Search Results for: unsolicited advice

Since I know nothing very useful about the job market outside academia, I solicited suggestions for specific pointers and helpful websites. A bushel of useful advice and thought-provoking comments resulted.

My original idea was to summarize what I thought was the best advice, and turn it into a single post. This idea has been undermined by (1) me not knowing which advice is best, and (2) a wide variety of occasionally-contradictory advice, presumably all applicable in different circumstances.

So instead here I’m just going to link to some of the most promising-looking resources that were mentioned. I encourage you to read the comments on the original post to get more ideas, and chime in here to keep the conversation going.

Collections of Online Resources

• The Alternative Scientist (blog)
• Non-Academic Career Information — a fantastic compendium from Prodigal Academic
• PhDs.org: Career Resources
• Beyond Physics: From the University to the Work Market (Facebook group)

Discussion Forums

• APS Forum on Graduate Student Affairs — Non-Traditional Careers
• Leaving Academe Forum — Chronicle of Higher Education
• Science Careers Forum — AAAS
• Versatile Ph.D.

Specific Kinds of Jobs

• Mathematics in Industry — SIAM
• Non-Academic Astronomers Network — AAS
• Policy Fellowships for Scientists and Engineers — a comprehensive list from Sheril Kirshenbaum
• What Is Data Science? — Mike Loukides
• How to Get a Job in Physics — Graduate course at LSU by Jorge Pullin
• Alternative Careers for Scientists — Bitesize Bio
• Careers in Science Policy — Heather Rieff

Personal Stories/Advice

• Project for Non-Academic Science — Guest-blog accounts collected by Chad Orzel
• Academia vs. Industry (Math) — Mark Chu-Carroll

Books

• Alternative Careers in Science — Cynthia Robbins-Roth
• Put Your Science to Work — Peter Fiske
• So What Are You Going to Do With That? — Susan Basalla and Maggie Debelius

Job Ads/Finders

• Government Jobs Finder
• Science JobSeeker — AAAS
• Nature Jobs
• New Scientist Jobs
• The Scientist Careers

Early January, and time for another entry in our unsolicited advice series — this one on choosing a postdoc. For non-academics, a “postdoc” is that lovely several-year period in between getting a Ph.D. and (hopefully) landing a faculty job, during which one establishes some independence and concentrates on doing research to the exclusion of all the other delicious aspects of professordom. And for reasons that have never been fully explained, a lot of postdoc jobs are offered and accepted in December/January/February, even if they don’t start until September. So now is the time to make yet another one of those choices that will dramatically affect the entire rest of your life.

Here, we’re not telling you how to get a postdoc; we’re presuming you already have more than one offer in hand, and need to choose between them. (Yay you!) At some point we should write about applying for postdocs, but that season is largely passed. Note that postdoc situations vary wildly from field to field, and my experience is largely in theoretical physics; there is more advice at Dr. Isis’s place, and I’m sure elsewhere — as usual, leave links in the comments. Free advice on the internet is worth what you pay for it, but if you get a variety of different perspectives a nugget of wisdom might sneak through.

To decide which postdoc position is right for you, it makes sense to think about what your goals are in being a postdoc in the first place. Generally they look something like this:

1) Do some good science.

2) Learn new things and grow as a scientist.

3) Put yourself in a good position to land a faculty job.

The very good news is that these goals are not in conflict! You can do good science while learning new things, and you can do both of those while positioning yourself to apply for faculty jobs. Indeed, you’ll be in much better position (obviously) if you have done some good science. However, it’s possible to do some good science and nevertheless end up in not such a good position.

