Unsolicited Advice, IV: How to Be a Good Graduate Student

Past installments of Unsolicited Advice dealt with such mechanical topics as how to choose an undergraduate school or graduate school, or how to get into graduate school. (Hell if I know how to get into undergraduate schools.) Now we step fearlessly into somewhat more treacherous territory: how to be a good graduate student. As always, this is one idiosyncratic viewpoint, and others should be offered in the comments.

It’s treacherous, of course, because there is certainly no right way to go about being a good graduate student. Once upon a time, as part of my ongoing campaign to discredit the notion of make-or-break general exams, I had the physics department at Chicago do a survey of their faculty, asking them to give a subjective rating of all the Ph.D. students who had graduated in the last five years (and with whose work they were familiar). We then plotted the resulting scores against how well they did on the candidacy exam. Result: there was a small handful of students who completely dominated on the exam, and were pretty much recognized as excellent physicists, clustered in the corner. Other than that, a complete scatterplot — there was no correlation between test scores and success in physics (among this highly-selected sample). But if you plotted candidacy-exam scores against incoming physics GRE scores, it was almost a perfect correlation. There are some students who are the kind who are really good at physics in an exam-type environment, and who have the ability to carry through that talent to actually doing research. But there are others who struggle with the tests, yet nevertheless are great physicists. And vice-versa: you can be a crappy physicist, whether or not you do well at the GRE’s and general exams.

The point being, there are many ways to be a successful physicist, and a corresponding number of ways to be a successful grad student. So the first piece of advice, possibly too vague to be useful, is: Look to maximize your talents. Typically, your first year or two in grad school you have some flexibility. You’re taking classes (this is written from an American perspective, sorry), and possibly also doing research, but you haven’t necessarily been tied down to a final choice of thesis advisor, or even research field, or even theory vs. experiment. This would be a good time to be honest with yourself — what are you really good at? You might have had your heart set on building the next great particle accelerator ever since you deconstructed your parents’ stereo when you were twelve, but when someone puts a soldering iron in your hand you just can’t seem to stop breaking things. But you did get a perfect score on the GRE. Well, maybe it’s time to face the music and switch to string theory.

But I’m burying the lede here. If I had to concentrate on a single useful piece of advice for grad students, it would be: Take the initiative. The deep truth of grad school is that the transition from undergrad to grad is when you go from primarily being “a student” to primarily being “a scientist.” As a student, your primary responsibility was to do what your professors told you to. As a scientist, your primary responsibility is to do good science. Many students struggle in grad school, especially in the early years, because they are implicitly waiting to be told what to do. Don’t wait — try to figure out what you should be doing, and do it. Check the arxiv in the morning to look for interesting papers. Go to colloquia and seminars, even if you don’t understand them — nobody really understands them, and it’s the best way to get a feeling for what those things are that you should be working toward understanding. Talk to people! Knock on professors’ doors (or, more politely, email them to make an appointment), and chat with them about what they are doing and what you might like to be doing. Even better, talk to senior grad students and — best of all — postdocs! They have more time than professors, and have a better understanding of the situation you are in right now. (When it comes time to apply for postdocs yourself, you’re going to need three letters of recommendation from scientists who know you and your work very well. If you can only think of one or two people who might qualify, you’ve badly mismanaged your time in grad school.) Come up with ideas! A good advisor will set you on a productive path for your first research projects, but that’s no reason why you shouldn’t also be trying to come up with good ideas yourself; at some point that’s going to be your job, after all. And when it comes to the nitty-gritty of actually doing research, whether it’s theory or experiment, don’t expect anyone to hold your hand at every step — use your brain to try to figure out what should be done next. At some point you will sit back and realize that it’s kind of fun. And then it will dawn on you that you’ve passed the threshold toward which you’ve been progressing for quite a number of years — you’re an honest-to-goodness scientist.

We can’t pretend, of course, that being a scientist is just a matter of willpower; you do have to learn some stuff. One of the eternal grad-school dilemmas is how many courses you should take, vs. how quickly you should just devote yourself to doing research. I’m going to have to be wishy-washy here, as there is no right answer, although it’s certainly possible to go too far in either direction. If you dive into doing research without having a proper grounding in coursework, you can end up being an expert in the one particular hyper-specialized thing that you are researching, but be left with a rather fuzzy grasp of all the rest of physics. Not only does a situation like that doom you to a lifetime of sitting in on talks that you don’t understand, but it might prevent you from making crucial connections that would actually be useful in your own work. But contrariwise, it’s certainly possible to spend too much of your time taking classes. Classwork is what you have trained to be good at, and in some ways it’s a comforting environment. But it’s ultimately not the point of why you are in grad school. Likewise, sometimes you will really want to learn some particular subject, but your department doesn’t offer a course in it. Here’s where you should figure out that it’s your responsibility to teach it to yourself. Especially these days, when there are not only five good textbooks but countless reviews on every subject available online, there’s no excuse for waiting for a teacher to come along — see the previous paragraph.

