juilletmercredi

When I was in graduate school, I lived with a roommate. The city I moved to precluded living alone, as it was too expensive; however, I think I would still have chosen to live with a roommate even in a cheaper place. Graduate school can be really isolating, but having a roommate takes away some of that loneliness and isolation. For me, I just needed a roommate I felt comfortable and friendly with, but also a personal space I could retreat to (i.e., I couldn't share a bedroom - just an apartment). The apartment also needs to be sufficiently large to satisfy the number of people living there. You can find roommates of all stripes - I would have been delighted to live with someone with two small dogs, and would've helped walk and feed them as well as taken care of them while you were away if you needed. (I love dogs, but I didn't get one personally until after I finished my PhD.) Some roommates are also more understanding than others when it comes to dating and having partners over; one of my former roommates was in a long-term long-distance relationship just like I was, so we were both very accommodating when it came to partners coming over and staying because we'd both "been there". And all of my roommates from graduate school are still good friends of mine. I gotta say, though - I live alone now during my postdoc, and it's pretty glorious. I can do whatever I want whenever I want. I'm pretty clean as a person, but I can leave dishes in the sink overnight, walk around with no clothes on, arrange everything in every room the way I want...it's great! Of course, it's great for the particular point in life that I am currently in; my postdoc is fairly regular hours so I can go out after 5 with friends and such, and it's not quite as isolating as the intense experience of graduate school.

About 50% of people who begin a doctoral program do not finish one. This is for a variety of reasons, which include - but aren't limited to - not feeling able to complete a thesis. What the Ed.D thesis will entail will entirely depend on the program, but I think it's safe to say that your assessment of what's necessary is true (although I would say that 50 pages would be too short for a doctoral dissertation. The shortest ones I've seen have been around 100 pages). The whole point of a doctoral program is to give you the tools and knowledge necessary to complete that dissertation, since doctoral degrees usually prepare you for a research career in which you will have to do similar work. If you find academic writing and research too daunting to surmount even with assistance for your learning disabilities, then Ed.D programs that emphasize research and scholarship might not be good fits for you. If you are trying to take the EdD back into practice and work in the education field as a leader/practitioner, then an Ed.D program without a dissertation requirement might be ok. But if you are looking to potentially go into a research career, I think any hiring committee would be quite skeptical of an Ed.D holder who did not complete a dissertation. Besides, I have to say that the dissertation is not the only part of the doctoral degree that requires academic writing and research;r your classes and your comprehensive exams will also require those skills. The doctoral degree - even the Ed.D - is largely a research degree, so if you find research very difficult to the point that you think you can't do it, then I question whether you should embark upon an Ed.D. How many hours? That's impossible to estimate up front It depends entirely on the project you pick, how demanding your advisor is, the resources at your particular university, how well and how quickly you write, whether you need to learn new analysis techniques to complete the project, etc. I think it's more common to think in terms of months or years. In my field (psychology), a complete dissertation usually takes about 1-2 years to complete. Roughly 1 year is spent collecting, preparing, and analyzing data, and the other year is spent writing it up. In my case, I technically only spent 9 months on my dissertation, but that's because the data was largely collected while I was still in coursework and exams. My dissertation was about 132 pages excluding references. I spent about 9 months actively working on it - September through May. I would say that I spent roughly 30 hours on it most weeks. 9 months x 4 weeks x 30 hours is roughly 1080 hours, but that does not include the time I spent writing the dissertation proposal (which took me 3 months prior to actually beginning the dissertation), the time I spent collecting data for the dissertation (that took a long time, but it was part of a larger project that included other papers and supported at least one other dissertation), or the time I spent revising the dissertation after my defense (that took me about a month). And there were definitely some weeks - especially towards the end - in which I spent more than 30 hours working on the dissertation. Basically, you can see the dissertation as a series of small steps. It is overall a large project, but you don't tackle it all at once. I broke my dissertation down into multiple 2-page sections, and so when I sat down to write it wasn't "I'm going to work on my dissertation today" (which feels enormous) but "I'm going to write this 2-page sub-section on XXX today" (which is a doable daily goal). You set daily and weekly and monthly goals and a timeline for yourself, and you hack away at it a little at a time.

I got accepted via email, but I did get called by the director of a funding program at my university asking me to apply for the funding. I'm glad I happened to answer the phone at that particular moment (I was at a conference).

