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.
