Hello PhD

Do you hear it? It’s the sound of hopeful scientists frantically typing out their grad school applications!

They’re pondering the best format for a CV, scouring University websites to learn more about each graduate program, and begging their research advisors to PLEASE make the time to write that letter of recommendation!

The silence you hear is the sound of trepidation as they sit down to write their personal statements….

This week on the show, we unpack the essential elements of a grad school application, and what you need to know before you begin.

During application season, you might be short on time and long on things to do. We get it.

That’s why we’ve condensed our application advice into one, easy to listen, episode. Here are the essentials:

Where to Apply?

Grad school applications are expensive: they cost both money AND time.

Even if you happen to have enough money to apply to 20 or 30 schools, you probably don’t have the time.

And we recommend that you limit your applications to places you’d actually like to go. Graduate school is a multi-year commitment, and you shouldn’t apply to schools that can’t teach you what you want to know.

It’s better to apply to the few programs you really want to attend than to get into a school that doesn’t match your interests. Even if you get in, you’ll be stuck in a research track you never really wanted.

For more on this important subject, see Episode 101: HelloPhD Guide to Grad School Applications – Knowing When, and Where, to Apply with Dr. Beth Bowman

The CV

Applications will require your CV. It should be composed in reverse-chronological order, with your education and most recent research experiences first.

Remember: any lab experience you list in your CV should have a matching letter of recommendation later in the application.

And if you happen to have publications or presentations at major conferences, be sure to list those with your own name in bold font so that the reviewer can quickly spot your name in the longer list of contributors.

Your Transcript

Here’s some good news: biomedical PhD programs are less focused on your GPA than other programs might be. Reviewers are MORE interested in whether you have experience doing research in a lab or in the field.

That said, they want to see that you’ve gained the background you need to succeed. That usually means coursework in advanced sciences like molecular biology, biochemistry, and organic chemistry.

If you don’t have this experience, or your GPA is lower than you’d like, it’s not the end of the road. Use the Personal Statement to make a case for your readiness, in spite of some gaps in your transcript.

For more, check out Episode 152. How Do I Explain the Bad Grades On My Transcript?

Personal Statement

This is the trickiest section for most students. How do you describe your interest in research and affinity for the program without resorting to flowery language or flattery?

We recommend describing the overarching theme your prior research lab has ...

The only thing harder than hiking for three hours into a remote boreal forest is realizing you forgot your sample kit back in the lab.

For many researchers, running out of a reagent means walking down the hall to borrow more from a neighboring lab, but field researchers don’t have that luxury. They may be hours away from their labs, and miles away from the van.

That’s why planning is so important.

This week, we learn the three T’s you should remember to pack on EVERY trip.

Dr. Sara Vero, PhD is a researcher and lecturer in agricultural and environmental science at The Waterford Institute of Technology in Ireland.

Dr. Vero has worked extensively in soil science, water quality, plant nutrition, and land management, and this week, she condenses some of her experience into three topics you’ll need to prepare for your next successful trip.

Tools

The first T stands for Tools – the equipment you’ll need to bring along to complete your observation or experiments.

As you plan your trip, Dr. Vero recommends that you think through the specific tasks you’ll need to accomplish – sampling, field treatments, assays – and compile a checklist of items required for each.

Typically, you’ll need three types of tools:

* Task-specific tools – these are the reagents and equipment you’ll use in your research, like core samplers, chemicals, or metering equipment.* Consumables – the items that get used once and packed out. Think gloves, bags, pipettes, and bottles.* Everyday Carry – personal items and equipment that have multiple uses, like a multi-tool, flashlight, or duct tape.

Make a spreadsheet or checklist, and pack common items in advance. Dr. Vero recommends having clothing and your everyday carry items in a duffel bag in the closet. When it’s time to hit the road, you won’t have to think about (or forget) any of these essential items.

Team

It’s rare for a researcher to go out into the field alone. There’s too much to do, and there’s safety in numbers.

That’s why Dr. Vero recommends thinking through those tasks one more time to identify the right team. She recommends assessing the following considerations:

* Skills – do you have people who are skilled to complete the experiments or observations? Can you learn a new technique, or teach a junior member of the group to expand the skill base of your team?* Labor Requirements – Do you have enough people to complete the tasks on time? In cases where time is limited but the observations are simple, consider recruiting more people from the department to multiply your force.* Availability of Personnel – grad students and postdocs are busy people. Be aware that you may need to give plenty of notice, or scale down your planned experiments based on their availability.

Time

Allowing for enough time to complete the work is a common point of failure for field research. Even if you have a good idea about how long your observations may take, it’s easy to underestimate all of the other time sinks of a trip.

