Hey there Brainiacs! I’m DOCTOR Alie Astrocyte. That’s right, I’m a doctor now! But not
that kind of doctor. I finished my Ph.D. in Neurosciences this year, and I’m excited
to move on to a new job and to have more time for Neuro Transmissions! Now that my dissertation
has been submitted, I’ve been reflecting on the journey that brought me here. Looking
back on when I started grad school, I realized there was so much I didn’t know going in.
So I thought I should share some of my thoughts and advice on navigating a STEM graduate program.
Here are four things I wish I’d known before I started grad school - and a few tips and
tricks I thought I’d share with you all. Number one: talk to the more senior grad students.
One of the reasons I chose my graduate program was because it was clear to me that the students
in the program were all independent, relatively well-balanced people, who enjoyed their research
but still had their own personal lives. Everyone in the program was friendly and supportive
to everyone else, and I wish I had taken advantage of that more. I became very close with several
members of my class, and we were an excellent cohort - but I wish I’d spent a little more
time talking to the more senior grad students who were ahead of me in the program. As more
advanced students, they’d already been through qualifying exams, applied for grants and fellowships,
attended conferences, and started their own post-graduate job hunts. As I progressed through
my degree, I found that I was often unsure of particular program requirements and timelines,
and I didn’t know how to navigate sticky situations in the lab, like managing interpersonal
conflict or negotiating authorship on a manuscript. But there’s no reason to reinvent the wheel.
So many of my older peers had gone through similar experiences. If I could do it over
again, I would have taken advantage of our program’s peer advising group, and spent
more time early on asking the older grad students for their advice. I think it would have made
a lot of meetings easier! Spend some time getting to know the more senior students in
your grad program, and see if your program has a peer advising program - those students
can give you insights into building a mentor/mentee relationship, accessing university resources,
and finding a reasonable work/life balance in grad school. Number two: Talk to your advisor,
early and often. Near the end of my graduate degree, I found myself feeling frustrated
because I felt like my advisor and I weren’t on the same page; during the last year, I
realized that our expectations weren’t aligned and I struggled with communicating what I
actually needed and wanted with my research. In retrospect, I wish I had spent more time
talking to my advisor about my research goals and my career plans earlier on, and been more
clear about when I wanted to graduate. A lot of the frustration happened because I wasn’t
sure how to initiate those conversations, and I was partially depending on my advisor
to make the first move and guide me - but every grad student is different, and I should
have taken more responsibility for my needs. There were a lot of exciting things to explore
with the data I gathered, and we wanted to follow up on all of them. If I had been more
direct about my plans, I think our research goals would have been more properly aligned,
and I think I might have graduated sooner, too. So talk to your advisor early and often
about your goals, and make sure you’re both in agreement about what the process of your
degree might look like - obviously unexpected things happen, but having a general overview
will help guide your decisions as you go along. Number three: Ask your advisor to send you
to conferences and to help you get a few publications. I loved my research, and I always enjoyed
working in the lab, but pretty early on in my graduate degree, I started to think I wasn’t
cut out for an academic career. There were a lot of reasons, and I won’t go into them
all here. Sometimes I think, though, that if I’d been more engaged in the research
community at large and spent more time interacting with other scientists in my field and sharing
my data with other researchers, I might have been more open to an academic career. I wish
I’d asked my advisor to send me to more conferences, and I wish that I’d pushed
to publish some of my research sooner. I graduated without any first author publications; we’re
submitting my research to a journal this fall, and I’m *still* not allowed to tell you
about my data. I was depending on my advisor to guide me in this arena, but now I realize
that the things that would be most beneficial to my *advisor’s* career are not always
the things that are most beneficial to *my* research career. By holding off on publication,
it may be a very high-impact paper. But it’s also only one paper. When I talk to friends
who are hunting for postgrad jobs, it seems like the general rule is quantity over quality
when it comes to publications. I understand why my advisor has taken this approach, but
I’m a big supporter of open access and data sharing. I wish that I had pushed harder for
that from the beginning - it probably would have changed the structure of my project,
and would have given me more opportunities to engage directly with the scientific community.
It also would have helped validate my abilities as a scientist; I would have had extra opportunities
to practice my presentation and science writing skills, and I would have gotten more feedback
on my research along the way. Talk to your advisor about your goals and interests, publish
when you can, spend time looking for opportunities to share your research, and ask your advisor
to support your attendance. Number four: I wish I’d learned how to code. As an undergrad,
I had the opportunity to take computer science courses to fill some of the requirements of
my degree - and now, ten years later, I wish I’d taken them! As my research went on and
my data stacked up, I realized how much easier my life would be if I had some basic coding
knowledge in, for example, Python or MATLAB. That knowledge would have made it possible
for me to do a lot of my own statistical analysis, without depending on bioinformatics core employees,
and would have given me a lot more control and personal insight into my data. It also
would have made a lot of data sorting and basic analysis WAY easier, because I could
have used a program like R or MATLAB to process and visualize my data, instead of having to
it manually with Excel and other simple statistical software. So if you’re just starting grad
school and you don’t have coding experience already, see if there’s an introductory
course available to you - or else consider taking an online course or picking up an intro
book on the subject. Learning it early on will literally save you days as you start
to pick apart your data! And now, some lightning round tips for incoming grad students everywhere
- Choose a lab and an advisor that values people and not just projects; even the coolest
research project will be miserable if you can’t stand the research environment and
your advisor sees you as just a tool instead of a person. I’ve put some links to documents
that can make the process a whole lot easier. Invest in at *least* one outside hobby - something
that makes you feel happy and productive - because it will help you get through the rough patches
in your research. I made YouTube videos, kept a garden plot, and did a lot of cooking in
grad school, so even after a bad day in the lab, I had other activities where I didn’t
feel like a failure. Build an outside network of mentors and resources, especially if you’re
considering a non-academic career. Most advisors can only really speak to their own career
experience, so whether you’re leaving academic research or hope to run your own lab one day,
you need to meet and network with others outside of your university. I recommend platforms
like Twitter to help you meet other scientists in a variety of career paths!
Stick to your guns and be clear about your needs. Many advisors will have all kinds of
cool new ideas and projects they want you to work on, but it’s okay to say “No,
I don’t have time for that”. Take care of yourself! Spend time with your
friends and family as much as you can - I had a weekly dinner and D&D game night with
friends that helped keep me sane because it meant I had at least one night to relax every
week. Make the time to prepare healthy meals to fuel your brain and body, prioritize your
sleep, and get some exercise; I rode my bike to lab almost every day for 5 years and just
that 40 minutes of physical activity every day made such a huge difference. And if you
have the resources, see a therapist - they can help you learn the skills you need to
navigate grad school and keep you healthy and productive in all arenas in your life.
You don’t need to be having a crisis, and in fact I think most people would benefit
from a regular “mental health check up” with a therapist! I’m sure there’s a lot
of other great suggestions that I haven’t included here. If you’ve got tips of your
own from your grad school experience, I’d love to compile a more thorough list here,
so leave them down in the comments! Overall, I had an amazing grad school experience. I
loved my lab and my advisor, and I had a fantastic project in an amazing research environment.
I’m glad I had this experience, and I’m excited to be “Dr. Astrocyte” now. The
key thing to remember is that grad school - and any job in STEM - is just that. A job.
You shouldn’t let your position consume your entire identity, so make sure you give
yourself the time and space to be a person outside of the lab, and demand that others
respect it too. You are more than your science, and you deserve to be treated that way. Until
our next transmission, I’m Alie Astrocyte. Over and out.