So you wanna do a PhD? Advice to undergrads

DISCLAIMER: I'm feeling cantakerous and frankly all that buddhist gratitude shit hasn't been working lately. So this post is bitchy and long. Real bitchy and really long. Read at your own risk.

Last week, two of the undergrads working in our lab asked me advice about grad school. At first, yes, I shuddered. I wanted to scream - run, run very fast in the opposite direction.

But then I decided that such a reactionary response is not very helpful nor frankly true to how I really feel. Instead of saying, "Don't do it," I sincerely asked her, "Why she wanted to go to grad school?"

Beaker, the undergrad, wanted to get the highest level of education possible and she didn't feel it was enough to get an undergraduate degree or even a Masters. Beaker was the first in her family to go to college . I asked her what her expectations were for the end of grad school, she said that she did not want to be an academic.

The second undergrad who asked me about grad school, SoYoung, just loves doing science. She's the one I worry the most about. I've seen so many colleagues of mine come to grad school with a true enthusiasm, curiousity, and love of science only to leave disillusioned with academia. In at least two cases, the supervisor was to blame. The others...who knows it was probably some combination of the institution, the supervisor, life events, and the academic environment.

These two made me think a lot about my own situation and whether if I knew what I know now, would I go to grad school to do a PhD. The honest answer is, "I don't know."

So here is my advice on how I might go about figuring out what type of school and supervisor to consider if I were an undergraduate again. I know that there are probably a lot of people who have given advice. But I thought I would throw my two cents in anyway.


1. Make an active decision about your future.

From what I've seen and read, when undergrads ask current or past PhD students advice about grad school, the most common piece of advice is, "Don't do it."

I don't think that this advice is really useful, if the student has already made an active choice. Too many students do grad school because they don't know what else to do or are just scared to leave the system. So the advice, "Don't do it," is really someone asking "Are you making an active choice or is it because you don't know what else to do?"

Anyone past the age of 21 years old who is old enough to drink, drive, and vote (hopefully not in that order) is old enough to make active decisions about their immediate future. "I don't know what else to do" is not an active decision. If you don't know what else to do, take a year off, travel or work, but don't just go to school because in the end you will regret it.

2. Why the fuck do you want to do a PhD?

The biggest question you need to ask yourself is "Why do you want to do a PhD?" If the answer is, "What's one more PhD? (This was the answer given to me by one Masters student in a neighbouring lab.) Not good enough, dumbass. And frankly, I don't care if you do your PhD, but you should.

In 5-6 years when you're done your PhD and you go looking for a postdoc cause remember there are 90,000 of us in the USA - it will matter to you. Or when you've realized that that less than average friend of yours who left college with an undergraduate degree, now owns a house and goes off to Europe for 2weeks every year with their gorgeous partner, and all you have is a stupid degree and a really bad headache. Oh fuck it will matter. Or when you're finished the 10th postdoc and still looking for that t-t position. So ask yourself do I really want this higher education.

This question forces you to become an active participant in your career trajectory.

Remember, that if you are interested in a PhD, at some level, you are trading off reproductive success and lifetime earning success. A typical PhD takes 5-6 years and sometimes 7 years. That's a lot of time in your your adult life to be choosing to have your head in the sand.

If an academic position is something you're chasing, good for you, but then understand the game. Yes, academia is a game and the rules aren't hard to figure out. What matters is pedigree and publications. So set yourself up for a win. (See the next advice).

Nowadays there seems to be a belief that you have to do a PhD to get a job. This is such bullshit. If a non-academic position is something you are interested in, do you really need that PhD, if so, what type of position are you interested in - industry, consulting, government work? Again talk to people in those places and ask them what's important then go out and get it.

3. Mobility and the size/level of school.

Because academic success is in large part a result of pedigree, you will have more mobility after your PhD if you go to a BigMFSchool. Most undergrads are naive and think that the supervisor's research should match their own interest. Yes, in some ways this matters because you'll be doing it for 6-7 years, but ultimately you will discover that the subject of research doesn't matter as much as the sociology of the department, university environment, and ultimately academia.