Dr. Vero uses the following equation to estimate the time needed:

Travel Time + Setup + Measurements + Rest + “The Unexpected” = Time Needed

Researchers often forget the latter two items.

Scheduling rest time is important,

When we think of scientists, we often think of the lone researcher plodding away at the bench late into the night.  We imagine Alexander Fleming scrutinizing his penicillium molds or Einstein pondering the latest equation he’s written on the chalk board.

We go a step further when training new scientists: we ask them to complete an ‘independent research project.’  We tacitly perpetuate this notion of the solitary scientist, making her own success or failure.

The side effects of this lone-wolf approach to research are painfully manifest: projects that stall on a single experiment, money wasted teaching everyone the same techniques, and students who burn out due to frustration, lack of direction, or just plain loneliness.

In Part 3 of our goal to modernize the PhD process, we propose a radical 180º turn from the independent project.

Let’s turn science into a team sport.

Though ‘group work’ was a dreaded sentence in your undergrad classroom, teams themselves are essential in most modern industries.  Can you imagine a manufacturer who expected one person to think up a product, design the machines, assemble the widget, box it up, and launch an ad campaign?

Yet that’s our vision of an ‘independent scientist.’  A scientist needs to identify the important questions in his field of study, design experiments, execute them, publish the results, and score grants from various funding agencies.

Imagination Laboratory

If we draw parallels to the lab, a new way of doing academic research arises.  We see a cohort of students, postdocs, technicians and PIs who team up to solve the same problem.  They map out the figures for a paper, and then divide up the work.

Instead of laboring away alone at the bench, experiments become an intricate dance.  An undergrad prepares the media while the PI (who has good ‘luck’) makes the clone.  A tech transforms the bacteria, inoculates the flasks, and teaches the undergrad to do a miniprep.

A grad student, who has flawless aseptic technique, is responsible for transfecting the mammalian cells without contamination.  She hands off analysis to the postdoc who has had ten years of experience at the microscope and prefers that quiet, methodical work.

They gather at lab meeting to assess the results of their team effort, and to chart a path through the next week.

Experiment by experiment, figure by figure, they divide and conquer the paper and publish faster than their competitors.  Everyone works to her strengths.  No one is left to flounder when an experiment fails.

In fact, it’s in every person’s interest to help the others.  Never again does a student sit stymied by the transfection that just won’t work; the whole lab needs that step to succeed, and everyone pitches in to diagnose the problem and break the bottleneck.

Of course, this system has its pros and cons.  While it’s possible to move more quickly from idea to paper, it requires a level of coordination that won’t happen by accident. And PhD programs would require a tweak to graduation criteria.  First-author papers would no longer be common, or meaningful, in such a team-based approach.

Tell us what you think – would you be willing to team up with others in your lab?  Have you ever worked in a setting where teamwork was the standard?  Leave a comment below,

It’s 8PM on a Wednesday night, and you’re sitting in a quiet lab all alone. It’s your turn to present during lab meeting on Friday, and that familiar sense of panic starts to set in.

What HAVE you been doing with your time? You flip back through the lab notebook and remember how you spent the first week waiting on reagents. The second week is a blur, and the third week, every dish in the incubator got contaminated for reasons no one will admit.

Now you have a day to try to come up with something… anything… to show for yourself.

Of course, it didn’t have to be this way, and with some techniques from the tech industry, you’ll never have to fret over a ‘missing month’ again.

A Failure to Plan…

It’s no secret that PhDs take a long time. We often lament the frequent failed experiments, but is that really where all of our time is going?

In truth, even when they make concrete plans, many trainees lose months or years to some common lab dysfunctions.

Do you wait weeks to hear back from your PI on a manuscript review or experiment question? Have you lost time waiting for reagents to ship when someone else used them up? How often do you prepare an experiment, then vie for time on a common piece of equipment like microscopes or the mass spec?

Even if you had a plan, these failures in lab-communication can slow or stop your progress.

Make it Agile

Luckily, labs aren’t the only organizations in the world that need to plan and communicate across a team. In fact, industry has developed myriad ways to organize a project based on unique resources and constraints.

In the tech industry, companies often use a process called “Agile” or “Scrum.” It’s an organizational framework focused on producing things customers want (apps, services, products) in less time and for less money.

Traditional planning might include a two year development schedule with detailed steps and checkpoints. But in a field like software where entire sectors might rises and fall in a matter of months, a two-year plan is worthless. Companies that can quickly change strategy and adapt their plan have more chances to succeed.

