iammaxhailme

I'm about 16 months into my PhD program. At my university (which is mid-tier but rising), you spend the first year knocking most of your required classes out of the way and join a lab during the summer after the first year (so about 10 months in). So for the last 6 months or so I've been in my PI's lab doing work, but I often have the opposite problem I see some PhD students mentioning... my problem is that I don't do enough work. It's not that there is work for me to do and I ignore it, there just isn't much for me to do. The PI gives me tasks and they either don't take very long or are so over my head that there's no chance I could do them without him being there, and he often only physically shows up 1 or 2 days a week because he's busy with other things. I am wondering what other people's experiences are in terms of hours. I know every lab and field is different, we're in the chemistry department, but it's a computational lab, so the work is all on the computer, I find it hard to get meaningful answers about this because what we do is so different from the rest of the chem department. The only other computational chem grad student I know is the other guy in my lab who has been there a year longer than me, but is in the same stage of the program (i.e. he hasn't started having committee meetings yet, etc) who always seems to have something to do, but I get the impression that what he's doing is learning stuff for himself and it's not really related to the lab. Since it's on the computer, the PI often works remotely and is slow to answer emails sometimes. When he comes in, sometimes I mention this to him but he doesn't seem particularly concerned. He's a nice guy and he seems happy to help with stuff when he's there, but he's a young guy, a new prof and I'm essentially tied for being his first graduate student, so he doesn't seem to have a lot of experience managing people. I'm too new to the lab to be independent/come up with stuff to do for the lab's research myself, and the prof doesn't give me much to do so I often only spend 3-4 hours a day actually doing anything, then I just go home and relax or half-heartedly skim some random publication related to the lab or read up on coding tutorials that I think will be useful later etc. At first I greatly enjoyed the lack of pressure (this is partly what drew me to computational chem in the first place... no getting up at 7 AM to prepare samples and do a bunch of chemical rundowns like when I did some short lab rotations in some more traditional labs that I was thinking about joining) but it's been a couple of months and I am getting worried that I'm going to be really behind when the department comes inspecting, or that I'll generally fall behind in some important way, such as publications (I don't have any, but the prof says that in computational chemistry, often you don't publish results formally in a journal and instead share a program or code so our field tends to have a low paper count). I can't say I've done NOTHING, because occaisonally there are weeks when I have a lot to do, but "a lot to do" for me means I spend 30-35 hours working instead of 15-20 (not counting TAing, which I spend 5-6 hours a week on). 30-35 still seems quite light compared to what I hear other chem students say they do, but on the other hand, they spend a lot of time doing more traditional chem labwork that is necessary to actually do research, whereas what we do is on the computers so we don't have that. Since it's such a different type of field, I'm not sure what's normal. I would post this in the chemistry forum, but that seems to be all people asking about admissions, so I doubt I'd get any meaningful replies there. Thanks for reading. Edit: I thought I should mention that I am not currently in any classes. My only real responsibility besides labwork during this semester is TAing freshman chem lab, which is 3 hours per week with an accompanying 1.5-2.5 hours of grading. There are no office hours

I guess that's true. Is it common to be allowed to take a graduate level course unmatriculated, though? (obviously I don't mean at the 2 year CC)

Do you mean take a class non-matriculated and ask those profs for letters? I'm not against that idea if it comes to that. Does it look very bad if a letter of rec comes from a prof at a 2-year local community college?

One more thing to add, I have also emailed a few grad programs around where I live to ask if my ambitions are reasonable (While I am obviously not going to get into Columbia or Cornell, I can probably get into CUNY or something if I can just get over this Letters problem). No replies from them yet either... It seems you have to do things on the phone if you want anything done.

Oh and also, yeah I'm probably applying for fall 2015, becuase most places don't seem like they start in the spring. I'm sure it's too late for fall 2014. I'm trying to find a lab tech job or something in the meantime. Maybe that experience will look good (although it'll probably only be a few months of experience when it comes time to apply)

Thanks for the replies. I have been trying to get my supervisor from the internship to write me a letter for months, but first he wasn't replying, then I had to email the intern program coordinator who emailed him, and neither of them emailed me back for like a month so I had to remind the coordinator, who then talked to him on the phone and said he was too busy, and that's how it's been for a while. I asked some of the other people I worked with as well, but no replies. The supervisor is the lab director and he was almost never actually in the lab. The people I actually worked alongside were the chemists, not the lab director, and I'm hoping they are willing to write a letter. I only just emailed them this morning so I still have a little hope, but not much. For the research I did I didn't work with a postdoc. The prof gave me some of his computational chemistry programs and I ran loads of calcs and showed him the results (directly to the prof, not through anybody). That's it. For all I know I'm the only person he was working with at all (although I'm sure there were other people, I just have no idea who they are) I guess I should look for some phone numbers for other profs, becuase maybe they get swamped with emails? I hope the other profs I emailed aren't just ignoring me. I doubt any of them remember me, even though I got an A or A- from everyone I emailed. I was a chem major at stony brook, so the classes were all big enough so that if you don't go out of your way to talk to a prof, it won't ever happen. I wish I had realized that beforehand...

I should add that I live about 45 minutes north of NYC and am hoping to not have to move unless I really need to.

I finished my undergrad at Stony Brook at the end of last fall (9 total semesters). I doubled majored in Chem & Applied Math and Stats. My total undergrad cum GPA is 2.97, however if you discount my first year when I was having serious personal problems, it's about 3.2. I was on dean's list my final two semesters (A little bit above 3.5), so my GPA trend is always increasing (I only ever had one semester which had a lower GPA than any of my previous ones). My major GPAs follow the same trend (they're a little higher). I hear grad school admissions notice these trends, which I hope is true. I did research with a prof for a year, and I think I did everything he asked me to do well, although he didn't ask for that much. It was all computational, no actual labwork. I did an internship at the NYC department of environmental protection one summer. I got a good employee evaluation. My GRE scores (percentiles) are 97th% verbal, 78th% quant, and 78th% writing (raw scores are 167V/160Q/4.5W). I'm taking the chemistry GRE in a few weeks. My GPA is a bit of a problem, but I don't think it's low enough to stop me from getting in to at least a halfway decent program. My real problem is letters of rec. I'm definitely getting one from the prof I did research with, but the way things are going, I don't think I'm going to be able to get any more. I've emailed about six professors, only one or two of whom I had even the slightest hope could write me one, but nobody replied. Besides the prof I did research with, I hardly ever talked to anyone, which I sorely regret now... I can't go to campus and ask, it's far and I've moved away. The people I did my internship with are stonewalling me (saying they're too busy, etc) for months and it doesn't look like I'll get anything else. I'm worried that having only one LOR and a mediocre GPA will stop me from getting in to anything at all... I'm not 100% sure what I want to do, but I think my goal is to get a masters in chemistry and do much better there (I think I can do much better, judging on how much better I did at the end of undergrad than the beginning, and more importantly, I'll network more). This will probably strengthen my eventual PhD app. Is this a common route? Mediocre masters --> do better in masters program to show you're capable --> to PhD? Anyway, thanks for reading all that stuff, if you did.