GradHooting, given the context of your second post I think that this is not an issue about elite schools, but rather about your mental health. I dealt with depression through much of the middle of my graduate program. I did go to an elite school for graduate school, but I still convinced myself that I was never going to get a job, that I was not comparable to my peers, that everyone was better than me, that maybe I should've gone to an even more elite school for better chances, or done this or that (papers and a different field were common triggers). It's not because of the school or program. It's really just your headspace, the depression, conspiring against you to make you feel worthless and panicked and anxious. If you're dealing with depression, the nature of the school won't fix that; fixing the depression is the only thing that would help. Having gotten over the depression, I can happily say that yes, that is the issue. I am far more optimistic about my job prospects and feel more positively about the choices I made now. Nothing much has changed, really, other than the fact that I was depressed and now I am not. What it sometimes helped me to do is make a list of the reasons I am awesome. Then mentally review them when necessary. This sounds narcissistic but it's not, really - the point is to help you balance yourself, because people who are depressed have a tendency to unnecessarily put themselves down.

I've never been to an MFA program, so I don't know how it differs. But "the pressure of the deadlines, sleepless nights" is pretty much the definition of graduate school, at least for a while. So if you're considering whether or not you should quit or press on, you should take that into account. From here on out, how often will you have to commute down to the school? If a lot of your unhappiness is from the commute and the requirement to take leveling classes, then now that those are over you might be much happier and able to forge forward. Even if you hate most of the work you created this semester, you could chalk it up to the work you had to create for necessity and look forward to producing better work in your actual graduate courses. I recently looked back on a paper I wrote in my first semester of graduate school, and I laughed at it because of the leaps and bounds my writing and thinking has taken in the last 6 years. But if you think the program (including professors) are designed in a way that is incompatible with how you do your art, it may be worth it to cut your losses and attempt to move on to a program where you can produce art you feel proud of.

I used Craigslist to find an apartment twice and in NYC most of the details and photos on the average post were true. Obviously sometimes you see something too good to be true - a 1500 square foot apartment on the UES for $1000/month - so you learn to pass those over. Sometimes they fudge a little bit (an "Upper West Side" apartment on 145th St). But most of the listings - especially ones looking for a roommate in a shared accommodation - are quite real with correct details and photographs. I'm browsing this Zenly site (clearly spam, but why not). It's set up nicely, but it only has Manhattan and only seems to show neighborhoods below 110th St, with the single exception of Morningside Heights (which has 4 apartments, all of which are above $3,000/month and three of which are above $6,000/month). And even all of those apartments are on 113th St. A service that would be useful to students would have more apartments under $2000/month (I've seen none) and would have some apartments in the more affordable neighborhoods of Manhattan and in the outer boroughs.

I am almost certain that overhead in the U.S. is also added to the top. If a researcher applies for an NIH R01 (which is $500,000 a year over 5 years) at a university with 50% overhead, they actually get that $500,000 per year. Then the university gets an additional $250,000 on top of that per year of the grant. And at most places, I actually don't think that you can use the overhead costs for course buyouts; I think you have to write that into the grant, aka you have to have a large enough grant to be able to cover that. Not only that, but your university has to allow course buyouts. For example, the regular load at my current university is a 2/2, a professor can buy themselves out of up to three courses, but every faculty member here needs to teach at least one course per year. At other schools I've seen it limited to 50% of the load. A community college may not allow them, and even if they did, they might have limits and requirements (like maybe you can only buy your way down to a 3/2, which would be a 50% reduction). And anyway, a community college probably doesn't have the resources for you to get an R01 or the equivalent NSF award. So you'll mostly be working with smaller grants, so you might not have enough money for enough course buyouts to really make it worth it/push the grants through. Although why would we be appalled by the amount of money that the university takes in overhead? It costs money to keep the lights on, run the electricity researchers' computers need, pay the IT guys who maintain the network, pay janitors who come clean the lab and the bathrooms on the hallway, purchase subscriptions to the journal articles the scientists use in their work, maintain the other library facilities - including the librarians who order that stuff, maintain the graduate students' work space...and all of the other thousands of things that universities cover that support STEM scientists in their work. It's a mutually beneficial arrangement.

I have been planning on building myself an academic website, and I was planning on going with Bluehost. It does cost money (a cheap amount - about $3-4/month, although I found out that you have to pay the fee up front for something like 2-3 years, which I thought was misleading) but I've seen a lot of Weebly and Wix pages that I did not like. With Bluehost you can use Wordpress and I just decided to do that. I plan to get my own domain name. (I had originally intended to build it this past summer, after I defended but before I started my postdoc, but there was minor drama with getting my defense schedule and I didn't have time. Now my goal is summer 2015, before I go on the market. We'll see.) I do not like social media for business. I think it's silly. LinkedIn is at least marginally useful, in that sometimes I find people who do what i want to do and I look at their CVs. I don't like ResearchGate. I find it really annoying. I've never used Academia.edu. I don't understand why we can't all just network at conferneces, and then I feel like a geezer when I say that.