That’s where Scrum comes in. Named for the huddle behavior in a rugby match, Scrum is marked by frequent team ‘huddles’ to organize the work. The team, facilitated by its ‘ScrumMaster’ or ‘Scrum Leader’, breaks down the work into week-long chunks called ‘Sprints.’

During the sprint, the team gets together daily for a very brief ‘stand-up’ meeting where each member answers three questions:

* What did I accomplish yesterday?* What do I intend to work on today?* What is blocking my progress?

The stand-up meeting may only last 15 minutes, but by the end, each team member will know what the others are doing, and how they can help.

Scrum for Labs

Lisa May was completing her PhD when the dinner conversation with her husband turned to lab. She lamented that there didn’t seem to always be a clear research plan, that lab members were competing for resources, and that there were multiple external forces blocking her progress.

Her husband, a software developer, suggested she look into the planning practices he used at work.

She did, and LabScrum was born.

This week,

All those feelings of excitement and possibility screech to a halt when you walk back into the lab to see your PI glaring over her reading glasses.

She looks at her watch. “Hey, good to see you. So glad you could join us,” she drips with sarcasm.

After missing a beat, you rally. “Yeah, sorry about being a little late. I heard about an information session on internships for grad students and wanted to check it out. It seems like a really great opportunity for me to…”

She cuts you off there. “Well, I’m not sure you have time for internships or information sessions if you aren’t making progress on that paper.”

And just like that, the hope dies within you and you slump back on your lab bench.

No Time To Lose

Sure, the interaction above is fictional, but it plays out in many forms every day. A student, looking for inspiration or skill development in a future career meets an advisor who believes that all time outside of the lab is wasted.

Because of the power dynamic, many students will either stop attending career development events, or they’ll do so quietly and surreptitiously.

Wouldn’t it be nice if you could convince your advisor that, in fact, building career skills doesn’t slow down your progress in the lab?

What if you had the data to show that students who spend time on skill development graduate on time and publish just as much as those who don’t?

Well, your wish has come true. A new paper published in PLOS Biology followed thousands of students across 10 universities over a decade. The researchers asked: does participation in career development events impact the time-to-degree or publication quality and volume?

This week, we talk to Beka Layton, PhD, one of the lead authors on the study, and the Director of Professional Development Programs at UNC Chapel Hill’s Biological and Biomedical Sciences Program. She walks us through the research design, results, and talks about which conclusions are well supported and which were just suggestive.

The study concludes:

Using quantitative data collected from 10 institutions, our current study shows that participation in career exploration and professional development programming did not adversely affect time to degree or numbers of manuscripts published, and, in select cases, even correlated with more productive outcomes. We hope that the data presented herein will assuage concerns of faculty and trainees alike and will lead institutions to incorporate more experiential learning activities into PhD training programs (such as programs described in references

Full disclosure: both Josh and Dan are (very minor) co-authors on the study. We’re not just podcasters, we sometimes do science!

If you’d like to connect with training and development resources near you, check out the NIH’s Office of Intramural Training & Education or the Graduate Career Consortium.

Alternatively, you can start a club or networking group with a few peers at your own university. And when your PI asks why you’re ‘wasting so much time’, you can lay down the facts to support your cause!

You know it. You love it. It’s mailbag time! We answer real listener questions, plus a few questions no one is asking!

Make it Meaningful

The first question comes from Lexi, who is trying to choose between a PhD program that is ‘pure fun’, and one that will have broader impacts:

I will be applying to Ph.D. programs this fall. On one hand, I could apply to applied math or mathematically-oriented Earth science Ph.D. programs where I could work on solving some of the biggest environmental problems we’re facing today. This type of work would entail some more boring daily aspects (like checking for errors in code etc.). On the other hand, I could apply to pure math programs where I know I’d enjoy every minute of the day to day, but my research would feel much less connected from the real world.

Tough, right? Boiling it down: is it more important to enjoy your day-to-day work, or to look back over a career and feel like you made an impact?

We refer back to Episode 144, where we spoke with Marlys Hanson about identifying your ‘motivated abilities. As a refresher, a motivated ability is a skill that you do well and enjoy doing. It’s a fundamental part of your personality, and when combined with your motivated subject matter, operating relationships, and payoff, defines a sort of ‘career fingerprint’ unique to you. When you define those features, you can identify careers in which you’ll excel and be happy.

For Lexi, the day-to-day work will matter a lot, and finding something that aligns with her motivated abilities is key. Finding that alignment in a career is kind of like riding a high-end, carbon fiber, well oiled bicycle. You’ll coast through most days, and have no trouble facing the few up-hill challenges.