Even once you get past courses and are unambiguously doing research, a similar dilemma presents itself — calculating vs. contemplating. (That would be the theorist’s version of the dilemma, anyway; experimenters are invited to suggest alliterative formulations of “tinkering vs. collecting data.”) Being a scientist is a back-and-forth process, between on the one hand looking at the big picture, learning the basics, thinking deeply, coming up with new ideas, and on the other hand digging into the details, getting your hands dirty, and actually coming up with some tangible results. Science depends on both, although many people are happier on one side than the other. Despite what was said earlier about finding your strengths, here’s a situation where you should make an extra effort to compensate for your weaknesses. You might be someone who loves doing calculations, producing page after page of equations, or file after file of simulation output. But if they don’t add up to an interesting result, people aren’t going to care that much. Or you might have deep and creative ideas about the nature of space and time or high-temperature superconductivity. But if you can’t wrestle those ideas down to some specific calculations, your colleagues aren’t going to be all that impressed. Sometimes, remember, the best ideas actually come about because you are simply fooling around with some calculations for their own sake.

All of this has been necessarily vague, in accordance with the fact that there are many good ways to be a successful grad student. But at the end, the goal (for most people) is pretty concrete: to land a good postdoc. Do keep that in mind. So, no matter what your individual approach to success is, here is the eyes-on-the-prize advice: Be the kind of grad student that people would like to hire as a postdoc. What kind of student is that? Well, just ask yourself what you would be looking for, if you had a pile of promising postdoc applications in front of you. Some people are lucky enough to get general-purpose fellowships that are based simply on their genius; so if the genius thing is working for you, great. More postdocs are hired by some particular person or group, to perform some fairly well-defined kind of research. What those people are looking for is a postdoc who will contribute to their group, whether by being an awesome individual researcher, or by being a useful collaborator. So, be that person. While you’re in grad school, establish a track record of productivity by writing papers. Even better, write good papers — write about things that other people are interested in. What is it about your research or skill set that makes you useful to people hiring postdocs? Become the world’s expert in some hot topic, or the master of some novel technique, along with establishing your broad-based competence. A good postdoc is expected to enliven a research group by being plugged into all the latest good stuff going on in the field, bubbling with new ideas and the energy and know-how to turn those ideas into tangible results. That should be you.

(Certainly, not everyone will become a postdoc, nor should they. One of my best students didn’t even apply for postdocs, after he determined it just wasn’t for him. There are many other directions in which to steer your career after a successful time in grad school, and it pays to keep those possibilities in the back of your mind all along. But I’m not really the one to ask about them.)

To be more concrete yet: Be a finisher. After several years of grad school, what do you have to show for it? Write papers, do analyses, build equipment, finish experiments. Demonstrate beyond any doubt that you can take the project from beginning to end, not just sit around the coffee room and lob probing questions. Give talks! Have something to say, and be confident that other people want to hear it. I’ve actually heard some students say that they love science, but don’t like writing papers or giving talks. That’s like saying you love being a butcher, just aren’t very fond of cutting up animals. (Suggestions for more illuminating similes are welcome.) Writing papers and giving talks is the entire point of what you are doing. Be enthusiastic about it, and while you’re at it, be good at it. There are so many smart people out there who write impenetrable papers or give incomprehensible talks, one good way to distinguish yourself from the herd is to learn to communicate effectively. But it won’t help unless you have something tangible to communicate.

September has long been my favorite month of the year, as campuses come to life with the incoming students, many of them starting off on a new adventure of one sort or another. Go get ’em, tiger.

Update: Many other people, of course, have offered advice on how to be a good grad student. If you know of any, mention them in the comments and I’ll link from here.

54 Comments

54 thoughts on “Unsolicited Advice, IV: How to Be a Good Graduate Student”

  1. @Jason:

    I got that, but I found Sean overstretched it. Just because he likes giving talks doesn’t mean everybody has to, and it’s definitely not ‘the entire point’ of science. Or if it is, then maybe I am working in the wrong field. I would estimate the majority of grad studs doesn’t specifically like giving talks. Telling them that’s the essence of their job is not really encouraging.