Before we unpack that, we should say a word about other considerations. You might care about geographic location, or proximity to a loved one, or easy access to jazz or martinis or gambling or whatever your favorite vice may be. (Personally, I can’t decide.) I’m all about the other considerations, and would never tell you to discount them. Life is short, and the years you spend as a postdoc are just as truly years of your life as any other years. However … if you were thinking that it would be worthwhile, at some point in your life, to sacrifice on your other considerations for a bit in order to concentrate on doing the best science you can — now is the time! Of all the hurdles and bottlenecks along an academic career path, the jump from postdoc to faculty is probably the hardest, just in terms of raw probabilities. (There are a lot fewer faculty jobs than there are postdocs looking for them.) At the same time, the transition from the comforting embrace of graduate school, where (at least in principle) you have an advisor looking over you, to the naked Hobbesian individualism of being a postdoc, where your personal initiative counts for everything, can benefit from a certain amount of increased focus. I know, “comforting embrace” isn’t the first phrase that comes to mind when you think of graduate school. But there is more structure there, and a sense of belonging to something bigger. (Often, as a postdoc, the department won’t even list you in any sort of directory.) So, while there’s nothing wrong with taking other considerations seriously, this temporary phase of your academic trajectory is arguably the best time to put those on the back burner while you concentrate on your job, hoping that sacrifice will pay off later. How much you balance those competing considerations is up to you.

(The extent to which personal initiative counts varies wildly from academic field to field; in a big lab, the role of a postdoc may be little different from that of an advanced grad student. For theorists, the role of a postdoc is little different from that of a beginning professor — you are expected to come up with your own ideas and carry them to fruition.)

With all that throat-clearing out of the way, let’s tackle those above goals. First, you want to choose a postdoc position that will help you do good science. This criterion is actually relatively straightforward, but there are some subtleties. Of course it will help if you go to a place that is chock full of good scientists doing the kind of science you would like to be doing yourself. But you still have to ask some of the same kind of questions you asked when choosing a grad school — at the most basic level, would you yourself be able to productively work with these people? Do you like them, are they supportive? What do the other postdocs who are currently there — or even better, were there recently and have moved on — think about the experience?

Here is an excellent little diagnostic. Of the different places you are considering, have a look at some of the papers they have written over the last three years. Now ask yourself: which of those papers would I have been most pleased to be a co-author on? That’s a direct way of separating vague feelings that “this place is good” from “they are doing what I want to do.” But then, to kick it up a notch, look again at those papers, and in particular at the author lists. Are there any postdocs there? Is this the kind of place where the postdocs collaborate frequently and directly with the faculty and each other, or are they more on their own, or have they still collaborating with their old groups from grad school? Different departments have different personalities, but the evidence of how postdocs generally fit in should be easy to gather.

Next, you want to learn and grow as a scientist. This one is a bit trickier. You definitely do want to grow — it’s unlikely that, as a grad student, you did enough different kinds of work that you would be happy to stay confined within those disciplinary boundaries for the rest of your life. Your postdoc years are a great chance to define yourself (see below), so you should think long and hard about how you want to be defined. On the other hand, it is possible to grow too much. If your degree is in string theory, and your first postdoc is in molecular biology, and your second postdoc is in inorganic chemistry, you’re sort of just being incoherent. You’ll have fun along the way — and if that’s your goal, that’s great — but if you are planning on moving to the next level, you want to be broad without losing coherence entirely. You want to challenge yourself with new things, but you want to challenge yourself productively. You certainly don’t want to think of your postdoc as another round of grad school, where you start from scratch. You are now a professional scientist with some established expertise, and you would like to build on that expertise.

But at the same time — and here’s the crucially important part — you don’t want to just repeat yourself. That’s why everyone always tells you to go somewhere else for your postdoc, not to stick around the same place you were a grad student. It sounds like good, solid advice, but when the moment of decision comes, far too many people choose to play it safe, and either stay where they are (if that option is available) or move over to some group with whom they were already collaborating. It’s hard to appreciate until you’ve been around the block a few times, but different departments are truly different in their approach to doing science. One of the absolute best features of the postdoc system (and there are a lot of crappy features) is that you get an invaluable opportunity to be exposed to the idiosyncrasies and habits of mind of a completely different set of senior researchers. That can be a truly eye-opening experience, and you should try as hard as you can to take advantage. Find people with whom you can work and be productive (you want to write papers, not just take classes or sit at the feet of masters), but who will challenge your preconceptions and open your eyes to new ways of thinking about your field.

