Hello PhD

It’s that time of year again – summer days are growing shorter, your friends are trying to fit in one last trip to the beach, and the backpack aisle at Target is about to be cleared out to make way for the Halloween costumes.

Yes, it’s back-to-school time. From toddlers to teenagers, this time of year instills foreboding about the school-year ahead. But as a first-year graduate student, you may have other feelings.

For most, it’s the start of a new adventure. For the first time, you’re pursuing the one subject in the world you love best, surrounded by other equally brilliant and passionate people.

It’s the end of being told what to learn and how to study, and the beginning of blazing your own academic trail.

It IS a new experience – different from your matriculation in high school or college – and it may be difficult to know what to expect.

This week, we lay out a ten-ish step plan for putting your best-foot-forward in that first semester of your graduate journey.

Back to School

We heard from Gary, who is about to start his own journey:

Hello,I really enjoy listening to your podcast. I will be starting grad school in the fall studying geology. Do you have any advice for a person starting grad school and to make the first semester a good one?Thank you,Gary

Gary’s question brought to mind many ideas we wish we had known in OUR first semester of grad school. We also reached out to current and former students on Twitter to hear their ideas.

Here are the Top 10 themes we heard:

1. Try new things

You’ll have plenty of novelty if you move to a new town and meet a completely new set of people, but don’t stop there. Take this transition period to try out new types of science in fields that you may not have studied before.

2. Get organized

Many listeners recommended getting a calendar, and filling it with discrete tasks you can check off when you’re done.

It will both keep your project on track, and let you visualize the progress you make each day.

3. Read more

You’ll be tempted to spend your first days and weeks running experiments and generating data. After all – these rotations are short!

But make an effort to spend time in the literature. Deeply understand the project you’re working on, and the foundational research that led to it. There’s no other time in your graduate training where building this foundation will be more likely, or more valuable.

4. Ask for help

You’re in graduate school for training. You don’t need to pretend you know everything, and you wouldn’t need to be here if you did!

Just like spending time reading the literature, asking for help early pays dividends over semesters and years.

5. Combat imposter syndrome

At some point in your graduate career, you will feel that everyone else is smarter, more skilled, and better equipped than you are to succeed in the lab. You’ll feel a knot in your chest when you wonder how you managed to fool everyone into thinking you were ready for this, and you’ll wish you could sneak out the back and avoid the embarrassment of being identified as a fraud.

That feeling is called imposter syndrome,

Wouldn’t it be nice if you had a crystal ball that could reveal your grad-school future?

You might look forward to see if that next experiment will work out, or if your research will eventually make the cover of Nature.

What you should do with the power of foresight is to take a deep look at the quality of mentorship you’ll receive over the next few years.

It’s no secret that good research advisors can be tough to find. Most are passable – you’ll learn what you need to learn and graduate on time – and a few are stellar, elevating your research beyond what you thought was possible.

But of course, lurking somewhere at every institution, are a handful of awful, terrible, no good, very bad PIs. These are the people you must avoid at all costs, lest they destroy both your confidence and your career plan.

Of course, no one has a crystal ball, and sometimes our choice of a research mentor doesn’t pan out. But there’s a website hoping to change that.

Hindsight: 20/20

Gadareth Higgs was ready for graduate school. His grades were good, he had some research experience, and he had been accepted to one of the most competitive programs in the US.

“I just assumed we would have good mentors. That was not the case,” he recalls.

In his third year, Gadareth would be forced to change labs, and his new PI was “not big on mentorship.”

Gadarath’s qualifying exam didn’t go well, and there were signs that the PI was working against him behind the scenes. Ultimately, he had to leave the program.

Then he got an idea: why not make a website where students and postdocs can score their PI on the factors that matter, so that other students can make an informed decision before committing to a lab?

Enter GradPI.com, which is something like RateMyProfessor.com for graduate students. This week, we talk with Gadareth Higgs and Paola Figueroa-Delgado to find out more about the purpose and people behind the website.

