breadwinner

Bumping to ask if anyone has any updated advice on Newark, but mainly pertaining to surrounding areas. My partner is moving there in the fall and I will hopefully follow subsequently, but we're both unfamiliar with the area beyond knowing the reputation of Newark. He's thinking of looking for places with a 30 minute or so commute to live in a nicer area. Any recommendations or thoughts on how the area has changed in the past 5 years?

Hi everyone, I hope you're staying sane during the quarantine. I am nearing the end of my 4th year in my PhD program in Biology. Up until about a month ago I thought I would be able to graduate at the end of my 5th year, but my advisers very suddenly decided they wanted me to do more experiments. Meanwhile some of my committee members have emphasized that I should stop doing research and just write everything up and try to graduate. I very much side with them. Unfortunately, I feel pretty powerless against my advisers and they do not seem to understand why someone would want to try to graduate in 5 years as opposed to just working and working until the research seems full fleshed out in every possible direction. Further, they drag their feet on editing my documents and will at first approve something and then later decide it needs to be held back for longer just in case more changes occur to them. I do feel that my research is about 80-90% complete in terms of the original expectations for the project, but my advisers are very fickle with what they want from the project and so according to their new desires for the project I'm only about 60-70% finished. A few people have suggested that I need to stick up for myself more and create structure that will get my advisers to adhere to a set of expectations so I know what I need to do. This would possibly involve a checklist of very specific goals and times for things to be completed by which we would all have to adhere to, meaning I put in the work and they agree to do whatever editing they want and sign off on it within the time-frame, as long as my work is good enough. But I am not sure if this is normal or reasonable for someone in my position. I heard that some students have a contract or timeline like this with their advisers, but I haven't met any who have told me that they have one. I wanted to see if anyone has been in a similar situation and created such a document or used different techniques to bring advisers around to their side in terms of graduating and being allowed to finish pieces of writing. Any stories or advice?

I'm in my 4th year of an ecology, evolution, and behavior program. Due to the job market and my personal strengths and weaknesses, I'm considering transitioning to industry (or another field) after I graduate. In order to get my foot in the door since my research focus is uncommon in industry, I am planning on doing an industry internship this summer before my (hopefully) final degree year. At this point it looks like I have a good chance of getting an internship offer. However, my advisers are implicitly against industry. One has complained to me of one or two of his students leaving after doing industry internships that they liked better, and the other is just very in love with academia and non-traditional/creative biology topics and jobs. I suspect that they will have a negative reaction to me doing an internship, but they are generally nice so they won't outwardly criticize me too much. I am worried that if I accept an industry internship for the summer it could reduce the quality of recommendation letters they would write if I did end up doing a postdoc after all. Of course, neither I nor any of you can read their minds so I'll probably just have to talk to them and see what happens. Does anyone have any experience transitioning to industry and having to tell their advisers, or doing such an internship? What was it like? Is there anyone who comes from a really obscure/unusual field in biology who has made this transition? Did you regret the loss of creativity? I realize that this experience depends a lot of personality etc. but I would love to hear other perspectives. Thanks for your help

Hi ctenophora, sorry for the late response. Based on everything I have heard about the program since then, the main thing to avoid seems to be specific faculty members (the cladists), and beyond that it is a well-regarded program. The facilities are really outstanding too. Hope that helps.

There's not a highly specific format they're exclusively looking for, but I would recommend putting all of that info into your first email. You definitely want to use "Dear Dr./Professor" or something else formal rather than "Hi". My dad who is a prof says he finds it juvenile when applicants start by saying "my name is" since that info is not super important and can be found in your email address as well as your sign-off. That opinion is subjective though. My emails started out more along the lines of "I am a senior at college X applying to graduate programs in field X. I have research interests in X and experience with X techniques, so I think I would be a good fit for your lab. Please let me know if you will be accepting PhD (or whatever) students this year. I have attached my CV." You should expand that slightly and word it a bit more eloquently if you want to write something similar. Mainly I think it should be short, polite, and very direct to the point (including a CV) because there's no way you can offend them by expressing interest in joining or by listing info about yourself. Also if you make the email too long or turn it into a string of emails they are less likely to reply as they get many emails a day. On this note, I would also advise sending a slightly altered follow-up email if you don't hear back after a couple of weeks because they likely forgot. YMMV, because several professors never responded to me even to reject me after several follow-ups, some of them said "I'm always accepting qualified candidates" as if to dismiss my question about whether they were looking. But the majority of people I contacted had good or neutral responses. Also, as for your concern about your grades/scores, some professors might bluntly ask to see them if you don't offer them up front in some fashion but you just have to accept it because they are going to see those number eventually no matter what.

Hi Furlock, I'm in EBE so I don't think that's exactly the same as molecular ecology but we have some such people in our department. I applied to 8 EBE programs and got into 4. I would suggest applying to more than 4 at least because I know that has been too few for some other EBE applicants even with good stats. One crucial factor depending on the structure of these programs is whether the specific PI you want has the funds and department go ahead to take on a new student. For me I had to apply directly to one or two PIs as opposed to doing rotations, so if that is the case for you as well you need to make sure every school you apply to has an appropriate PI accepting students. You can find this out by emailing your target PIs, which I think you should always do anyway.