Finally we have the money goal: you’d like to put yourself in good position to land a faculty job. (That’s what we’re assuming, anyway; if not, standard disclaimers apply.) Of course this is as much art as science, and there’s a tremendous amount of noise in the system — but you control what you can.

With that in mind, recall that our advice for being a good grad student was to “Be the kind of grad student that people would like to hire as a postdoc.” Guess what? As a postdoc, you will strive to be the kind of postdoc that people would like to hire as an assistant professor. And what kind is that? If you’re honest with yourself, you can probably hit upon the right answer by contemplating the kind of applicant you would be most likely to hire, if you were already a faculty member sitting on a hiring committee. The basic rule is that you’re not going to get hired as a faculty member by being talented and smart; you’re going to be hired because the department sees that you are doing awesome things. When people hire postdocs, the applicants are still charmingly unformed as mature scientists, and their letters of recommendation will often weigh more than their lists of publications. But when it comes to hiring a faculty member, it’s rarely done purely on promise — they want to see that you’ve done something.

So when you’re choosing which postdoc to take, choose the one that maximizes your chances of actually doing something. Writing papers, and (more importantly) writing good papers. And (most importantly) by “good” we do not mean “technically competent.” We mean interesting, even to people outside your immediate circle of friends. Papers you would want to read, even if you hadn’t written them. Those are the kinds of papers you want to be writing as a grad student.

The need to write interesting papers should be obvious, but sometimes it gets lost in the excitement. Writing papers as a grad student can be like having sex as a teenager — you’re amazed that it’s happening at all, and not so concerned with excelling. But at some point, as you mature, it becomes important to do it well. It is deadly, as a postdoc, to fall into the trap of writing papers just because you can write them. Like it or not, there are many people like you competing for a scarce resource in the form of faculty jobs. You have to distinguish yourself. If you are working within any field where there is a nontrivial chance of getting hired as a faculty member, there will certainly be other people writing papers in the same field. What is it that will make your papers better?

And it’s not only good papers — it’s papers that define who you are. That’s a question you will literally be asked when you are applying for faculty jobs — what are you really? What do you do? And the appropriate answer has to be well-defined (like it or not) in terms that are comprehensible to a faculty hiring committee. “I work on models of dark energy” is a bit narrow; “I am a theoretical physicist” is a bit broad; “I work on field theory and particle physics applied to cosmology” is about right. (You can always, and in fact should, continue to broaden your scope all throughout your career.) But you can’t just proclaim it; your list of publications has to proclaim it for you. You won’t want to work on the same thing over and over again, but you do want the work you do to tell a coherent story. Each paper is a dot on a map of possible problems one could be thinking about, and you want your set of dots to form a sensible picture. A postdoc period is a good time to fill in what you might think of as gaps in your toolbox, if you will excuse a terribly mixed metaphor. Become the scientist you would want to hire.

Figure all that out, and then choose the postdoc position that will maximize your chance of writing the papers that make it happen. Easier said than done, I know. If it were easy, it wouldn’t be any fun, would it?

It’s September, and a young person’s fancy naturally turns to applying to grad school/postdocs/faculty jobs. And in this day and age, questions inevitably arise: Are they going to google me? What will they find? Followed immediately by: Should I have my own web page (if I don’t already)? And what should be on it?

Roughly speaking, as you climb up the academic ladder, the scrutiny one undergoes becomes increasingly close. If you are in high school and applying to colleges, I would be extremely surprised if any admissions committee googled you — there are just too many of you, frankly. Mostly this also holds for undergrads applying to grad school. At least, that’s the situation among theorists; for experimentalists, who might be joining a specific lab on day one, the number might be smaller and the individual attention correspondingly greater. By the time you apply for faculty jobs, the numbers are very small, and nobody gets an offer without being poked and prodded in person, and having their CV examined under a microscope. In that case, the web page is (almost) beside the point, as they’ve seen you up close and personal.