At its core, GradPI allows students to score their advisors on five factors called the “SMART” scale.

From the Frequently Asked Questions page:

S stands for Standing. Reputation is important because your advisor will serve as the springboard for whatever you do next.M stands for Mentorship. It is important to have an advisor who can serve as a scientific role model, even if not as a career or life guide.A stands for Autonomy. The degree of independence desired by students is highly variable; only you know what’s best for you.R stands for Resources. Money talks. End of story.T stands for Tact. This is essentially a personality score. But it takes into consideration how well the advisor conveys feedback, and fosters a welcoming environment for students of different cultures, genders, races, religions, and sexual orientations.

It’s important to note that low-scores in a certain category may not be a bad thing for every student. Paola described how a prospective mentee might use the ratings to find a good fit.

“Everyone has different kinds of mentorship preferences. You can provide comments and feedback on these different categories and see why for you it’s important to have autonomy. So [an advisor] with a low autonomy score is not good for you,” she explained.

In some jobs, one day at the office looks a lot like the next. You could look through your calendar and optimize your meeting schedule and to-do list without much thought.

But working in a lab is different: your projects are in constant flux, experiments lead to other experiments, and you need to balance bench work with meetings, mentoring, and writing.

That busyness can lead to inefficiency as you tackle the items on your list one after another.  Worse, you’re forced to plan overlapping activities to fill the ‘downtime’ during incubations and time points.

This week, we encourage you to take a step back, look over your list of competing priorities, and ask some hard questions about what’s really important.

You might find you have more free time on your hands than you ever imagined…

Throw it in the Focus Funnel

Managing your time in lab goes beyond just making each experiment efficient and effective; you need to choose what tasks to take on, and which to let go.  That’s where the Focus Funnel from Rory Vaden’s Procrastinate on Purpose comes in handy.

Just take your to-do list, and ask the following questions:

* Does this task actually need to done? If not, eliminate it.* Does it involve a repetitive task that a computer could do?  If so, automate it!* Can someone else do it just as well as I can? If so, delegate it.* Does it need to get done right away? If not, procrastinate.

If you answered no to all of the above, you’ve got a task that is important and requires your attention ASAP.  Now’s the time to set your pomodoro timer, and get the job done.

As you work through this mental checklist, you’re sure to find activities that are best eliminated, automated, delegated, and procrastinated.

Skip the fifth repetition on that Western blot that just won’t produce a pretty hot-dog shaped band. It’s okay, they’ll still publish your paper.

Make an Excel template that runs all of your favorite statistics after a qPCR.  It’s better at math than you are anyway.

Train your local undergrad to split your HeLa cells.  I promise you can get more if the first few batches get contaminated.

Wait until after you talk with your PI to finalize those PowerPoint slides.  You know he’ll find something to criticize – why not make it something you were planning to fix anyway?

The Focus Funnel can’t get you out of all of your work, but it will help you put each task in perspective and help you maximize the time you spend on the things that matter most.

The Pirates of Alcosynth

This week, we’re sampling the Hornigold English Style India Pale Ale from Mystery Brewing in Hillsborough, NC.  It derives its name from a piratical source which we reveal on the show.  The brewmaster at Mystery is none other than Erik Lars Myers, author of North Carolina Craft Beer & Breweries, so you know he knows his stuff!

We also learn about Professor David Nutt’s resear...

For most graduate students, the list of potential careers runs something like this:

* Research Faculty* Teaching Faculty* Industry Researcher* Science Writer* …. ummmm…

But the truth is that there are other, less talked-about careers that can be a perfect fit for scientists who may love learning but not working at the bench.

Raison d’Liaison

Listener Cara asked:

I am a second year graduate student and I am interested in working with clinical trials in the future, maybe as a clinical trial manager or medical science liaison. I was wondering if you guys know anyone who went into this type of career who could talk on the show about how they got there and what their job is like?  Thanks!