Some of those days I just sit on my bed or on my couch and do nothing for a little while. Like literally nothing (well, I breathe). Normally I don't enjoy that, but it's nice to turn off your brain for 15-30 minutes and do nothing. I also enjoy Netflix marathons and playing video games to decompress. Now I also like to pet my dog or watch her do dumb stuff. She always makes me smile. Earlier today she was running in her sleep (chasing squirrels I guess) and she let out these two little soft barks in her sleep. She rarely barks when she's awake, so I thought that was funny, lol.

I am slightly more proud of my undergraduate institution. I went to a small mid-ranked historically black college for undergrad and an Ivy for grad school. But I loved my HBLAC, as I like to call it - it was such a nurturing, wonderful place where I had really great experiences and learned so much. I was so well-prepared for graduate school, and I feel like they manage to do a lot with a little. 50% of our students were Pell grant recipients and still they manage to send many, many students on to top graduate schools and to great careers. Plus the school has a huge commitment to community service. My grad school has so many resources that made being a graduate student there a pleasure academically speaking. But in other ways it was not so enjoyable.

Thoughts: 1) The standard course load at a community college is 5/5. You get no teaching assistants, so all grading and other class responsibilities are up to you. It would be difficult to carve out time for research if you are teaching five classes a semester. And there probably is not the opportunity to buy out at most CCs, given that your dedication is supposed to be to teaching. A 1/3 reduction would be around 7 classes a year, which is probably more like a 3/4 - possible, but difficult. 2) There are far fewer resources to do research at a community college. Many CCs won't have an office of sponsored research. They will be unfamiliar with how to handle grants and outside funding. Attracting research assistants for your research would be quite difficult, since you will be dealing only with first- and second-year students who may not know enough to help you yet. 3) CCs in most fields probably would prefer a PhD to an MS holder. In the past, they took MS and MA holders as instructors in part because of the lack of competitive PhDs competing for those jobs. But as the market tightens and it becomes harder for PhDs to get tenure-track jobs elsewhere, more are turning to CCs. It started in the humanities, and now it's to the point that it's quite difficult to get a tenure-track position at a CC in the humanities without a PhD. I wouldn't be surprised if this shift also happens in the STEM fields. Currently the academic shift seems to be going the other way - more PhDs hired on a part-time or contingent basis, with less time to do research. If more CCs start hiring PhDs, I don't think it will be because they have decided to change their priorities; rather, it will be because there are a glut of applicants that allow them be more choosy about who they hire. But the first and foremost responsibility of CCs to their students is teaching, teaching, teaching. If you do research it will probably be on your own time, and you probably won't get much support for it.

I would agree with that assessment.

In fact, I don't see how you could be eligible for tenure-track jobs in academia without being very close to 30. Even a flash who went straight from undergrad to grad school and finished in 5 years would be 27 when they graduated. Maybe 26 if they had a late birthday.

In my field, future employers would think nothing of it. In fact, they wouldn't even care where you got your BA. The concern would be the quality of your graduate education. In my field it's not uncommon for students who went to the best or one of the best programs in the field for undergrad to stay there as doctoral students. After all, if you are in one of the top-ranked places in the country that's the best for your research area, you're working on bleeding-edge research with a rock star in the field, and you're doing well - why would you leave? Simply to say that you did your PhD somewhere else? If you went to BA through PhD at, say, Michigan or Stanford or UCLA or Harvard - that wouldn't threaten your job prospects one iota in my own field. There are other ways to gain perspective. You can collaborate with PIs at other institutions; you can go to conferences a lot; you can do a postdoc somewhere else.

Who did you speak to at the grad school fair? Usually, grad fairs send representatives from the admissions office; the admissions office usually deals with the admission of the master's students. Generally, the professors in the department handle the admission of the doctoral students. I'm not saying that the person at the fair didn't know what they were talking about - perhaps they really do. But I've heard the admissions folks at my own alma mater speak before and (although their tremendously helpful/amazing!) much of the advice they give does not apply to applying to the PhD programs at our school; it was mainly tailored towards MPH applicants. But sometimes professors DO go to grad fairs. In my former department, the info sessions at APHA are usually staffed by professors and current grad students. Maybe e-mail a potential PI at Yale?