It’s for postdoc applications, then, that the googling question becomes most relevant. Remember that most research groups have relatively few postdocs, so they take the selection process very seriously — mistakes can be costly. But in many cases the decision-making timescale is sufficiently short that they don’t have the luxury of seeing each candidate in person. So I would say: yes, at many places where you apply for postdocs, they will be googling you to glean information that might not show up on a formal application. That is especially true if you’re applying to individual professors or groups (rather than wider-ranging fellowships), and also if the relevant decision-makers are younger.

So: if they do google you, what will they find? You can see how it might make sense to put up your own web page: that way you have some influence over their first impressions of you. There is a systematic issue, of course, that some names are more easily googleable than others, but we won’t address that here. If you do have a web page, you can simply include the URL in your CV, so they will have it in front of them.

If you do decide to have a web page, what should it look like? There is an overarching principle at work here: the Web is World-Wide. That is, everything you put on your page can be viewed (ordinarily) by everyone. You can’t put stuff up that “is only meant for your friends,” and then be surprised when it is examined by prospective employers. If you have pictures or stories that are in any way private — keep them private!

…

Unsolicited Advice VII: Should I Have a Web Page?Read More »

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.

• Total Drek
• Marie desJardins

In comments, JMG3Y asks, “Where should a smart science-oriented high school student with a breadth of interests go to college?” This deserves a much more careful answer, but time is precious, so consider this a rough draft of an answer, which people are welcome to amplify in the comments. (Past installments here and here. At some future date there will be an installment on “How to be a good graduate student.”)

In reality, colleges and universities are very different from each other, and each should be considered separately. Also in reality, any such institution is huge and multifaceted, and two people can have wildly divergent experiences at the same place. Furthermore, sticking again to reality, this is a question that depends mostly on the individual student, and for which there is no right answer. Being all that as it may, for purposes of exposition let’s lump the possibilities into four categories:

1. Liberal-Arts College (LAC), such as Swarthmore or Amherst.
2. Specialized Technical School (STS), such as MIT or Caltech.
3. Elite Private University (EPU), such as Harvard or Stanford.
4. Large State School (LSS), such as UCLA or Michigan.

These are fuzzy and incomplete categories, of course, but hopefully the ideas will come across clearly enough.

At an LAC or STS, you will be forced to learn a lot, like it or not. I’m a big fan of LAC’s; the professors are typically talented and dedicated to teaching, and students get invaluable up-close-and-personal time with the faculty. But for people who want to go to grad school, they face something of a disadvantage because the these schools typically won’t have graduate programs. That means (1) you can’t take any grad classes, and (2) you can’t buttonhole grad students about advice for the next step. I went to one, and received a great education, but keenly felt those disadvantages.

The STS’s are also great (I work at one now). Your fellow students will be interested in similar things, and the coursework will challenge you. There will be plenty of opportunities for research experience, rubbing elbows with grad students and postdocs doing work at the forefront of science. Both MIT and Caltech have a feeling at being at the center of the scientific universe. Of course, they generally won’t give you a broader academic experience, if that’s what you’re after. For me personally, one of the best parts of being an undergraduate was being exposed to ideas in the arts and humanities (and people, both faculty and students, in those areas) that I never would have experienced otherwise.

At an EPU or LSS, it’s generally much easier to slide by without stretching yourself, if that’s your thing; on the other hand, the resources are tremendous, and if you have the initiative to take advantage of them, you can have a great experience.

The best thing about an EPU is the other students. So much so, that at a place like Harvard it’s generally acknowledged that a large fraction of your education comes from extracurricular activities. You’ll meet people, in your field and out, who will be running the world a few years down the line. The professors will be great researchers who may or may not be interested in teaching; there will likely be some opportunities for research and individual contact, but not all that much.