We tracked down Dr. Aoife O’Dwyer, an experienced Medical Science Liaison (MSL) and founder of MSLConsultant.com. When she’s not working in pharma, she’s coaching other scientists on ways to succeed in the MSL career!

Dr. Aoife O’Dwyer

Aoife hadn’t always planned on going to graduate school, but during an economic downturn, she was struggling to find work in the pharmaceutical industry.

When her research advisor suggested pursuing a PhD, she saw it as a great way to build her skills and perhaps open up other career options.

It didn’t take long for her to realize she did not want to stay in the lab long-term. In fact, she tried to quit in her first year! But her advisor convinced her to stay, and they developed a plan to help her graduate quickly.

With her PhD in hand, Dr. O’Dwyer turned back pharma. She found a career that would leverage her love of science, her deeply honed research skills, and her desire to make an impact on medical care.

This week, we talk with her about her role as a Medical Science Liaison – what it is, and what it takes to get there.

MSL, KOL, PHD, OMG!

First question – what even IS a medical science liaison?! Aiofe describes it this way:

A medical science liaison is a field-based, non-promotional expert on a product or therapeutic area. The job of the MSL is to develop collaborative relationships with people we call key opinion leaders who are experts in a certain therapeutic area, and use those relationships to improve or inform the strategy of a pharmaceutical company.

In other words, the MSL acts as an ambassador, bridging the gap between research labs, clinicians, and the pharmaceutical company.

Importantly, there’s a bright line between what an MSL does and what the sales team is doing. The MSL role is non-promotional – the goal is not to sell more products to the physician. Instead, it’s about listening to doctors and patients to understand where there are challenges in care or gaps in data that the company can then work to improve.

One common misconception about the MSL role is that you’ll need to find a company working in the same field where you did your PhD research. That’s just not true, Aiofa explains. Instead, you’ll be expected to ‘up-skill,’ quickly learning new areas of research as the industry develops.

If this career has piqued your interest, you’ll want to hear the tips Aiofe shares for transitioning from lab to pharma. She advises students to hone their communication skills through experience, and gives unexpected advice on the application process.

Ten weeks is not a long time. It feels even shorter when you’re tossed into the deep-end of a top-tier research lab.

If you’re spending your summer as a Research Assistant between semesters, or you’ve graduated and want to get some summer experience before grad school, we have ideas to help you hit the ground running.

This week, we respond to a listener question. Talia wrote:

This summer I had an AMAZING opportunity to do research at my dream school. I am a public health undergraduate and I have experience mostly in qualitative methods and community-based research. This summer I’ll be in a really cool epigenetics lab. I have very little background in biology and even less bench lab experience.For all of you bench lab folks and people in a mentoring capacity, what makes an undergraduate research assistant “coachable”? What habits do you love/don’t love in your RAs?

Great question, and we’re sure Talia is not alone in feeling unprepared for her first foray in the lab. Classes and textbooks are worlds away from the hands-on experience of research.

That’s why we crowd-sourced the traits other scientists want to see in summer research students. If you follow these guidelines, you can expect to make lifelong friends and have a solid letter of recommendation by the end of the summer

7 Habits for Summer Research

Show Humility

If you’re interested in a research career, you’ve probably done well in your classes and often been the smartest person in the room. That’s great for your self-confidence, but it’s going to drive your lab-mates and mentors crazy.

When you start as an undergraduate student research assistant, recognize that no one expects you to be an expert.

They expect you to be teachable.

That means asking questions when you are unsure about the material or getting help on the experiment where things are unclear.

And even if you have some prior experience, no one wants to hear you say “That’s not how we did it in my old lab…” Take a breath and be ready to learn a new way of doing things. Maybe the ‘old way’ was better, but you’ll never know until you try the new way!

Pay Attention to Detail

Research is all about the details, and your ability to focus and follow directions precisely will help you succeed.

Have your mentor observe and offer tips on improving your technique – things like pipetting accuracy or clearly labeling samples will make or break an experiment.

