Tall Chai Latte

I moved from MD to MI. I didn't really like my new city at first (during the interview as well as my entire first year of grad school), but I found a couple new hobbies I could engage myself in, and new friends I made (which means growing more distant from my old friends back home) helped me transition into my new life in the new state. It took a while, but it worked out. It sort of feels like finding something new and interesting you can do to take your mind off of being homesick. After a while, you'll get used to the new life. We all adjust at some point.

I do think our female faculty are more impressive. My advisor is one such professor, her being a female on top of being an ex-international grad student/postdoc made her hop through even more hoops, and she emerged with several papers in the top journals and a faculty position at a top-20 school. At the same time, I feel intimidated as her student and lots of pressure to perform well, otherwise I'm breaking her CV or something LOL.

I got a C in one of my required courses during 2nd year too. I guess it will bar me from applying for pre-doctoral fellowships and scholarships, but other than that, no real harm so far. My program had me retake that course before my preliminary exam, I passed the second time with a B+ and got through the prelim just fine. I also heard that some PIs check transcripts of prospective postdocs, but I don't know how much does that play into hiring decisions. Grades aren't the only thing that gets looked at on a fellowship application. Your PI's track record plays a role as well, so even if you have straight A's and great research proposal, you still may or may not win the fellowship.

Haha, OP reminds me of how I was back in undergrad. When I was doing research in my ex-PI's lab as a junior/senior, I was never sure how to address my PI. Do I call him Dr. So-and-so? Professor So-and-so? Or… His first name (that was a little too intimate… hmm…)? I ended up going as "um…" and my PI knew I had something to tell him. Haha. After I started grad school (also came straight out of undergrad), everyone around me addresses the faculty by their first name, and they introduced themselves to the new students by their first name. That was when I switched over to first-name basis. But still, when I meet my old boss, I still go "um…"

I'm a female in the life sciences, and I don't feel the need to work hard to impress other grad students because of my gender. Everyone is very supportive and collegial. But I found that I need to work harder to impress the female faculty than the male ones; perhaps because they worked very hard to be where they are today, and the process made them become more critical towards grad students in general. Our male faculty are less uptight and more approachable, and those are the ones whom students are attracted to.

I spent my entire third year feeling lost and unsure, but things were at least moving along, so it wasn't so bad. Right now, things are slowing down, and I had to terminate a project (or putting it aside) just last week, because despite trying a lot of options, the science just isn't going to work out. So I suddenly lost one chapter of my thesis... As for my other projects, they have potential to develop into very interesting studies, but I'm nowhere near the stage of writing them up. I thought I should already be able to harvest my efforts by the fourth year, now I feel I spread myself too thin and tired. This I have to agree with my advisor -- but... she was the one who defined the general direction of my thesis and giving me 3-4 projects to work on at the same time, all in a slightly different angle.

I thought it means "hitting the wall", at least that is true in runner's world.

I'm not sure if all of you have heard of the term "hitting the wall". It's a term commonly referred to as the period you suddenly grow fatigue during a long run. I'm experiencing one of those periods right now with my research, at this critical moment! I'm 2 months into my fourth year in a PhD program. Things were going well up til late August, and then all of a sudden I had to terminate a project, things stalling, and now it's almost a complete stop. It's been almost 2 months and the pressure is really getting on. But this period will end, right? I guess I don't really have anything to say or ask tonight, besides venting a little and hoping to get some moral support from the cyber space.

My first thesis committee meeting is coming in two weeks. Right now the major task to generate enough preliminary data and solidifying the technology platform to support the story line, but I'm not sure what to expect so feeling a little shaky in organizing my thoughts. Eek... What is expected of students who is presenting for their first committee meeting? How did your first committee meeting go? Man I feel like my story is all over the place

I lived with a couple different roommates (one at a time) over the course of my undergrad, and one roommate during my first year of grad school. After sharing living space with another person for years, I decided to live alone 2 years ago. And it's been great! I need my alone time to decompress from a day's hard work and relax.

Thanks everyone for your encouragement and support. Sigh, I'm not sure what to think now. Nothing is ever transparent when it comes to project details and potential outside collaborations with my PI, and I feel this will become a bigger problem in the future. I tried to approach my PI with this, but apparently I got the impression that I've overstepped my boundary, and I only need to "just do your experiments". While I do have other projects that I can based my thesis on, I find it difficult to carry on without fully trusting the PI. People always put their own interests first. I just had to learn it the hard way.

Warning: this post may sound pissy. I have been working on a side project for at least a year, where my goal is to figure out the structure of a protein. The project is very time consuming and hasn't been going very smoothly, and all of a sudden, I got scooped by our collaborator! Whoa where did that come from? What made the situation worse is, that my PI was involved in both sides simultaneously. While there is no lost to my PI, my effort has gone down in the drain. Now I'm asked to complete the project for the sake of finishing it. I hate hate hate hate it. My PI acted like it's none of her business, and me being scooped is entirely my fault. This project is not her expertise at all! Sigh, I hate how grad students are just vulnerable to PI's doing and being controlled.