An LSS will also have great resources, in terms of faculty and research opportunities. There might be more close contact with professors than at an EPU, but that’s quite a generalization. Your fellow students will be more of a mixed bag; some will be geniuses and future world-changers, while many will be there to tread water for four years to get a degree. Of all the choices, the education you get at a large state school will depend the most on your own initiative; the school will almost certainly have more to offer than you possibly have time to take advantage of, but nobody will force you to do any of it.

For the particular goal of advancing to grad school, there are certain specialized factors to keep in mind. Having grad students around to ask questions to is certainly helpful. The choice of undergrad advisor is also important, I suppose, but depends much more on individuals than on schools, so I don’t know what to say there. It’s important to get some research experience, but this can often be done off-campus at other places during the summer (see the NSF Research Experience for Undergraduates and similar programs). Getting good letters of recommendation is certainly helpful — for that, it’s less important where you are, and more important that people there know you well enough to write sensible letters. When it comes to actually applying to grad schools and making choices, it’s nice to get advice from people who know what they’re talking about; don’t be afraid to ask around.

Perhaps my own perspective on this kind of question is coming through clearly enough: wherever you go, your educational experience can vary wildly depending on how much you put into it. If you stick to what’s required, slide through with just enough work to get whatever GPA you’re aiming for, and spend the rest of your time playing video games, you’ll manage not to get much out of it no matter where you are. If you seek out new and challenging courses and activities, spend your summers doing research or interesting off-campus activities, and make an effort to talk individually to your best professors and hang out with other students who enjoy ideas, it will be an invaluable experience.

If you ask most 40-something professors what they would think of going back to school for four years, to do nothing but take interesting courses and discuss deep ideas with their friends, their eyes would light up with unvarnished pleasure at the prospect. Whatever you’re studying, college is a unique opportunity to stretch your mind; make the most of it.

Our first installment of unsolicited advice concerned the difficult question of how to get into graduate school; this one presumes that one has successfully leapt the hurdles of GRE’s and ornery admissions committees, and is faced with the perilous decision of which offer to accept. (If one has either one or zero offers, presumably the decision-making process is somewhat easier.) We will not, at the moment, be addressing whether you should be going to graduate school in the first place, or how to succeed once you get there. [Update: see also How to Be a Good Graduate Student.]

This is a much more difficult task than the first installment. Not that it’s more difficult to decide where to go than to get into grad school in the first place; just that it’s much more difficult to give sensible advice about how to do it. When it comes to getting into grad schools, everyone agrees on the basic notions: good grades, test scores, letters, research experience. Choosing where to go, in contrast, is a highly personal decision, and what works for one person might be utterly irrelevant to someone else. Rather than being overly prescriptive, then, I thought it might be useful just to chat about some of the issues that come up. Ultimately, you’ll have to decide for yourself how to weigh the various factors.

• Why do you want to go to grad school in the first place? Sure, maybe you should have already given some thought to this question — but now is the time to get serious. Is your goal to become a professor or other professional researcher (which is typically assumed)? Or is it just to get a Ph.D., and then see what happens? Or is it simply to learn some science?

  As a general principle, the purpose of grad school is very different from that of your undergraduate college education. At least in the U.S., college serves multiple purposes: training in some concentration, to be sure, but also a broadly-based liberal education, as well as more general exposure to critical thinking, and crucially important social and personal aspects. Grad school is much more focused: it serves to train you how to be a working research scientist (or whatever, although I’ll be speaking as if it is science you’ll be studying, as that’s what I know best). In college it’s good to be a broad person and cast your net widely in the oceans of learning and experience. In grad school, however, there is a lot to be said for focusing as much as you can on the specific discipline in which you are specializing. Not that you should stop having broad interests, but it might make sense to sacrifice some of them temporarily to the goal of becoming an expert researcher.