At the end of the degree, if you go to a small unrecognized school, your vertical mobility is less elastic. If, however, you go to a big school, in a lab whose supervisor is the latest thing since sliced bread, then for your postdoc, you can go to that small school, BUT you have the opportunity to also go to a large school. If you go to a small school, you'll have to be the superstar of a small pond to have that kind of vertical movement.

What are you going to do if you don't become that major league baseball player? If you leave a BigMFSchool with a PhD in hand, chances are you have more mobility outside academia. I'm sorry but that podunk school in the middle of nowhere'sville doesn't carry as much weight to the outside world as say BigMFUniversity does. Think about that when you're serving a non-fat soya latte at Starfucks in the same SmallTown you did your PhD.


4. What you like in research is irrelevant, what you like in a Supervisor is not.

A good supervisor-student relationship is responsible for an enjoyable and successful PhD.

For fuck's sake, make sure that you interview the Supervisor as much as they interview you. In order to do this, you need to be clear about what you value and expect in a supervisor. I'm talking specifics, none of this vague nonsense. So read about mentorship in academia - there are tons of blogs and other places like Sciencemag and Nature Careers and make a list.

Identify if the Supervisor is interested in your career and how are they going to help you. Don't work with someone who has no investment in the work you are doing. Make sure that person is honest about their investment in you. Set up a written but FLEXIBLE agreement about the expectations of progress during your grad career. Revisit this every year.

If you want independence in your question, experimental design, and analysis then think hard about taking a project that is funded by a grant. Ask about the flexibility of the "specific aims." Ask to read the grant - and yes, you can do this.

Ask about authorship rules and publication expectations. Conferences and travel expenses (who pays). If you have field work or lab work, how will this be funded? Will you have a chance to see the budget? If they will support you for 4 years what happens in the 5th, 6th year???

Get everything in writing, especially stuff about funding and authorship.

Find out how this supervisor deals with life events in his/her student's lives. You may think nothing will happen, but fuck...

Tenure. If the supervisor of interest, is a young prof seeking tenure - it could go either way. It could be good in that publications and grants will be important to them and thus if you are in their lab you are how they get this stuff. But it could also be be bad and exploitative. You need to decide. My personal feeling is that if I were to do this again, I would look for someone who is seasoned. Think pancakes. When you make them, what happens to the first one?

Don't work with two bosses. Or if you do - follow the money.

Lastly, you want to embark on a research career in whatever form that might be? Then start now. Get the names and emails of previous students who left happy and disgruntled and start asking questions about the Supervisor. Look at the publication records of the most recent students - where did they publish? How many? In which journals? Were they on other papers that came out of the lab? Where did these people end up? Academia? Industry? Does this match with your career trajectory?

I once told a student to run very far away from her potential supervisor. None of his PhD students have ever ended up in academia. Many left their MSc. degrees quite bitter. Did she listen? No she insisted that her relationship would be different. If you are going to douse yourself in some hot and sticky self-delusions, don't cry about how stuck you get at the end. Listen and read between the lines.

5. Genotype x Environment

The collegial environment matters to your growth as a scientist even if you're not interested in academia. It includes two things: the intellectual and social aspects of a school.

Intellectual Environment:

I wouldn't go to SmallUniversity, if you paid me an incredibly high stipend and especially not if I came with my own funding. As a grad student (and postdoc) the environment here is an intellectual vacuum. There are grad students and faculty but never the twain shall meet in a discussion group (unless it is for course credit).

Here faculty are not interested in mentorship but only in shameless self-promotion and the fulfillment of a bare minimum of teaching requirements. Seminars, discussion groups, joint lab meetings, and journal clubs are the life force of a biology department. It is where you have a chance to meet people doing science from a totally different pov. Because a lot of this was critical discussion of papers at LargeUniversityinCanada, I learned how to read science by watching and hearing how faculty did it. You need this as a grad student.

