Nature article on being a PhD student
Dec. 14th, 2006 07:57 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
dracodraconisSource: News @ nature.com
The full text of the article is inside the Lj cut.
How to get a PhD
Evaluating PhD progress both highlights accomplishments and suggests daunting challenges ahead.
Mhairi Dupré
There's a book handed down in my lab from previous graduate students called "How to get a PhD". It can be boiled down to five steps: 1. Become a postgraduate. 2. Choose project question. 3. Get data. 4. Write thesis. 5. Pass thesis defence. But a PhD is more than getting your mates to call you 'doctor'. (Although that does have a ring about it...) PhD students need to make themselves known to the scientific community, they need to learn many different skills that make them employable as a postdoc, and most of all, they need to publish.
A publication record is the scientific yardstick by which potential employers and funding bodies will measure your ability. Sometimes I feel disheartened by this. What if my experiments are valid and interesting but the laborious nature of the research requires five years to produce a paper rather than one? What if I'm great at designing experiments, thinking laterally and interpreting results but can't extract DNA to save my life? Good experimental design and interpretation are important for a principal investigator, but before you become one you need to generate data and publish. Then, finally, you will reach that level where you don't need to work in the lab anymore.
To get a PhD one must also have a lot of determination and commitment. This means not just putting up with a lab mate's obsession with David Bowie, but getting out of bed every morning (ok, afternoon). Scientists certainly won't be doing it for the money. There are ups and downs to graduate life, and an awful lot of the time I feel really rubbish. When my experiments repeatedly fail, I feel incompetent. When I know I'm not putting in enough work, I feel inadequate. And when I compare myself with the other students who seem to have a new paper every time I talk to them, I feel like eating my own lab book. This is where one's colleagues and lab environment come into play.
The people I work with have a great influence on whether I enjoy my PhD. When colleagues are kind, open, helpful and happy, it can really ease the pain of 'I-should-have-known-better' experiments and 'did-I-forget-to-add-reagent-X?' results. I feel that I'm not alone and this makes a whole lot of difference. I spend lengthy amounts of time telling myself not to be scared to admit when I don't know or understand something — with helpful colleagues you can ask straight away if what you are doing is OK. Otherwise it's easy to get discouraged and end up going a long way down the wrong path.
My PhD is also time to discover who I am, what I like, and what I want to do with my life. At the moment running, learning Japanese and organizing the departmental Christmas party are taking most of my time, so if some things are going badly I have other areas of my life that are going well. You can't completely separate work and non-work during your PhD, or at least I can't. I find myself thinking of experiments to do in the middle of the night, and during the day, I wonder about what to cook for dinner and if I remembered to lock the door.
What has this year taught me? After doing my PhD for 12 months I feel better about quitting the previous one. I know where my experiments are going and I can talk to my supervisor whenever I want; people are helpful and it's exciting coming to work most days — things are very different from my previous lab. I'm still not particularly confident, though. At the end of my first year I am more aware of how much work a PhD requires. One thing they don't tell you before starting graduate school is how deceptive time can be— four years, I thought. That's ages. Now I realize that I have only three years left in which to stop pipetting around and get something done!
So, as I look back over this year, I'm grateful for a second chance at a graduate degree and I'm glad I've survived so far. As I look to the near future, I'm worried but also excited about where my project is going, not to mention my life in general. Will I get an academic position one day? Will I be in Europe or elsewhere?
To mark my progress against the checklist: 1. I'm a postgraduate, check. 2. I have a question, check: what am I doing here? Scientifically, I hope to understand more about the evolution of leaf development — although there are many research questions I'd like to answer! 3. Data collection— I just hope I can manage it in time. The next steps, writing a thesis and defending it? That's the easy bit!
Mhairi Dupré is a first-year PhD student in evolutionary developmental biology at the University of Oxford, UK.
The full text of the article is inside the Lj cut.
How to get a PhD
Evaluating PhD progress both highlights accomplishments and suggests daunting challenges ahead.
Mhairi Dupré
There's a book handed down in my lab from previous graduate students called "How to get a PhD". It can be boiled down to five steps: 1. Become a postgraduate. 2. Choose project question. 3. Get data. 4. Write thesis. 5. Pass thesis defence. But a PhD is more than getting your mates to call you 'doctor'. (Although that does have a ring about it...) PhD students need to make themselves known to the scientific community, they need to learn many different skills that make them employable as a postdoc, and most of all, they need to publish.
A publication record is the scientific yardstick by which potential employers and funding bodies will measure your ability. Sometimes I feel disheartened by this. What if my experiments are valid and interesting but the laborious nature of the research requires five years to produce a paper rather than one? What if I'm great at designing experiments, thinking laterally and interpreting results but can't extract DNA to save my life? Good experimental design and interpretation are important for a principal investigator, but before you become one you need to generate data and publish. Then, finally, you will reach that level where you don't need to work in the lab anymore.
To get a PhD one must also have a lot of determination and commitment. This means not just putting up with a lab mate's obsession with David Bowie, but getting out of bed every morning (ok, afternoon). Scientists certainly won't be doing it for the money. There are ups and downs to graduate life, and an awful lot of the time I feel really rubbish. When my experiments repeatedly fail, I feel incompetent. When I know I'm not putting in enough work, I feel inadequate. And when I compare myself with the other students who seem to have a new paper every time I talk to them, I feel like eating my own lab book. This is where one's colleagues and lab environment come into play.
The people I work with have a great influence on whether I enjoy my PhD. When colleagues are kind, open, helpful and happy, it can really ease the pain of 'I-should-have-known-better' experiments and 'did-I-forget-to-add-reagent-X?' results. I feel that I'm not alone and this makes a whole lot of difference. I spend lengthy amounts of time telling myself not to be scared to admit when I don't know or understand something — with helpful colleagues you can ask straight away if what you are doing is OK. Otherwise it's easy to get discouraged and end up going a long way down the wrong path.
My PhD is also time to discover who I am, what I like, and what I want to do with my life. At the moment running, learning Japanese and organizing the departmental Christmas party are taking most of my time, so if some things are going badly I have other areas of my life that are going well. You can't completely separate work and non-work during your PhD, or at least I can't. I find myself thinking of experiments to do in the middle of the night, and during the day, I wonder about what to cook for dinner and if I remembered to lock the door.
What has this year taught me? After doing my PhD for 12 months I feel better about quitting the previous one. I know where my experiments are going and I can talk to my supervisor whenever I want; people are helpful and it's exciting coming to work most days — things are very different from my previous lab. I'm still not particularly confident, though. At the end of my first year I am more aware of how much work a PhD requires. One thing they don't tell you before starting graduate school is how deceptive time can be— four years, I thought. That's ages. Now I realize that I have only three years left in which to stop pipetting around and get something done!
So, as I look back over this year, I'm grateful for a second chance at a graduate degree and I'm glad I've survived so far. As I look to the near future, I'm worried but also excited about where my project is going, not to mention my life in general. Will I get an academic position one day? Will I be in Europe or elsewhere?
To mark my progress against the checklist: 1. I'm a postgraduate, check. 2. I have a question, check: what am I doing here? Scientifically, I hope to understand more about the evolution of leaf development — although there are many research questions I'd like to answer! 3. Data collection— I just hope I can manage it in time. The next steps, writing a thesis and defending it? That's the easy bit!
Mhairi Dupré is a first-year PhD student in evolutionary developmental biology at the University of Oxford, UK.
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Date: 2006-12-14 04:06 pm (UTC)Progressing towards no. 3 here, and have a fair bit done on no. 4. No. 5 doesn't worry me much, after some of the presentations and meetings I've done with my startup and here at my current job.