  The reason for this is that, like it or not, you are entering a competition. Not necessarily grad school itself (where grading and suchlike are notoriously relaxed, although there may be competition for advisors and fellowships and such), but the ultimate job market. Most people who go to grad school want to get jobs as scientists, probably in academia. There are far fewer such jobs than there are grad students, so most people who get a Ph.D. will ultimately not succeed in becoming professors. And the other people who want those jobs are also very smart and dedicated. So, if you are serious about choosing this as your life’s path, it makes sense to really devote yourself to your craft during your grad school years, and give it your best shot. I personally think that the rigorous training provided by a Ph.D. is extremely useful and rewarding even if you don’t become a professor, but you should certainly enter the fray with open eyes.

  If becoming a professor is what you want to do, you should choose your school accordingly. At the same time, I’m a firm believer that your life doesn’t completely end just because you’re in grad school, nor that the process itself should be unpleasant. It should be extremely challenging, taking you to the limits of what you are capable of doing — but the days you spend in school are also days that you are alive, and you shouldn’t completely shut yourself away. That’s the difficult balance to strike. (Told you this wouldn’t be very helpful.)

…

Unsolicited advice, Part Deux: Choosing a grad schoolRead More »

Your humble bloggers here at Cosmic Variance have spent quite a bit of accumulated time in academic and research settings — in fact, my guess is that none of us have spent an entire year away from such a setting since the age of about six or so. That’s a lot of accumulated wisdom right there, and it’s about time we started sharing it. Since it’s that time of year when applications are being sent off to graduate schools, I thought I would start off by letting everyone in on the secret to how to get accepted everywhere you apply. Of course I can only speak for physics/astronomy departments, but the basic lessons should be widely applicable. [Update: see also Choosing a Graduate School and How to Be a Good Graduate Student.]

So, here goes: have great grades, perfect GRE scores, significant research experience, and off-scale letters of recommendation. Any questions?

If, perhaps, it’s a bit too late to put that plan into action, here are some personal answers to questions that come up during the process. Co-bloggers (and anyone else) are free to chime in with their own take on these complicated issues. Keep in mind that every person is different, as is every grad school — in fact, specific schools might behave quite differently from year to year as different people serve on the admissions committee. Don’t sink your sense of self-worth into how you do on these applications; there’s a strong random component in the decisions, and there are a very large number of good schools where you can have a fun and successful graduate career.