Here, at SmallUniversity, I started a discussion group, in the same vein as one that had a rich history of attendance by faculty, postdocs, and students at LargeUniversityInCanada. The response was muted. And only a small proportion of grad students came. All the postdocs attended but that's because we were starved for intellectually stimulation. Oh sure they have "lunch-time seminars" at SmallUniversity, but these are really just masked faculty meetings where everyone listens 'attentively' to the Godfather pontificate about the latest toy. Price of admission: Your balls in his purse.

Go to a lab meeting. Here is where you will get a chance to see how your chosen Supervisor interacts with his/her students. How interactive is the lab? Are they critical or just soft about the work. Critical is essential in a lab group.

Seminars. These are where you get to hear about work that has really impacted the scientific community or in some small way impressed either the grad students or faculty. The second reason this matters is it will become the base of your network. When a seminar speaker comes to a department, you can meet with them and should. Day1, as a PhD student you should be thinking about building your academic network. Who knows where this could lead? Collaborations? A postdoc? So find out who has come in the past to these things? Look at the publication record of the past speakers because this will tell you about the level of science that your university of interest does. You can ask for this information from the person who has coordinated these events or even the secretary in the department. One advantage of a BigMFSchool, is that they don't have difficulty attracting speakers. Here at SmallUniversity, I've heard grad students complain about how hard it is to get speakers and then the expense at bringing them to a place in the middle of nowhere. And I think as a result, the Biology seminar series here is spotty at best.

Funding creates the environment. If I had to do grad school all over, as a Canadian I would choose to go to a grad school in Canada over a school in the US, simply because the funding situation. In the US, it's really difficult to get grants partly because the grants are large and there are so many people chasing money. Although the typical grant is $150,000 (subtract off ~50% for university overhead), the chances are slim, between 7-12%. Furthermore, most of that grant tends to go to salaries. As a direct consequence of this boom-bust cycle of funding, I feel that there is an atmosphere of self-preservation and intense competition within labs, departments, and US schools.

In Canada, the average grant is between $35,000-40,000, but the chance of getting that is 77%. It's a more sustainable system. Labs don't crash and burn if they don't get renewed because they don't grow to unsustainable sizes when they get funded. A second difference between Canada and the US is that NSERC funds a lot more graduate students. This really makes a difference. At SmallUniversity, the money is in the hands of the PI and as a result so is the power. Money in your hands means that no one can leverage that against you. If you come with your own funding, you have more power and thus options. In my mind, money in the hands of graduate students is better spent and way more democratic.

Social environment:

I'm not going to talk about the obvious social life of grad students because as a potential grad student coming in you can easily find out about this. Instead, I'm going to talk about the atmosphere. The soft selection so to speak of the department. Walk around and look at the walls of the department and the different labs. What's on the walls - what's being highlighted? Only posters from scientific conferences? Lab photos of people in a social context? Or both? How does this fit with what you want out of the PhD experience?

How is the departmental space organized. Where are the faculty offices? Where are the grad students housed? postdocs? Walk down the hallways. Are the doors to the faculty offices open or closed? At SmallUniversity, the faculty are segregated from the students and postdocs and the doors are never open. This reflects the accessibility and interaction of the faculty with the grad students or postdocs. In other words, here, it is limited at best. At LargeUniversityCanada, the faculty and grad student offices are interspersed and the doors are always open. There it was encouraged. In the grad student offices, who shares with whom? Is it lab focused or more interactive so that there is a mix of labs? While at LargeUniversityInCanada, I learned a ton from my office mates, most of whom were not in my lab.

***********************************************************************************
None of this advice matters, because no matter how much you tell someone that they're in for a bumpy ride, they think that they are special, the exception.

Don't lie to yourself about how important or smart you think you are. Because you're no different than the rest of us.

Stay humble, always.