Graduate School
esiegel | October 10, 2012"It's Dr. Evil, I didn't spend six years in Evil Medical School to be called "mister," thank you very much." -Dr. Evil, from Austin Powers: International Man of Mystery
Graduate school is hard work, and Ph.D. programs in Physics and Astronomy are some of the most demanding and competitive ones out there. It's well-known that it's incredibly difficult to strike a good work/life balance while you're in graduate school, and that between classes, homework, reading, research, and any teaching or service duties you may have, you cannot expect to spend only 40 hours a week on all of your…
drorzel | September 2, 2010Over at Inside Higher Ed, there's a list of "survival tips" for women entering grad school in the sciences. It's a pretty good and pretty typical list of advice-- you can find more or less the same advice posted somewhere every fall.
What's striking about it, though, is that if you stripped all the specific gender references out, it would still be a good list of advice, for students of either gender. Here's the list with gender-specific terms removed:
Be realistic about support from faculty. As a general matter, faculty of either gender want to see their students of either gender succeed.…
sciencewoman | November 12, 2009From the mailbag:
I have a Masters in Biology (from a 5 year BS/MS program) and for the past 4 years I've been working as a lab manager/technician. I have my own research project(s) in addition to keeping track of ordering/equipment maintenance/mouse breeding/etc. All-in-all it's a sweet gig and I could see myself doing this or something similar for most of my career. The problem is that there seems to be this culture in biology that one has to get a PhD, and my competitive side kind of feels the need to get one mostly just to show that I can. My practical side can't figure out why it…
sciencewoman | September 14, 2009It has recently been brought to my attention that a subset of my department's graduate student population is unhappy with our course scheduling. Some of our part-time graduate students feel that we are not doing a sufficient job of offering evening courses to meet the needs of people who work full-time during the day and complete their graduate degree one course at a time. I imagine the disgruntlement has been brewing for a while, but I suspect things are likely to come to a head soon, so I thought it might be worthwhile to spend some time laying my thoughts out here before it comes up in…
sciencewoman | July 24, 2009To recap, I'm prepping a new graduate level course on experimental design and data analysis (EDDA) that will serve MS and PhD students from geosciences and civil and environmental engineering. I've been working through the SERC course design tutorial, and so far I've figured out context and constraints, over-arching goals, and ancillary skills goals. It's finally time to add content to my course.(Note that the material that follows is a bit outliny, because I'm thinking out loud (on blog paper) here and looking for feedback)
First, according to the good folks at SERC, I need to bring it back…
sciencewoman | July 23, 2009Now that things at ScienceBlogs have returned to normal, and I've drawn down my stash of reader emails, it's time to get back to work on my series on course design. For those who haven't been playing along (1.1, 1.2) I'm prepping a new graduate level course on experimental design and data analysis (EDDA) that will serve MS and PhD students from geosciences and civil and environmental engineering. I don't envision this course as a purely statistics course, though EDDA necessarily incorporates statistical concepts and techniques. Similarly, I don't envision this course purely as a proposal…
gregladen | July 22, 2009There has been some recent discussion on the blogs and on Facebook about the tension an adviser might experience between paying attention to graduate students and doing the other stuff you are supposed to do, or from the student perspective, how to deal with getting that quality time from your adviser.
Much of this discussion is in the area of standard NIH funded lab-ratty science which is a world that I am only marginally familiar with. But that is not the only kind of science that is done, and these issues permeate academia beyond the sciences. There are built-in tensions between doing…
sciencewoman | March 26, 2009Mary Ann Mason has a column in this week's Chronicle of Higher Education describing the importance of role models and mentors for women graduate students. Though Zuska recently wrote a provocative post that argued that "the problem of motherhood" might be a red herring for those interested in increasing the representation of women in science, Mason's column provides some data that suggest the problem of motherhood is very real.
Role models, particularly ones with children, can make the difference in whether a female graduate student takes the next big step along the tenure track. While…
sciencewoman | March 15, 2009The theme for this month's Scientiae carnival asks us to talk about a challenging point in our lives and describe how we overcame the adversity. Did we have help along the way, and are we better scientists for having been through the trial by fire? Truthfully, I'd have to say that the last two years have been the most challenging of my professional life. I don't think anyone could be prepared for the combination of first-time motherhood and a new tenure track job. I certainly wasn't. But I haven't gotten past that challenge yet, and I've been blogging about it along the way. Thus, a better…
awild | September 26, 2008The lab I work in at the University of Illinois has recently acquired funding for several graduate student positions. If you are considering a career in taxonomy, genomics, phylogenetics, biodiversity, tropical ecology, or parasitoid wasps, click here for information about the positions.
Ponder the following: you'd get your graduate degree from one of the finest entomology institutions in the world. Plus, it's paid for. And, if you choose the Heterospilus project, you'll get the rare honor of working with, um, me.
laelaps | November 5, 2007The fiberglass skull of Barnum Brown's second Tyrannosaurus rex fitted on the revised mount now standing on the 4th floor of the AMNH.The AMNH in New York is home to some of the most impressive biological collections in the world, the institution playing host to various students of natural history. This tradition of allowing researchers and graduate student access to the collections is now taking another step forward with the opening of the Richard Gilder Graduate School, currently offering a Ph.D. in Comparative Biology. As the "Welcome" statement from John J. Flynn states, much of biology…