When you DO face a longer, steeper challenge on the job, it’s nice to have a broader motivation to help you over the rise.

For example, PhD students may run into failed experiments, cantankerous PIs, or difficult classes. If your passion for human health or environmental impact can help you push through those challenges rather than quitting, then all the better!

But a desire for long-term impact is no substitute for day-to-day proficiency. No matter how much you want to save the Earth or save a life, if your daily work routine grinds against your motivational profile, you’ll quickly burn out.

Postdoc Away

Our next question comes from Srijani, who is thinking ahead:

I’m a PhD candidate in India and after much deliberation, I’ve now decided to go for a postdoc either in the US or Europe. I was wondering if you could talk about the postdoc opportunities that can potentially work for me. I plan to submit my thesis in 2023. 

Though at the time of this writing, 2023 seems like a long way off, we’re actually really happy that Srijani is actively planning the next phase. Landing a postdoc on another continent is not easy, and starting early is key.

One challenge is that most prospective PI’s receive hundreds of emails that start with “Dear Esteemed Scientist, I am interested in…” If your missive lands in that pile, you’ll have a hard time breaking through.

Instead, take the time to research the labs you’re interested in working in, and be specific about why you want to work there. If your email gives even a hint of sounding like a form letter, your chances of getting a reply go way down.

Imagine a tennis ball dropped on cement – it immediately bounces back to your hand.

Now imagine dropping that same ball on a sandy beach.

The bounce of a tennis ball on pavement is a form of resilience, but it’s important to note that resilience is not just an inherent property of the ball.

Context matters just as much.

The Origin of Resilience

This week on the show, we talk with Adina Glickman. She served as the Director of Learning Strategy Programs at Stanford University for 18 years, where she founded The Stanford Resilience Project.  She co-founded and is currently a co-director of The Academic Resilience Consortium. She’s the author of The Resilient Learner: Eight Pillars of Student Success among other works, and is the CEO, Founder, and Academic Coach at Affinity Coaching.

As you can tell, Adina Glickman has spent a lot of time thinking, teaching, and mentoring around resilience. We start our conversation by trying to understand just what resilience means and how it applies in academic settings like graduate school.

“As human beings, we are hard-wired to be resilient. We are born resilient,” Glickman says. She describes how a baby falls many times while learning to walk, but with each attempt, learns something new about muscle movement, the position of the feet, and balance in the inner ear.

Ultimately, the baby’s resilience pays off and she can walk a few steps, then a few more.

And that’s a key component of resilience; it’s not enough to keep trying – you need to learn from the failure.

It Takes Two

But Glickman cautions us not to see resilience as a trait confined to an individual. It’s not enough to expect each person to develop a set of skills.

Instead, resilience comes from the interaction between the individual and his environment – the context in which he fails.

She uses the example of the rubber ball bouncing on pavement or thudding onto a mattress to show that our ability to rebound has everything to do with our environment.

And that’s why she’s worked and written so extensively about how academic institutions, families, and society at large can foster the individual’s ability to bounce back.

This all becomes painfully relevant for graduate students, who are guaranteed to meet failure as they design and run experiments, submit papers for review, and apply for grants. Failure is unavoidable, and so resilience is central to success.

Unfortunately, some students have never had to exercise their resilience. They enrolled in graduate school because perhaps they excelled in their high school and undergraduate training. The failure they face as a grad student may be the first real challenge of their training.

At the same time, many academic institutions aren’t set up to provide a good resilient surface to learn and rebound. The rules and expectations may not be explicit, and impostor syndrome can chip away at our desire to get back up when we fall.

Glickman encourages students, faculty and administrators to talk about their failures in an effort to normalize the experience. She recommends “sharing your own story, sharing your own struggles on a human level.”

Somehow,

In 2011, a whopping 36,000 science and technology grad students earned their PhDs.  That same year, about 3,000 faculty positions were created.  So why did you feel like a failure when you decided to step off the tenure track?

Taking the high road

Scientists aren’t always as rational as we seem.  A rational person would look at the disparity between faculty positions and new PhDs and realize we need to support students and postdocs who choose careers outside of academia.

But there remains a stigma. If you go to industry, you’re ‘selling out.’  If you find a job in policy or outreach, you’re ‘throwing away your training.’  And heaven forbid you take time off to raise your kids!  What gives?

Dara Wilson-Grant, Licensed Professional Counselor

This week on the show, we talk with Dara Wilson-Grant about an article she wrote titled Standing at the Crossroads: When PhDs Abandon the Tenure Track Career Path.  Dara is a licensed professional counselor and associate director of the office of postdoctoral affairs and career counselor at UNC Chapel Hill, and she’s seen the struggle as postdocs come to terms with their “alternative” career plans.