And in the first few weeks, we recommend keeping your headphones in your pocket and out of your ears. Get a few successful trials under your belt before you add other distractions while you work.

Engage with the Science

Having a summer student means an ‘extra set of hands’ in the lab, and that’s valuable, but you should strive to be more than a gel-running robot.

To get the most out of your summer research experience, do what you can to actually understand the work you’re doing.

That means asking about how your experiments fit in with the broader goals of the lab. Maybe you’re working toward a figure in a paper – take the time to see the forest for the trees.

It also means trying to understand the techniques and reagents you’re using. How does this enzyme work? Why are we adding this buffer?

It’s no secret that post-secondary education is a rough road to walk. Graduate students rack up debt for the privilege of working long hours for an unpredictable number of years with very little faculty support.

Well, that might be true in much of the Northern hemisphere, but in a land where mammals lay eggs and snakes eat crocodiles, all bets are off.

Aussie Aussie Aussie, Oi Oi Oi!

Of course, we’re talking about Australia, where PhD programs evolved in ways both unique and inspiring. We talked with Tahlia Perry, graduate student and echidna connoisseur, about her experience earning a degree from the University of Adelaide.

Tahlia describes many differences between a PhD program in Australia and the US, but we want to highlight four:

1. Higher Education is affordable

Imagine not being saddled with tens-of-thousands of dollars in student loans when you decided to start graduate school. Would that change your career choices, or at least decrease the existential dread you feel when you consider graduating and trying to start a family?

In Australia, higher education is supported by HECS-HELP loans – publicly backed funding that you only pay back AFTER you have a well-paying job.

For example, your tuition and fees are covered throughout the course of your training. If your annual salary is below about $52,000, you pay nothing on your loan. If you happen to earn more than $52,000, a graduated repayment scale kicks in and the fees are paid like income tax until your debt is repaid.

2. Almost all PhD students ‘take a year off to do research full time’

It’s called “Honors Year” and after finishing an undergraduate degree (in 3 years, no less), students who want to continue to post-secondary education will take 9 months to focus on research before applying for a PhD program.

Though the projects are time-limited and narrowly focused, it’s a great way to experience research full-time before committing to a multi-year ordeal.

3. A PhD takes just 3 years!

This one really surprised us. We thought we were being bold by advocating for a fixed-term 5 year PhD, but Australia went and raised the bar!

Instead of taking 1-2 years for rotations, classes, and trying to identify a project like we do in the US, Australian applicants include their research plan as part of the application!

By the end of the first year, they’ve done a literature review and designed the study for approval by their committee. Then, over the next two years, they have frequent (required) committee meetings to make sure the research stays on track.

4. Students have a safety net

In addition to regular committee meetings, the students have a safety valve to get help when the PI becomes a problem. During each meeting, the student’s advisor will step out so there’s a space to talk with the remaining committee members about any concerns the student may have about their boss.

It’s not perfect, as the power dynamic between student and faculty will still favor silence, but it’s a start, and one worth considering by other programs.

All in all, we were inspired by Tahlia’s experience, and by all the feedback we got from other listeners to our question about creating a fixed-term PhD.

Here’s a controversial idea: what if graduate school finished on a predictable schedule the way (checks notes) every other academic training program does!

Since kindergarten, your education has had fixed milestones. You knew it would take 12 years to graduate from high school, 4 for college, and 2 for a masters or an associates degree.

Even medical school takes a predictable 4 years, with an additional 3-6 for residency and fellowship, depending on the field.

So why does graduate school take between 4 and 10 years, with a lot of discretion, uncertainty, and mental anguish in between?

Start the Clock

This week on the show, we explore the strange, but sticky, notion that graduate training should be open-ended with no fixed program of development.

If we could sacrifice that sacred cow, we might be able to design some requirements and milestones that feel less arbitrary and can consistently churn out bright, capable scientists.

Imagine a world in which your PhD program was limited to 5 years.  What type of training would build your research skills and make you ready for the workplace?

