Eigen

Just to be clear, I really don't care if you down-vote my post, I just thought the irony was quite funny. Apparently, it was not sufficient moderating, and instead of reminding people to be mature I should have moved straight to removing offensive posts, and warnings & suspensions. I seem to have overestimated the responsiveness of the posters here.

Nice to see that people are maturely taking my warning about appropriate forum behavior to heart. Down-voting a moderator warning people about abusing downvotes.

Posting something you don't like =/= a troll. Posting in a fashion you don't like =/= a troll. On a forum with a number of people with a number of different, non-US cultural backgrounds, including a number of whom do not speak english as a primary language, asking questions that might seem obvious is not being a troll. Constantly following someone around calling them a troll? I'd say that's pretty much being a troll. But that's just my personal definition. I'd hope that among the educated, mature prospective graduate students on the forum, they'd be able to either politely respond or individually ignore someone who's posting style or frequency they don't like, rather than further sidetracking the thread with non-productive incriminations of said individual. For those people who truly bother you for some reason, there's even a forum-wide ignore option you can use. I would hope that most of us have a more productive use of our time than tracking someone through their posting history to down-vote them.

I would say most first year graduate students should spend 2-4 hours per day (at least) reading background, doing literature searches, and figuring out the field. A large part of getting a PhD is showing that you can teach yourself new techniques, and that you can figure out how to do things that neither you or anyone else previously knew how to do. Having a PhD says that you can learn things. It's why you (generally) can't get two PhDs in different areas- it would be pointless. You are expected to have the skills necessary to teach yourself new areas should you want to transition your research. If you read something and don't understand, keep working until you do. Look up words you don't know, techniques you don't know. Learn how to take copious notes as you read papers and books, build yourself a library of self-written protocols and instructions. There's almost never a single right answer to a question- but you should now the different answers, how they differ, who supports one answer over another, or why there's evidence for one answer over another. And then you should be able to pick the one you think is most valid, and argue why you think it's the most valid.

This is field specific, but in many disciplines it's common to not know for sure who your advisor will be until after your first semester (or later) of grad school. You are frequently competing with other incoming students for limited spots for committee chairs and lab spots with specific individuals.

I'll just add to Sigaba's sentiment, and say that I think posting an offer letter publicly, whether for a school or a job, is bad form, and generally considered to be publicly positing private information. Generally, while not legally protected, job offers (and graduate acceptance/funding offers) are considered confidential. You can show people, but broadcasting them too widely can seem unprofessional.

Just gonna post a blanket warning here, as there are too many people to PM: Consistently trailing someone and referring to them as a troll, while downvoting comments that are not in themselves offensive, bad information, or incorrect.... Is in itself borderline trolling/harassment.

Barker's book is good when it comes to lab dynamics, in general, but not great at preparing you for the science, really. I switched from a very traditional synthetic field in chemistry to applied molecular biology, and have had to teach myself everything from Cell Biology on in terms of lab techniques, etc- it's definitely possible. First, absolutely read all of the papers published by your group. And the supplementary information. And take copious notes. Then, you'll want to split your readings into several areas: General background- review articles, proceedings, books from the library. These will help you get the fundamentals down, and help you to not feel like everything is in a foreign language. For books, my approach was to go to the library, head to the molecular biology section, and focus on books that seemed interesting or tangential to my work, then read, rinse, repeat. Protocols- Nature Methods is a great place for this, but you'll also be able to find a number of library books with detailed protocols- looking for titles with "practical approach", or "techniques" or "protocols". If your lab has a copy, there's a great 3 volume set on cell biology protocols by Cold Spring Harbor Press, but it's not practically available for the individual. Current Research- you need to get a feel for where your lab's work sits in the scheme of the field- what approaches are you using, what niche does the lab fit into, and where does your project fit into that. Learn what journals people in your field publish in, set up ASAP alerts for those journals, and get into the habit of checking once or twice a week, and reading any new articles that come to mind. There are some good videos for techniques on youtube, but there are equally as many really, really bad ones. If you want cell culture protocols, Gibco has a number of great video tutorials for common techniques. Cell culture is.... Sadly, largely superstition. Labs have established methods that they use, for which there may or may not be a reason- or there may have been a reason, but it really isn't valid anymore, or no one remembers what it was. It was one of my biggest frustrations when I set up a cell culture lab of my own- trying to figure out what, of the 30 different protocols I had for the same technique, was the most valid and would work best for our lab. There's a lot of great current literature out there, but your lab may or may not use the best practices you'll find therein. Take FBS use, for example. The vast, vast majority of labs still heat inactivate FBS prior to use. Even through a lot of the current literature recommends against it. Heat inactivation was necessary prior to sub-micron filtration- you needed some way to inactivate toxins, etc. in serum. Now, the vast majority are removed by filtration, and heat inactivation serves primarily to denature the serum proteins you're using to supplement your cells. There was a white paper from Invitrogen examining cell line growth of a huge number of different lines in heat inactivated vs normal FBS, and they found that a number of cell lines grew significantly worse in inactivated serum, and none grew worse in regular serum. And this is from a company that makes a lot of money selling inactivated serum. So when it comes to some of your initial questions, you may find you aren't getting good answers from people in your lab, and it may be that they don't have good answers to give you!