Her article is unique, because it addresses the deeply emotional issues of changing careers.  We’ve trained for years to be ‘scientists,’ so what do we become when we take a job in analysis, accounting, or administration?  How do you know when it’s just a rough couple of months in lab, and when it’s really time to reassess your life goals?  Dara answers all.

Read her blog and get in touch at careersinbloom.com

It’s Friday morning, and you promised your PI a draft of your paper before the weekend. The trouble is, you lost a lot of time this week to distractions.

Monday you had lab meeting and a few other planning sessions. Tuesday you worked from home but got sucked into cleaning the kitchen and folding laundry instead of writing.

You don’t remember why Thursday wasn’t more productive. You started out the day feeling anxious about the deadline, and then spend a few hours (hours?!) online shopping to numb the anxiety.

And here you are on Friday with less than 7 hours left until your deadline and your stress levels are maxed out. So why is it that your main desire is to watch videos on TikTok?

The Cost of Paying Attention

Social media companies are often described as the ‘attention economy’ – each site employing science and psychology to trick you into spending your time and attention online.

But that attention comes with a cost, especially if it’s distracting you from other meaningful work. If graduate students need to read papers, plan experiments, and publish in journals in order to graduate, then every moment spent on Twitter is a minute longer until your degree.

But social media companies aren’t the only culprits here – distractions come both from within and without.

Maybe a noisy open-lab layout draws your attention from your reading, or your phone buzzes regularly with notifications. These are external distractions.

But we can also get distracted by sensations and emotions – that gnawing hunger from missing breakfast, or your recurrent worry when finances get tight.

This week on the show, we unpack the who, what, and why of distractions, and share five strategies for getting them under control.

We base the discussion around Chris Smith’s article 5 Strategies for Writing in Turbulent Times published in the London School of Economics and Political Science Impact Blog. Though the author focuses on writing, the tips apply to any type of focused work you may need to complete.

For more time-management tips, check out these previous episodes:

154. How to Plan Your PhD w/ Hugh Kearns

015: Simple Tricks for Time Management: The Pomodoro Technique

Most graduate students look on their research advisors as a mentor – hoping for guidance on science, career, and life in general.

But even a superstar PI can’t provide that kind of comprehensive mentorship for all students all the time, and those stellar advisors are rare indeed.

That’s why EVERY student needs to think about identifying and building relationships with three distinct types of mentor through graduate school and beyond.

Competing Interests

Let’s face it: your research advisor may care about your development as a scientist, but they also have to worry about how quickly you’ll publish papers, how much grant money you’ve taken up, and what academic legacy they leave when their students and postdocs start their own labs.

That means that any advice they give you may have hints of those other interests. They can’t give an unbiased answer when you ask whether this paper needs one more experiment before publication, or whether a career in industry would be a good fit.

But you can help round out their guidance with advice from other mentors, and this week on the show, we discuss three types of mentoring relationship you’ll want to build.

The Other Science Mentor

It’s really important during grad school to have ANOTHER mentor who can also give you advice and feedback on the specifics of your project and your progress through your training.

For example, maybe you’ve started to write up your results to publish a paper, you give it to your PI to read, and they come back with just “one more experiment” for the seventeenth time. You think it’s a complete story, and by the way, you’re in your fifth year of grad school and really need to get this paper out!

Having another scientist familiar with your work and your field can be a good mediator in this situation. Or maybe you’re just stuck… your PI keeps telling you to repeat some experiment that used to give some cool result but now is going nowhere and you are out of ideas. 

How do you find a Science Mentor? Here are some features to look out for:

* They are knowledgeable about your research* They are in your department (or are easy to connect with to share results)* You enjoy talking to them

This mentor may be the PI of a lab you considered joining, or one of the members of your graduate committee. What’s important is that they understand your work, and can offer advice without the baggage or bias of your own research advisor.

The Career Mentor(s)

How many careers has your research advisor had?

If you answered 1, then you’re in the same boat as most graduate students.

To get a tenure-track faculty position, most scientists leap from graduate school to postdoc to assistant professor. And if that’s the career path you want to follow, your PI will probably have some knowledge to help you get there.

But what if you want to go into industry, or science writing, or entrepreneurship? It’s unlikely you’ll get anything other than blank stares or discouragement from your advisor.

That’s why having one, or more, career mentors is so important. These are individuals who work in the fields you want to work in, or they have the job you hope to achieve someday. Their experience and advice may differ wildly from what your PI would tell you, and that’s exactly what you want.

Good career mentors not only share their experience,