    @astropixie

    regarding fellowships, if the organization has a website, look up their board and check them out.

    Best,

    B.

  2. “Many other people, of course, have offered advice on how to be a good grad student. If you know of any, mention them in the comments and I’ll link from here.”

    May I immodestly recommend The Researcher’s Bible? It’s aimed at CS students, but many of the lessons are generic.

  3. B, I see! I just count the efforts to produce a publishable paper as part of the writing part.

    Jason, also as B explained earlier about writing, it has more to do with the extra irrelevant stuff to make your article publishable in a journal. Most of the writing effort goes into the irrelevant stuff. This then comes at the expense of doing research for your next project.

    I am writing a paper right now. It took me a few hours to write about my results. As far as communicating my results to the scientific community is concerned, what I have is good enough. But you can’t write a journal article that says:

    “I’ve done some computations on problem X and found result Y.”

    even if everyone knows the details about the problem X. You still need to write a decent article containing an introduction, examples, a conclusion etc. By doing so you make your article accessible to non experts. But that may not be your intention. If you wanted to do that, then you would prefer to write a big review article for that purpose.

  4. With regard to the comments about writing and giving talks, science is not about you understanding nature, it is about us understanding nature. It is certainly fun to learn more about the world, but science is a collective enterprise, and “science” only really happens when you communicate your findings to the rest of us — and that means papers and talks, unfortunately.

    I know that the original commenter understands this, but it is a crucial point — the thing we call science is about more than simply deepening one’s own understanding.

    Being the sort of person who has read everything and thought deeply will make you valued by your colleagues (“X is just great to talk to”) but the problem as a grad student or a post-doc is that the post-doc or assistant professorship you want will be offered to you be people who are NOT your immediate colleagues.

    It is certainly possible to write too many papers, and many papers are written that need never be written, but you have to produce, rather than simply absorb and ruminate.

  5. There is a crucial distinction between “loving science,” an avocation that is open to everyone in the world, and “being a scientist,” a vocation that is very rare and precious and from which certain results are expected. (Although one certainly hopes that participants in the latter also participate in the former.) The whole point of being a scientist is, indeed, writing papers and giving talks.

  6. Random advice for grad students:

    Keep a list of talks you’ve given, title, setting, date. You’ll never be able to remember all of them when it’s time to apply for jobs.

    Actually, just keep your CV updated.

  7. Regarding the papers and talks: there is always the advertising campaign aspect of it, especially at early stages, but that is missing the point. The main, completely egotistic, reason for writing papers and giving talks is getting feedback. That feedback is irreplaceable, that’s why it is so common to send preprints out to friends before they appear on the arxiv, to talk to a bunch of your friends and colleagues at various stages of any project, and generally to seek out any form of useful feedback you can. The talks and papers are just the tip of the iceberg, and I cannot imagine getting anywhere without them.

  8. The whole point of being a scientist is, indeed, writing papers and giving talks.
    Perhaps appending this may be knowing how to write well and providing good, clear, and precise oral presentations. And there is a difference: reading a paper is not a good talk, nor is producing a conversational essay writing well.

  9. Yes, I see plenty of things on that list that I should have done when I was in grad school. I’m not sure doing ALL of them is humanly possible, but whatever.

    I would add, every grad student should also take advantage of being a student with few if any responsibilities for a few years. Go skiing mid-week when there’s fresh powder and no lift-lines. Use profanity when you TA a lab section. Sign up for a conference just because it’s in an exotic location. Play foosball–everyday. Drink.

    Odds are good you’ll have to leave academia someday, might as well make the most of it while you’re there.

  10. Go skiing mid-week when there’s fresh powder and no lift-lines. Use profanity when you TA a lab section. Sign up for a conference just because it’s in an exotic location. Play foosball–everyday. Drink.

    I think you have just described 90% of the UW Astro grads.

    (Note that I think this is a good thing.)

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  12. Regarding the writing papers and giving talks stuff: Science is a group enterprise. If you do great work but can’t communicate your results to anyone, it’s like you didn’t do it. That said, there are two more things:

    (1) Writing and giving talks are skills that you learn just like doing physics problem sets is a skill, only they’re open-ended and require initiative. Before you’ve learned them well, you’ll be uncomfortable with them; that’s normal. Grad students don’t like giving talks because they have to get up in front of profs and might embarrass themselves. Okay, but they have to learn to get over that. Talking in front of grad-student-only audiences is a good way to do that.