Yes that's what I mean. I think that you don't necessarily need to outright say "you guys won't need to train me" but at some point you will sit down with the PI or someone and they will ask you about your research experience. You can summarize it and also say something like "during this project I learned a lot about technologies x and y, which I know you use in your lab, and I'd like to apply my experience with these tools to project q if I work in your lab". Hopefully you can make it sound more natural than that

samman, I think it's not a huge boost but I'm not totally sure. For me, the thing my potential PIs were most concerned with was not the field of my past research but the plans for future research I laid out in my application. It definitely is enormously helpful to your actual PhD research to land in a lab where the PI does basically exactly whatever it is you're going to do (otherwise you need to buy a lot of equipment and seek a lot of external help). However, I'm not sure if they'll like you much more than other applicants just for having experience very very similar to the lab's focus. I would guess that as long as you're in roughly the right field before applying they're more concerned with whether you've proved yourself to be a good researcher. However, I do think they would be impressed if you lay out your extensive experience with specific pieces of equipment and techniques that you know you'll use because the PIs know it saves time on training if they bring in grad students who can already do a lot of tasks. Maybe you could focus on mentioning those skills. As for your application, do you mean 50th percentile for the GRE? You might want to retake that if you have time. I got something like 79th percentile on the GRE Q section and I think that was borderline concerning because one of the PIs who extended an offer to me initially called it "a bit low" although obviously not prohibitive. If you're talking about the subject test then just don't submit it.

Thanks guys TakeruK, I have trouble making this distinction myself. I am pretty sure based on past experiences that I am imposing at least 80% of it on myself. My advisor is kind and soft-spoken but I am always paranoid that something that I've done will be the last straw, because it seems to me that I am making a lot of egregious mistakes. His response was pretty neutral. Obviously he would have liked me to get it right the first time but he didn't criticize me at all for getting it wrong and said my apology was unecessary. I think one of my prroblems is that none of the students in my lab have sequenced before. The last one to do this graduated before I came here. Anyway, I will try to overcome my qualms and push forward.

I have been in my lab for almost one year. I have extracted some challenging RNA samples from a few non-model organisms. I have already sunk money (my advisor's) into my work due to needing kits and reagents, not to mention a year of stipend. Now that it comes time to sequence my samples I am feeling completely overwhelmed by the costs (which in my mind equate to pressure on me for the payoff to be excellent) plus the fact that due to my semi-inexperience with buying sequencing services I keep getting the price wrong, thinking it's lower than it really is, having my advisor sign a PO after convincing him it's worth it, only to discover new hidden fees that add hundreds or thousands of dollars. Meanwhile, one of my samples is slightly impure compared to the others but after redoing it over and over the quality only gets worse, do we could be gambling at least in part on a low quality sample. I feel that if I convince my advisor to gamble thousands of dollars on my work I'm just setting myself up for failure if the results of sequencing are less than perfect. Every time the price increases I feel very upset at having to go through the cycle of asking for money again because I feel like it's my fault the price is so high. I've tried hard to get the price right but because I am still learning what all the Illumina terms mean it's very challenging to know even after talking to tech support. I didn't realize when I designed this experiment that it would cost so much because my other professor (who has more sequencing experience) kept telling me it would be super inexpensive. I can't tell if my emotions make no sense and I should just force myself to ask for the huge amount of money needed for the appropriate specs or if I should be working on somehow making it cheaper. The latter is something I have no idea how to do. Pls help. Is any of this normal? I know I've screwed up majorly getting the price wrong but I really thought I had it right every time...

I also had a super enjoyable first semester. I didn't have to teach for my salary last semester, but I do now. At first it seemed overwhelming but I'm settling into it and enjoying it more now. I love coming up with my own research ideas and trying out stuff with fancy lab equipment. I also love having some undergraduate assistants to do my bidding. One of my labmates, who is doing very similar things, is, however, extremely stressed all the time and seems to be in his office from early morning until very late at night. Sometimes he makes me paranoid that I'm not "working hard enough" but then again my professors seem decently pleased with my progress and I'm keeping up with my classes well.

Yeah, I'd say it's fine to say a school is your top choice. I actually said something similar at most of my interviews (it just so happened that I liked each new school better than the last, so I really did think each was my top choice at the time) and I got accepted everywhere I interviewed. I also suspect that one of the places I got rejected (didn't interview there) rejected me in part because I failed to show great enthusiasm about them being a favorite school of mine, especially since it was technically less competitive than the places I was accepted.

My boyfriend was invited as well.

I ended up sort of playing it safe in that I kept using last names/titles even when PIs signed with their first names. However, this eventually resulted in one PI ending an email with "you can call me [first name] by the way". The rule of thumb I used before applying to grad school was to use titles until meeting them in person in the context of doing research with them or having them as an adviser.

Definitely no. I had some people I wanted to work with ask specifically about my scores and they only asked about the V and Q scores. And yours are so stellar anyway. Furthermore, the AWA score only reflects your ability to write a very specific kind of non-biology-related essay. You have ample opportunity to prove your science writing abilities/essay writing abilities in your statements and in the fact that you have publications/presentations listed on your app. On top of all of this I think EEB programs do not put a lot of stock in the GRE except to throw out applicants with really low scores. Don't bother.