PhD program is quite the commitment and rarely lives up to expectations – but information technology is well worth the fourth dimension and try you will spend for something that truly excites you.

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Source: https://www.elsevier.com/connect/9-things-you-should-consider-before-embarking-on-a-phd