    (2) It is sort of possible to do science without writing papers and giving talks. You can work in a research group on a project that somebody else directs, in a more technical capacity: writing software, building instruments, doing lab work, and so on. You won’t be independent or self-guided. But even then, you’ll find that you may have to write internal reports, give talks within the group, and so on. You can’t be an effective research professor or PI if you don’t write papers, proposals, and grants, and give talks.

  13. The purpose of a scientist is to write ‘good’ papers. Where ‘good’ means papers that solve(try to solve) well-motivated problems, are well-researched and contribute to the quest of understanding nature.

  14. Another piece of advice (which I had to learn the hard way): don’t underestimate the importance of personal relationships. A common theme in pretty much all the cases I know of where people succeeded in academia, and which came through repeatedly in various events I attended where folks who had made it in academia told us how they did it, was that they all had wonderfully supportive relationships with their phd advisors and postdoc mentors. And how to achieve such relationships? Well, as best I can tell, the trick is to make yourself useful to these people and work for the greater glory of their research programs. Make them feel that you are continuing their academic lineage. Don’t start going off in directions of your own! Developing your own research program can be fun and personally satisfying, but to get good postdoc jobs, and even more so for getting a faculty job, it is crucial that you have the strong support of influential senior people, and generally you won’t get this unless they have something personal at stake in whether you suceed or not. Don’t be so naive as to think that you can make up for the absence of such support by publishing papers on your own in PRL or doing other things to justify your own research program. People might say nice things about it, but the bottom line is that if they don’t have anything personal at stake in it then they won’t really care what happens to you.

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  16. Wish I had read this in grad school. Would have been useful. Or rather, wish I had had an advisor who spoke the truth to me like that. I think I just didn’t quite “get it” about how grad school worked and how important it was choosing an advisor, etc… Good tips for the next generation Sean.

  17. Unfortunately, students have a hard time understanding most of this advice due to their perspective. The day-to-day demands on them (e.g. TA-ing, RA-ing, passing classes and exams) are very unlike what they need to deliver to succeed in the long term (i.e. research). In this way, being a student is just like being a faculty member. And this is where both students and faculty need to take the initiative in doing research, even if it means lowering other priorities.

    I can clarify a bit about the hot topic issue. What I always told students was that they had to define their problem narrowly enough that by the time they were done with their thesis, they knew more than anyone else in the world about their topic. The thesis topic also has to be couched in the form of a problem that admits of a solution (that is, a hypothesis), not in the form of a research area.

    Generally, finding something about which to be the expert means choosing a topic that’s much narrower than the student would like. The trick then is to situate the narrow project as part of a bigger, longer-term project. Some professors are geniuses at pulling together small projects into empires. That management role of seeing the big picture is much more important than students usually think, particularly in raising funding.

    The missing piece of advice here is collaboration. The best scientists I know all collaborate heavily. I used to let students collaborate on any course work they did as long as they cited who did what. That’s what the real world of science is like. Collaboration is particularly useful if there’s a mismatch in skills, such as writing, solving particular kinds of equations, etc.

  18. I think that telling grad students to take initiative in grad school is a bit late. They ought to be doing things such as knocking on faculty doors, finding research and going to seminars as undergrads.

    Not only will this get them used to taking the initiative when they get to grad school, but hopefully it’ll help with the advisor search.

    Mind you, I’m in astro, so it’s slightly different but I started with research between my freshman and sophomore years of undergrad. That in turn got me publications (yay, always good, including one first author pub my sophomore year) and experience which got me jobs which then got me into grad school with a topic and an advisor. My working during undergrad for various different people (whilst sticking with my official research advisor whom I loved as a mentor) also let me know the type of advisor I can do well with- the kind that is generally hands off, but is there when I finally say “Enough! I’ve been trying to figure out this problem and I’ve google-whacked, emailed people, talked with people and I’ll be buggered if I can find anything that might help.”

    And I’d like to say that in the “be like a postdoc you’d want to hire
    ” and “be a finisher” sections should perhaps mention proposals. Much as we may not like to admit it, the holy NSF/NASA/DOE/DOD grant money, is what funds much of the sciences. Writing proposals can always be a trying experience, however doing them before your last year of your grad career get you so much more experience in writing and have the chance to improve before your funding depends on you being able to secure it.

  19. The whole point of being a scientist is, indeed, writing papers and giving talks.

    … and of course writing grants rounds out the top three.

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