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8.1 Rebekah's tips for graduate student success  (Page 2/3)

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Think

Keep a notebook just for ideas (not your lab notebook). You’ll need them later. Do not self-edit or let others edit you. Do not be hard on yourself. Better ideas will come with experience.

Plan

“A vision without a task is but a dream; a task without a vision is drudgery; a vision and a task is the hope of the world” – Church in Sussex, 1730

Set goals for yourself. Always have your next steps in mind. Consider back up strategies. Make sure to have a balance of projects (stretches that would be awesome if they worked out but might not, experiments you are confident will work). Learn enough about statistics and experimental design that you do not have to re-do experiments because they were planned in a way you did not get the data you need.

Write

Write up your work as you go along. Communication is absolutely critical no matter what career path you take. If this is a weakness takes steps to improve your skills while still a graduate student.

Get others excited about your work

You need to have others excited about what you are doing and willing to experiment and grow and publish along with you. As a graduate student, this means involving undergraduates in the scientific aspects of your project. If you are not doing this as a graduate student/postdoc, you will only accomplish a small fraction of what you should. By the time you are fully immersed in your PhD project (beginning of Year 3), you should have at least one and likely more than one undergraduate working along with you. Modeling can be a bit of an exception to this but for any experimental project, it is just a fact that this is almost a necessity. In addition to making your work progress faster, you need to develop/experiment with your own management style before you are suddenly thrust into the role after graduation. If you look at anybody you consider successful in research, I guarantee that one of the factors which differentiate them from others who have achieved less is that they have excelled in bringing in other people to work with them on ideas. We each only have 24 hours in a day. If you try to do everything on your own, it will simply be impossible to (be sane and) develop a record which makes you as competitive as possible for your future career ambitions. Also, undergraduates at Rice are incredibly bright, motivated, and talented individuals!

Success in academic oriented careers

I can only talk about what I know which is the postdoc/academic faculty experience… that doesn’t mean it is a better career path or the right path for you or that it is what you should want. It is just I have never been in industry or government work so have not developed a sense of what success in those areas means.

Success in academic oriented career takes innovative ideas and sustained productivity. Ideally (for the most success) these ideas provide truly new approaches rather than incremental advances though incremental work can occasionally be fundable and as you start your career you will probably be doing a lot of this. What is almost never fundable is derivative work (Group A did such and such with Optical Design A and Particle B. Maybe I can do it with Optical Design B and Particle C.) If you have not published your work in peer-reviewed format it does not exist as far as the world is concerned. You need a combination of quality (impact factor of journal, citation rate) and quantity in publications. Make sure you understand h factors/m factors as you will be judged on yours. Once you start publishing, you do not want unexplained “gaps” in your publication record. Make sure you are publishing enough for the career you want/need. Generally, students wanting postdocs/academic careers should be aiming for a first author publication each year with as many co-authored publication as possible (no absolutes here – just a rule of thumb on what it takes to land a research-oriented faculty position today). Even if you intend to move into industry, as a PhD you will be judged on your published output during your job search.
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Source:  OpenStax, 2008 nsf advance workshop: negotiating the ideal faculty position. OpenStax CNX. Feb 24, 2010 Download for free at http://cnx.org/content/col10628/1.3
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