The fact is, our current system is extremely variable – each student has a unique project with individual successes and failures.  One student might sail through in 3 years, while another is forced to change labs and stays through year 9.

Is the first student smarter? Better equipped to succeed?  

Or is the second student better trained by the additional time?

The reality is that ‘time to PhD’ is not synonymous with skill or training.  And if time isn’t correlated with success, then there’s an opportunity to tighten up the training schedule without sacrificing pedagogical quality.

We share a handful of ideas and concerns about a fixed-term PhD, but we’d love to hear what you think!  Is it worth standardizing scientific training, and where should we start?

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054: The 5 year PhD – #modernPhD Part 1

Breakfast of Champions

Fry up some bacon, pull down a coffee mug, and pour yourself a glass of breakfast. It’s the Morning Smack Imperial Milk Stout from Three Taverns Craft Brewery in Decatur, GA.

With maple-notes and a solid sweetness, this stout drinks like a dessert. And at 8% ABV, it’s probably wiser to save it for after dinner.

You can still sip it from a mug, though!

Sometimes, a graduate school education follows the strait and narrow path through dissertation, postdoc, and faculty position.

And sometimes, it sprouts wings and takes you somewhere else entirely.

That was the experience for Isaac Childress. Isaac began his career as a physics PhD studying high-energy particles. But “Plan A” didn’t turn out exactly as he expected.

Instead he found his muse in board games, and worked to design one of the top-rated games in history.

Isaac Childres, PhD – founder of Cephalofair Games and designer of Gloomhaven

This week we talk to Isaac about the downs, and ups, of his non-traditional career path.

For Isaac, graduate school was a struggle with plenty of disappointments and feelings of failure. But outside the lab, he found inspiration while playing board and video games with his friends. As he played, he started to notice game dynamics that could be better. He imagined story lines and player interactions that would be both fun and challenging.

Near the end of his graduate training, Isaac had designed a game called Forge War and had tested it with friends and reviewers. He set up a Kickstarter to see if maybe, just maybe, he’d earn enough support to actually get it published.

The kickstarter brought in over $100,000.

Isaac followed up Forge War with his award-winning Gloomhaven game, and the rest, as they say, is history. This physics PhD was building worlds, testing game dynamics, and ultimately, delighting players around the globe.

We hear about everything from the time he was kicked out of his research group to the moment he knew his board game Kickstarter was going to be something special.

If you’ve ever wondered if there’s a place for you outside the lab or in the world beyond graduate school, Isaac’s story is sure to inspire.

Just make sure you look before you leap. Isaac concludes, “It’s alway good to have a backup plan before you start pursuing your dreams…”

Find Isaac Childres at Cephalofair.com or on Twitter @cephalofair.

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018: How NOT to choose a career you’ll love

This week’s refreshment comes once again from listener Adrian who shares the TROPICÁLIA American IPA from Creature Comforts Brewing in Athens, GA. It’s the perfect not-too-bitter finish to a sunny spring day.

It’s that time again… Let’s open the mailbag and see what you, our listeners and friends, have sent in!

You asked for it…

We start out with a couple of questions from David, who is considering going back to grad school for computational biology after a successful career as a software developer.

He wants to know where to find ‘a list’ of programs that don’t require the GRE for admissions. Here’s that link for anyone interested in attending grad school without shelling out money for a standardized test.

Bio/Biomedical Graduate Programs Dropping GRE Requirement

He also asks whether he’s likely to face age-discrimination for going back to school in his 30’s or 40’s. While it’s clearly illegal to discriminate based on age in the graduate school application process, we don’t have enough experience to say what he’ll face when he reaches the work force.

If you have a PhD and know how companies or schools consider age in the hiring process, why not let us know in the comments below?

Next up, Allison looks for some advice on the very real emotional and relational impacts of moving to a new place to attend graduate school:

I love listening to the podcast and have been listening for about a year. I am a graduating senior at my University, looking to go to graduate school in the fall. I am looking for advice on moving away from home ( for the first time) during grad school. I am married, so that helps, but I still feel nervous and don’t want to get depressed about moving away. Advice?