You're overthinking it. One person getting confused won't tank your application, especially with positive comments from the others.

Most do. Some prefer to relieve the anxiety of those grad students, and formally tell them they're in the first batch.

Why are you assuming it's a bad thing/scary thing grad students are part of the process?

You don't mention your discipline, so this may be off base. But in the sciences, you are largely being paid to forward the goals of the PI and the lab, and being asked to help with another students project is absolutely par for the course. It would not at all be considered blackmail to get the sort of email you cite in any lab I'm familiar with, it would be considered a reprimand to a graduate student who's not living up to the expectations of the PI and department. The latter part, the request that you spend at least a few hours in lab every afternoon is also worrying to me, as most PIs would expect (in a discipline with labs) that you're in at least a normal 40 hours a week, either working on your projects or helping with general lab upkeep and maintenance/training junior graduate students/helping with other projects. Is it perhaps possible that there's a rift in understanding between you and your professor about exactly what is expected of a PhD student?

Depends on the program and school, but yes, grad students have a say in admissions decisions, especially senior PhD students. There's a thread on the board already about how to pick grad students from a graduate student who's picking someone for their lab, and I get asked for individual and bulk opinions each year about graduate students that visit our department. Just so it won't come as a shock to you, graduate students also will help grade and judge new graduate students and research progress at many schools as well, especially in the sciences.

Just to emphasize what other people have mentioned- fields at the graduate level are much, much more segregated based on the methodology, approach and perspective than they are the topic. This is true across fields- in STEM, you could find a research group studying nearly the same thing in 6-8 departments, but each are approaching it from a training and perspective consistent with their discipline. How an electrical engineer approaches nerve conduction is different than how a psychologist approaches it, and both of these will be distinct from a structural biologist or chemist. But the perspective in the different approaches is often valuable. It's for this reason there's actually more of a push-back against "studies" departments (gender, aging, etc) as they focus on a topic rather than an approach. It means that the graduate training period isn't focussed on training someone to have a great breadth beyond their field. The argument is that it's far better to be a historian, or a sociologist, or an anthropologist with a topical focus in gender dynamics or the aging process than it is to study the aging process from a less defined standpoint, and personally, I would agree. Coming out of a PhD program should have you trained to explore more than one topical area or field with fluency- you might not know the facts, details or players as well, but you have the training to learn those and become fluent. Just my 2 cents.

I can also say I strongly suspect that they are not trolling about their attendance at UNC in the Fall, take it for what you will. But the mood of the thread seems to be rampant down-voting, so....

Just posting to stem speculation: Unless they're going to inordinate effort, Nicolay and LetsGetMetaPhysical aren't the same person. Also, if you don't like the way someone is taking a discussion, you don't have to respond. As much as any of you may dislike it, on an open discussion board, you don't get to dictate what can and cannot be discussed in a thread, or get upset that people, in a virtual conversation, are going off topic. If something is seriously over the line, report it and we'll look into it.