Everyone here offered good suggestions. My grad program director once told me, that feeling frustrated doesn't mean you fail as a graduate student. I went through a phase like you described just a while back, and I was very close to calling it. At the time I felt uncomfortable revealing it to my PI, so I talked to my grad program director in private. He had me write down reasons I felt stressed as bullet points, for example, "I am frustrated about my projects because of A, B, and C", and approach these problems by saying "I have trouble in these areas, can you help me?" when talking to your PI. For me, seeing a list of reasons relieved some of the stress. Otherwise I'd be wondering why I was frustrated nonstop, which just made the situation even worse. Interestingly, it was at that point my experiments started working.

If you are in life science, you can check if your PI has a grant with the NIH by the NIH RePORTER website. Each institute also has its own internal website to keep track of each faculty's funding source.

This is one of the addicting twitter blogs like WSWCGS.. Can keep you on for a while.

To ak48: not only experiment results affect my mood, the reaction of my advisor also does. Really don't like this insecure and paranoid feeling hanging around. I've done 3 years of undergrad research + I'm almost at the end of my third year of PhD, and yet I'm still easily affected by these things.

This is exactly how I feel right now. Two weeks ago, a major experiment failed badly after so much preparation and effort went into it, and the setback knocked most of the motivation out of me. Now I'm just struggling to get something done... I started in October 2010, and I wonder if I'll ever get done on time. So OP, you are not alone. I'm waiting for something to re-kindle my motivation too... Doing something light, like catching up on literature might help. Cook myself some of my favorite food always helps in some way

I think it depends. Do you own a car, and will you be taking it with you to Chicago? I've only been to Chicago once, and the overall impression the city gave me was it's a very vibrant city. Public transportation in Chicago is also very well developed, so I don't think you'll be quarantined to your apartment. Once the new semester starts, you'll be very busy and hardly have time to stay idle! So I wouldn't worry too much about not getting to know your surroundings.

I would go for the program with overall better fit, rather than the program with only one advisor fits well. Given your POI at the less prestigious school is the only one with a good match with you, and she's just starting out as a brand new faculty, there are uncertainties between the time you join the program til the time you graduate. Like PaperTowels mentioned, you are going for a PhD, so you'd want her to stick around for 5+ years. Long term funding and network are also factors to consider. That said, if the program with overall better fit has more than one POI for you, I'd say it's a good choice. You probably don't want to get stuck with one POI, who started out as an awesome fit, but for whatever reason not working out as you are much deeper in. That way, you can have some wiggle room.

What a coincidence! I was reading this article yesterday as well. You are not alone!

Thanks everyone for your comments. Our lab is a small one, and everyone else is pretty much a postdoc from overseas, meaning that I can't get much insights on "what was it like when you were in grad school?" because their school systems are very different from US system, nor "how do you do this experiment?" because the lab is too interdisciplinary. I'm the only one who can do what I do, and probably know the most about it in the lab. Same with everyone else's projects. Sometimes I wonder if all these negative feelings are normal, and why does it have to be like this.

How does one deal with feeling of isolation in grad school? I have become increasingly busy and my workout schedule is totally messed up. I am surrounded by postdocs from other countries, with no other students in my group. There are two other students in the lab next door I can talk to, but they are not from my lab, and I doubt I can keep bothering them. Everyone has so much to do....

I wish there's a handbook for grad school too! On how to deal with emotions like this, and how exactly you should look at these emotions. Grad school is a really unique time, you are supposed to treat it like a job (in terms of fulfilling professional obligations), at the same time being very emotionally invested in it... It's a little counterintuitive.

Sometimes I'd leave my PI's office feeling "wow I'll never know as much as she does. There's so much to read and remember...", followed by the unenthusiastic feeling you described. Then I started putting together my own weekly list of goals to achieve, and actually getting them done one by one as the week passes -- it becomes my new motivation. I do discuss these goals in a broader sense with my PI, so that I know I'm not missing anything, like missing/wrong controls or wrong experiments. I know my PI has Type A personality -- always rushing, always competitive in many things (including alcohol tolerance!), always wanting to win. But if I've crossed out most of the things on my weekly list, I can happily ignore her "just push a little harder" comments. You can do it Dal! Baby steps, one day at a time.

As others have said, it depends both on your and the prospective PI's personalities. In my lab, my PI has weekly one-on-one meetings with everyone in the lab, where you will definitely get to discuss science and getting feedback. She's usually there when you need contact, and she doesn't come hunt you down unless you owe her figures/data/written stuff. This is what I like about her -- I'm not under constant watch. I can decide how I want to plan my week, and still have enough trust from her. As opposed to the postdocs, they are under more pressure and my PI comes to them for progress much more often.