REGGIE >> Hello everyone this is future PhD Dr. E speaking and this is another
episode of putting the you back in grad school. Today's episode will be a little
different. In the previous three episodes I was in the studio and this
episode I'm on campus because we're gonna talk about life as a University of
Michigan grad student. So let's get into it!
So for this episode we're gonna break it up into three the first part is gonna be
life I was a beginning graduate student or life in your first two years of your
masters or PhD program. Then for part two is going to be life as an intermediate grad
student and finally it's gonna be life as a master's grad student. First two years for
masters and PhD students are pretty similar and you're probably gonna do a
lot of class work and with that in mind I'm just gonna show you a little tour of
North Campus
REGGIE >> Right now I'm in the EECS building EECs is an acronym for EECS which is the
combined building for Electrical Engineering and Computer Science and
has three levels and I kind of like this building because it's very new. One thing
I like about University of Michigan is all buildings are open 24/7 so you have
a lot of choice when to study so I personally like to mix it up and we're
gonna show you an example one of the rooms in the EECS building. This is a room
in the EECS building and I used to study here a lot especially for exams. One of
the reasons why I like this building is you see all this space you can just
expand you can put your laptop you can put your backpack and while you're
studying notes all in one place. It's fairly quiet and it's kind of a
hidden gem because a lot of people at least when I was studying weren't here. We also have
like a bunch of outlets like you can see an outlet right here.
And there's a bunch of boards so you can practice and you can get more familiar
with the material. Right now I'm in the Duderstadt Building and I like that you
type building because it's kind of a one it's kind of all in one shop and you
have Mojo which is basically where you get your coffee and your snacks. You of course
have a library and you also have some storage room you have access to.
dual screen computers. Even when you're studying you probably want some time to
maybe chill or maybe have time to express yourself and Duderstadt has all
that. I'm currently walking into the first floor where we have underground
library if you really want to be quiet and really want to focus and there's also a game
room. Unfortunately the game room is closed on weekends I didn't know that but
here is a glimpse of what the game room is about. We have Red Dead Redemption we have any
game friendly probably from the 1980s to present. We have an old dragon large-scale
board game or a little cooler as well and they also have other video
games they have board games they have table top games they have pretty much anything
you want and I think it's a pretty fun room I've been here a few times so yeah.
If you ever come to Michigan come Monday through Friday.
This is still Duderstadt. I wanted to show the other cool
services and features due to offers. This is a visualization - you can
do a lot of cool 3d things this student right here is using a locking script for VR.
major to work with this if you have interests you can definitely try and
control this result and this is the fabrication studio. These machines are 3d
printers and here's an example of all the various things you can print.
All you need is be a student and basically you just have to have your design and the
materials and they basically let you print for free. So that was a fun
little distraction and I only included it because I wanted to give you
perspective students a glimpse on what you can do when you're not studying for
classes all the time and with that we're going to go to the differences in class
site between undergrad and grad school fair warning this next series of footage
is a bit old as in like last Friday this is Sunday and I know when we record
it because the rooms are currently being booked on Sunday. So let's see the
differences
So one thing you should know about grad school is class sizes are significantly
smaller. For example I'm about to show you a lecture hall.
So in this lecture hall you can see you a space for around 500 to 600 students.
And now I'm about to show you the size of a graduate school class. This is the
auditorium for classes for graduate students for chemical engineering at
University of Michigan. As you can see there is significantly less seats and
there's a significantly smaller room and that's primarily because in graduate
school there are far less students so you can practice your skillsets more
deeply than broadly.
So in your second year of the PhD and definitely your third year don't you
focus more on the research component of your PhD because you're done with classes.
Right now I'm going to show you in CRC. So this is in CRC as you can see it's
pretty big and this is building 28 to my left is building 32 and this is only a
slight fraction of it. CRC used to be the Pfizer building and since then
it has been converted to the various research labs at University of Michigan
there's chemical engineering there's electrical engineering
there's biomedical engineering. There's a lot of engineering labs here
in addition there are also a lot of dental labs there's a lot of medical
doctors that work here so it's CRC is a great place to do interdisciplinary
research. So one of the biggest components of being a PhD student
specifically is research and right now this is my lab. This is the Thurber lab and
what we do is a lot of biomedical research and it's pretty empty right now
because it's pretty early it's around 9:30 ish and yeah I'm just gonna give you a
little tour of the labs. Over here is my lab bench. Everyone's gone because it's
been Sunday except for one person. This is Howla he's part of my lab.
One thing you should think about when choosing a lab is good facilities I'm
the Thurber lab is pretty new so we have all the facilities we need to do
good research that's not to say bad facilities can make or break your lab
experience but good facilities can definitely speed up your research
and. So this is the office here and you want to make sure as
a grad student a PhD student specifically you have an office all to
yourself because you definitely want a personal space we can just think about
things. Not all schools provide offices but you definitely should want an office so you
can definitely talk to your um flatmates, have some personal time to
think, also have some personal space to relax just because you're gonna be
spending a lot of time in the office and you want to make sure that you're
comfortable.
As I mentioned in my previous videos for getting a PhD usually
contributes to the field and one of the ways you do that is by presenting
posters, behind me is my lab poster. We're about to flip it over. This is
my labs poster we have three main research thrusts which is drug
distribution pep to engineering and diagnostic imaging agents what I think a
good poster should do is give you a very non-technical explanation of what you're
doing and how it works. For example I'm gonna focus on orally
available imaging agents because this is my project specifically basically we
want to use infrared light that is highly orally available which means you
can take it as a pill. They can bind to
a disease target and you can also see it under light. And over here you
can see that a white light this is a mouse without cancer under
white light you can see the tumor but if you have your infrared fluorescents you
can see the tumor pretty well. And the whole point of this is we want
to see how early we can detect the tumor. And now I'm going to give you a
slideshow
In the last few years of your PhD experience you are looking less into
research and you're looking more into mentoring and going to the next steps.
And for the mentoring aim you're teaching undergraduates how to do
research and you're also mentoring firsts and possibly second year PhD
students how to become more productive. In the next steps you might be walking
into academia as a postdoc you might be looking in the industry and the
possibilities are endless. As I mentioned in the earlier videos getting a PhD
opens a lot of doors and with the PhD hand or almost in hand you're starting to
look for opportunities you're interested. And that's the end of this week's
episode. Next week's episode we're going to talk about the cool things you can do in Ann Arbor and
the surrounding areas so this is future PhD Dr. E signing out.