Definitely some degree of field specificity, but I can also say at my university the funds aren't field specific, as they come from the Provost's office, and are pretty even between disciplines. I know a number of schools also have the funding come down from the Graduate School, if there is one, making it less field specific. As mentioned though, there's a great deal of discrection in use of the funds, and the department may not view it as the best use. Sadly, the programs at our school that choose to use less of it for prospective graduate students don't divert it to current graduate student travel, but rather give it to faculty members to "recruit" at conferences. The bottom line for most of these questions comes down to nothing in graduate admissions being universal- each school is a bit different in policies, organization, and structure. As long as you ask politely and in a non-pressuring, non-entitled way, you can find out what the school you're interested in does as far as policies, both for visits and availability of funding for current students.

I'm going to guess this is very field dependent. Most post-docs and the vast majority of jobs in my field would offer a nice chunk towards moving expenses, and a number of grad programs help with relocation as well. Makes it a very reasonable question to get here, and also why it's so important to specify field when you're asking a question here, as the answer often changes hugely depending.

PhD student, estimated graduation date 2020. Or something like that. Can also put PhD (In Progress, Estimated Graduation 2020). If you have an advisor, put the advisor's name. I've never actually seen anyone put candidate on a CV. I have seen people put ABD on a CV, but mostly when it's people posting examples of what not to do.

I don't personally think much of departments that accept students who they don't really want to court, I think it leads towards bitter graduate students with little departmental support who are little more than warm bodies. It ends up leading to the department (and school) spending more money than an adjunct, or even non TT teaching faculty would cost, for graduate students who will have a very low chance at finding a good job post-graduation. But that's not really an argument for this thread. It does, however, lead back to my initial comment, that I would see it as a red flag. Either the department doesn't have the resources, in which case it's in pretty bad financial hardship (red flag) or it doesn't consider you as worth spending the money on, which will probably continue to be the case post acceptance (red flag).

We've been trying to come up with a seminar series on networking... With the main focus being how not to piss off all of the University staff by (a) yelling at them and ( assuming you're better than anyone who doesn't have a PhD. I'm not exactly sure how to market it, though, and I have a feeling the people who really need to hear it wouldn't come, regardless.

This is absolutely true. A lot of people seem to forget that, though. The number of complaints I get through our graduate student association about academia not being a magical place where there are no politics, grad students aren't the low rung on the totem pole, and we don't all get perfectly fair treatment based only off our merits (and not our networking or personality) seems to indicate that the vast majority of people getting into graduate school don't realize that the ivory tower isn't a complete insulator to humanity.

Even for those who love reading, writing, researching and teaching.... You may hate the department politics, the bitter people you're working with, the lack of support from your department when you have problems with students, the lack of support for your department from the administration, the pretentious and/or entitled students you're teaching who don't care about the subject, the crapshoot of publication, etc. It's very idealistic to say you'll be happy if you love reading, writing, researching and teaching, in my opinion- although if you don't love them, I agree that you're in the wrong field.

So first, I think you're assuming that most of us don't have real world experience. I've worked construction, oil & gas industry, and for years on a farm. And to respond to your last paragraph: I'm not sure where you're looking, but if you're not currently in grad school, I don't know where you would be looking for a lack of realism. I've been doing our new graduate student orientations for the whole school (across departments) for the last few years, as well as school specific ones before that. I work with all of our incoming graduate students to some degree, as well as doing workshops for new graduate students across disciplines. There's a huge lack of realism. Also, I don't see a whole lot of non-annecdotal evidence in your post, but yes, employment for academics is significantly worse than most other labor markets. Similar to law graduates, it usually takes the position of underemployment rather than unemployment, but it doesn't lead to happy days either. Additionally, you're assuming you'll love research, school, and TAing. Generally, you know it's time to graduate when you hate your project, your research, and everyone around you. A friend of mine in Political Science (recently tenured) told me that when he finished his dissertation, he couldn't stand to look at it for 2 years. And then he ritually destroyed it.

No, I definitely wouldn't use it as a primary judgement, but it would be a red flag of funding issues for me.