At our 2019 Lab Retreat I asked two senior students, Giulia Orazi and Alan Collins, to share their Words of Wisdom accumulated over 6 years in graduate school. They generated a terrific list of quotes, so I thought I'd share them and perhaps add to them over the years. We will keep updating them each year. Enjoy!
Words of Wisdom - 2023
Chris Geiger - senior PhD student
- Always start a o/n culture, that is, don't let bad days turn into bad weeks.
- Learn to be your own cheerleader.
- Your mental health is your responsibility.
- Never stop learning. What kind of scientist do you want to be? What skill sets do you want? What is your best learning style?
- Read a micro textbook - fill in your knowledge gaps.
- Grad school is not purgatory - the rest of the world is still functioning. Pay attention to the outside world - friends, family, etc.
- Be a warm body - showing up to seminars, journal. clubs, etc to support your lab mates and the programs matters.
- Never be afraid to say "I don't know".
- It is important to say out loud those things that are true.
- If graduate school is a reaction with activation, be an enzyme. And don't be a repressor.
Fabrice Jean-Pierre, senior postdoc
- Don't forget, when you are doing experiments, you are always testing a hypothesis.
- You have a great idea? Great! Now do some reading to make sure that someone did not have that idea several decades ago (i.e., a year in the lab saves a day in the library).
- Ask for help, and be receptive to criticism.
- Always come to lab knowing what you are going to do.
- You are only competing against yourself (you don't know what is going on in other people's lives - just your life).
- Be a team player -> help your colleagues.
Words of Wisdom - 2021
I have 4 students graduating this year, so there is plenty of advice!
Shanice Webster
- Stand up and fight for others, be passionate in your beliefs but try to hear all sides of the story
- Recognize grad school for what it is – a place to be trained – so it OK not to know everything.
- Believe in you.
- It’s your PhD – take charge of it! Decide your level of effort because input equals output, and then accept outcomes.
- Spend time thinking about your data, both short term goals and big picture. Reading and thinking are sources of great ideas for your projects.
- Don’t be overly self-critical. Never allow the volume of self-critiques to override those things you are good at.
- Encourage and positively reinforce those around you.
- Be kind. Little actions can have big positive impacts.
- Extend grace – sometimes it is hard to know what people are going through.
Hector Sanchez
- Remind yourself and others that you belong here in graduate school.
- Seek out opportunities outside the lab – classes, fellowships, internships – they will make you more competitive for jobs in the future.
- Always update your CV.
- Keep in touch! Reach out to former lab mates, because they are your extended family.
- To blue, yellow: not red, green. Remember good color schemes for the colorblind.
Courtney Price
- Take ownership of your project and soon as you can. You’ll always get lots of feedback on your project – ownership helps you filter through the advice for the most productive ideas.
- Put data in a paper format as soon as you can – it helps you finish the story and find gaps in your work.
- Read more! It will help your project and drive new ideas.
- Take care of yourself and look out for others, especially as you become more senior. Looking at for your lab mates is one of your responsibilities.
- Complain about stuff to your lab mates, friends and family.
- Everyone should learn to code – even if it is just a little bit.
- Do your thesis edits quickly – don’t put it off.
Stefan Katharios
- Getting a PhD is hard. It iis OK to share the challenging parts with friends and colleagues.
- Don’t overly hyper-optimize assays. Sometimes you can just get the data and move on.
- Think like a microbe to help you understand your data. A result that is weird to you might make sense for the perspective of the bug and its biology.
- If a protocol that is too complicated, think about the question you are trying to ask. Is there a simpler way to ask the question?
- Using imaging as a non-destructive tool is really powerful.
- Writing: write ugly first, fix it later. Just the process of starting to write is important.
Words of Wisdom - 2020
Our 2020 retreat was cancelled due to COVID so our only words are "Be safe and well"
Words of Wisdom - 2019
•“As you go through graduate school, you never have fewer problems; you just have different problems.” – Laura Filkins
•Set aside time for reading in advance. It’s easy to get behind on it if you only do it when the opportunity arises.
•Read broadly outside your area of research. You might find that something you want to pursue as a post-doc.
•Take opportunities to network with PIs and other students and post-docs in other fields. Having connections in other disciplines helps with your research, but also with career development.
•Don’t shy away from having to learn a new technique. It broadens your marketable skillset and it’s easier to critically read papers that use techniques with which you are familiar.
•Earning a Ph.D. is learning how to be a scientist. Importantly, you get to decide what kind of scientist you want to learn to be. Follow your interests and push your project in the way that most excites you. Don’t just do what is safest or most likely to succeed.
•Take the time to understand the protocols that you use (what is each step for?). This helps with troubleshooting and allows you to modify protocols to adapt them to new purposes. Understanding the protocols you use also means that you will better understand the data that you get at the end of the protocol.
•Statistics is an important tool to describing and interpreting your data. If you don’t understand what the statistical test you are using is for then you don’t understand what the test is telling you. It is worth taking the time to learn how to select the appropriate test for each situation.
•Take the time to design experiments carefully. It is easy to get carried away or feel pressured to get data and rush though experiments. However, a few well-designed experiments are worth more than a lot of scattershot experiments and may not take as long in the end.
•Try to keep in mind a plan of a logical sequence of experiments to answer your questions. It can help to regularly aggregate your data into a powerpoint to look at your progress and check for things you have missed as well as considering the sensible next steps.
•Don’t get attached to models. Always be trying to refine them as you test them and incorporate new data. All models are wrong, but some models are useful.
•Take the time early on in a project to play around with the conditions you use, even after you find one that works. It is important to understand what impact different variables have on your experiments. You also may find better conditions.
•“A year in the lab will save you a day in the library” – George O’Toole
•Towards the end of a Ph.D. we all need to make decisions about next steps. This can be daunting and even paralyzing at times. It is important to be self-motivated and make concrete steps towards figuring out what you want to do. Start thinking about it early in your degree and take opportunities to explore things you might be interested in. Some avenues of exploration may include taking a course, attending a conference on something you are interested or to meet potential post-doc advisors. Monitor your progress towards figuring out your next steps and talk to your mentor. The sooner you can figure it out, the better you can tailor your application.
•Pick conferences deliberately and with a purpose. Think about what you want to get out of a conference first and then find one that will let you achieve that goal. E.g. a good conference to give your first talk as a graduate student, a conference to network, a conference to be exposed to an industry or government field in which you are interested.
•Structure your time using both long- and short-term goals. What do you want/need to accomplish this week/month/year?
•Try to maintain a work-life equilibrium. There won’t be a constant balance, but will be wild swings back and forth. Try to maintain the equilibrium around the right point and minimize the swings one way or the other.
•Be open about your difficulties and take the time to support one another. Graduate school can be isolating and stressful. Don’t be ashamed to ask for help. Especially don’t be ashamed to talk about things you are or have been finding hard. Silence about these issues only makes people experiencing them feel more alone.
•Incorporating a skill that you are interested in learning into your project is a great way to learn it.
•Try to maintain side projects. If your main project is stuck in a rut, at least you’ll have others that you can push forward. Side projects are also a useful plan B in case your main project needs to be abandoned or good rotation projects.