We reminisce about the various times we’ve had to move away from ‘home’ to attend college or grad school. It really is a difficult transition, and it’s deeply personal.

Though there’s no way to make that move easy, we recommend putting some effort into establishing new roots by meeting people outside the lab. That might look like a book club, church, sports, or roommates, but keeping busy is key to feeling comfortable in the new place.

We also offer some suggestions for maintaining those vital connections to friends, family, and home. Schedule time to visit, or to have your friends visit you. And even though it might sound weird, schedule time to talk or video chat.

Having that time carved out on a calendar will mean that you won’t go months between connection.

Our last two questions came from this very website that you’re reading right now!

Rui asks whether it’s worth describing a negative advisor relationship when applying to a new program and joining a lab.

And Shilpa, an ambitious undergrad, wants to know how to find research opportunities if they’re not offered at the local university.

We answer all these questions, and a few that weren’t asked in this week’s episode. Be sure to email, Tweet, or post your questions below to keep that mailbag full!

Yellow Haze

It’s pine-pollen season in North Carolina, and it’s tough to appreciate just how gross that is unless you live here. They say a picture is worth 1,000 words, so here’s a drawing someone did on a restaurant table near my office:

Yup, that’s pollen…

And if 1,000 words aren’t enough, here are 1,000,000,000:

It looks like a cross between an anteater and a hedgehog, but don’t let that description fool you into believing it’s easy to spot an echidna in the wild. These denizens of the Down Under know how to hide.

“They’re really understudied in Australia because they’re hard to find in the wild,” says Tahlia Perry, a graduate student at the University of Adelaide who has staked her graduate career on studying these rather shy creatures.

Crowd Sourced Science

“If you do find one you might not see the same animal for a couple of years in the same area. Even if you do put a tracker on them, you sort of know they’re in a couple of meter radius around you but you still can’t find them because they’re really good at hiding and they just disappear into the soil.”

Tahlia’s project aims to understand more than just the distribution and habits of the echidna; she’s studying the foods they eat, their hormone balance, and their microbiome.

And for that, she needs to collect echidna scats (i.e. poo!) for analysis in the lab.

It’s difficult to generate enough data to finish a PhD with just one or two echidna sightings a year, so Tahlia and her team had to think bigger.

They developed an app called EchidnaCSI that users across Australia can download to their phones to participate in the project.

EchidnaCSI allows citizen scientists to snap photos of echidnas they see around the neighborhood or in the wild. Those photos are uploaded to the University’s servers with date and time information, as well as the phone’s geolocation, giving Tahlia vital data about where, and when, echidnas can be found across the continent.

To understand the food choices and microbiome of these creatures, the app-participants can contribute in a slightly less orthodox way…

“I’m getting the general public to basically collect echidna poo for me from across Australia,” Tahlia summarizes with a laugh.

But the value of average citizens dropping poo in the mail is anything but laughable. Tahlia’s team can use those samples “to tell us who that echidna is, if it’s healthy, stressed or reproductively active. And so we can learn more about these wild populations without having to track or capture any of these animals.”

And that’s the point – pun intended – of EchidnaCSI. It stands for “Echidna Conservation Science Initiative.”

When we met Tahlia, she was attending the Citizen Science Conference, where nearly a thousand scientists, teachers, students, and enthusiasts met to talk about the ways that valuable research is assisted by curious and engaged citizens.

Citizen Science is growing in popularity as researchers leverage the crowd to understand bird migration, water quality, insect habits, and weather patterns.

Tahlia sums up the problem, and the solution, perfectly:

“There is no way I’d be physically able to do it myself. Even with a team of scientists there’s no way we’d be able to collect this many sightings, this many scats, or go to these sorts of locations. The budget alone and the time alone – I would be doing this for the next 40 years of my life if I wanted to get thi...