• What do graduate school admissions committees look at?
  Everything. Keep in mind that, unlike being admitted to college (undergrad), at the grad school level the admissions are done by individual departments, with committees comprised of faculty members with different kinds of expertise, and often students as well. They’ll look at your whole application, and in my experience they really take the responsibility seriously, poring over a huge number of applications to make some hard decisions. Still, it’s well-known that careful examination of a thick file of papers is no substitute for five minutes of talking to someone, which schools usually don’t have the luxury of doing, so decisions are always somewhat fickle.
• Even my personal essay?
  Well, okay. I wouldn’t sweat the personal essay; in my experience it doesn’t have too much impact. Let’s put it this way: an incredibly good essay could help you, but a bad essay won’t do too much harm (unless it’s really bad). To a good approximation, all these essays sound alike after a while; it’s quite difficult to be original and inspiring in that format.
• Are GRE scores important?
  Yes. At least, in the following sense: while bad GRE’s won’t kill your chances, good GRE’s make it much easier to admit you. (We’re speaking of the Physics GRE, of course; the general tests are completely irrelevant.) It stands to reason: given two applicants from similar schools with similar grades and interests, there’s no reason for a department to choose the student with lower GRE scores. At the same time, you can certainly overcome sub-par GRE’s by being outstanding in other areas; this is particularly true for students who want to do experiment. I know at Chicago that we let in students with quite a range of scores.
• What about research experience?
  Research can be a big help, although it’s by no means absolutely necessary. These days it seems that more and more undergrads are doing research, to the point where it begins to look unusual when people haven’t done any. There is some danger that people think you must want to keep on doing the kind of research that you did as an undergrad, although I wouldn’t worry too much about that. Mostly it shows some initiative and passion for the field. It can be very difficult to do theoretical research as an undergrad, but that’s okay; even if you eventually want to be a string theorist, it’s still great experience to do some experimental work as an undergrad (in fact, perhaps it’s especially useful).
• How do I get good letters of recommendation?
  It’s more important to have letters from people who know you well than from people who are well-known themselves. One of the best side benefits of doing research is that you can get your supervisor (who hopefully has interacted with you quite a bit) to write letters for you. It’s really hard to write a good letter for a student who you only know because they took one class from you a year or two ago. Over the course of your undergrad career, you should find some way to strike up a personal relationship with one or more faculty members, if only to sit in their office now and then and ask some physics questions. Then they can write a much more personal and effective letter. Of course, if you are just a bad person who annoys everyone, it would be just as well to stay hidden. (Kidding!)
• Is it true that the standards are different for theorists and experimenters?
  Typically, yes, although it might be different from place to place. Because a lot of undergrads haven’t been exposed to a wide range of physics research, a large number of them want to be Richard Feynman or Stephen Hawking or Ed Witten. Which is great, since we need more people like that. But even more, we need really good experimenters. Generally the ratio of applicants to available slots is appreciably larger for theorists than for experimenters, and schools do take this into account. Also, of course, the standards are a little different: GRE’s count more for prospective theorists, and research experience counts more for prospective experimenters. And let’s be honest: many schools will accept more prospective theorists than they can possible find advisors for, in the hopes of steering them into experiment once they arrive.
• So should I claim to be interested in experiment, even if I’m not?
  No. Think about it: given that schools already tend to accept more students who want to do theory than they can take care of, what are your chances of getting a good advisor if you sneak into a department under false pretenses and have to compete with others who came in with better preparation? It makes much more sense to go someplace where they really want you for who you are, and work hard to flourish once you get there.
• Do I need to know exactly what I will specialize in?
  Not really, although in certain circumstances it can help. Professors like to know that someone is interested in their own area of research, and might push a little harder to accept someone whose interest overlaps with their work; on the other hand, most people understand that you don’t know everything after three and a half years of being an undergraduate, and it can take time to choose a specialization. In particular, at most American physics departments (unlike other countries and some other disciplines), it is generally not expected that you need to know ahead of time who your advisor will be when you arrive, or which “group” you will work in.
• Should I contact faculty members individually if I’m interested in their research?
  That depends, mostly on whether the person you are contemplating contacting is desperate for more grad students, or is overwhelmed with too many requests as it is. In popular areas (ahem, like theoretical particle physics, string theory, and cosmology), there are generally more applicants than departments have advisors for. In that case, most people who receive random emails from undergraduates will just urge them to wait for the admissions process to take its course; remember that it’s a zero-sum game, and for everyone who gets in there’s someone else who doesn’t, and it would be a little unfair to penalize those applicants who didn’t contact faculty members personally. On the other hand, if you have reason to believe that someone you’re interested in working with is trying to get more students, or if you think your case is somehow unique and requires a bit of attention, feel free to email the appropriate faculty member with a polite inquiry. The worst that can happen is that you get a brush-off; I can’t imagine it would actually hurt your chances.
• Is my life over if I don’t get into my top grad school?
  Yes. Well, only if you let it be. The truth is, how you do in grad school and beyond (including how you do on the postdoc and faculty job market) depends much more on you than it does on where you go to school. In the next episode of “unsolicited advice,” we’ll think about how to actually choose where to go, including how to get the most out of visiting different schools.

Actually this episode was not completely unsolicited; thanks to Philip Tanedo for suggesting we share some of our invaluable insight. See, sometimes we really do listen.