There are few PhD programs in epidemiology that don't require a master's. I'm pretty sure Yale's PhD program in chronic disease epidemiology doesn't require one. If you have no research experience, I think it's unlikely you will be admitted. The public health experience is nice, but a PhD is a research degree - PhD programs want students with some research experience who know what they are getting themselves into professionally. (The clinical experience is more or less meaningless. Epidemiologists don't do clinical work.) Given that even in programs where the master's is not required most students nonetheless have one, I think you will be at a disadvantage lacking both a master's AND research experience. You can make up for the lack of a master's by being an otherwise really superb candidate, but without the experience, you're not outstanding as a candidate. The classes that you take are not so much relevant. If you decide to delay graduating for a year, it should be to get more research experience. But you can do that post-college - either in a full-time research position (given your degree, try a policy institute like Mathematica, RTI, RAND, Advisory Board, etc.) or a post-bac program like the NIH IRTA. The CDC also has some research programs for post-baccalaureate students, I think. You don't have to decide, also. You can apply to MPH programs, MS programs, and PhD programs at the same time and see where the chips fall. (This is what I did, and I got into a PhD program.) MPH programs are generally more professionally/practice-focused, but you can certainly do research in an MPH program and many MPHs go on to get a PhD in epi. The MS is pretty much designed to be a research degree and a feeder into a PhD; the difference is usually more theoretical coursework.

IIRC this poster has posted before, and wants to take some time between the master's and PhD. They thus want to get a master's that they can practice with in the meantime. (Correct me if I'm wrong, OP.) I don't think it's a waste per se; the credits won't transfer so it won't reduce your time to degree, but you will get some valuable clinical/counseling experience as a school psychologist (albeit a different setting, but still). That can not only look good on a clinical application but will also probably enhance the clinical educational experience. And no, I think as long as you get some research experience and do a thesis you should be okay. Many a person with a professional master's has gone on to get a PhD later. Also, the difference between EdD and PhD really differs between programs. Generally speaking, the EdD is more thought of as a professional doctoral degree in education - designed for educational leaders (principals, superintendents, etc.) to go into the education field and lead in a practice sense. But that's not universally true anymore. Many research-based doctoral programs that have the goal of training academics - professors and researchers - culminate in an EdD. For example, for years Harvard's research-based program was an EdD; they only recently transitioned it over to a PhD.

This isn't a widespread thing, but I think graduate student input on applicants is very common. Thankfully, the vast majority of professors don't treat their graduate students like "little shits" or "minions", but rather like junior colleagues who they are training to eventually take their place (figuratively, although sometimes literally). At a certain point in the program they value your expertise, and an advanced graduate student isn't all that different from a new assistant prof tbqh. Just like you take it on faith that your professors are sane, professional people who are interested in the growth and preservation of their labs and programs - and don't deny students because they don't like their hair or something - you have to take it on faith that the graduate students are too. Any grad student selected for this kind of thing is probably quite advanced and has proven themselves to be sane and professional and unlikely to reject a student for "extremely poor reasons that have nothing to do with merit." Although I do have to break it to you that grad school decisions are not made entirely on merit anyway. Some personal subject matter doesn't belong in personal statements, and many professors will react negatively to that, too. In fact, I daresay a lot of grad students would probably be more sympathetic. Read that "kisses of death" article that was posted in the other thread. A 5th or 6th year ABD has survived the vast majority of the program and has a pretty good understanding of what it takes to make it through. Enough, I would say, to put a rating on an applicant. I honestly do not understand this. Graduate students are researchers. Your personal statement was, presumably, tailored towards researchers - researchers who would read it and get a better understanding of what kind of research you want to do and the preparation you have to undertake this program. What, research-wise, would you have tailored differently if you knew that a 6th-year ABD was reading it as opposed to your PIs? I hope the answer is nothing, because that 6th-year ABD is going to be judging your research from much the same lens as the PI. The PI of course has more experience, but that doesn't mean that the grad student is fooling around looking for the chili pepper or something. A couple of the professors in my department who I knew were involved in admitting students got their PhDs literally a year or two before me. Some of them are my friends. And I want my lab and my department to be successful and for my (now former) PI to be successful in his work, so when I evaluated students for him or forwarded him the information for potential students, I only sent along the ones I thought would be good fits professionally. Grad students are also adults. What could you have written in there that was fine for a supervisor to know but unsuitable for a grad student to know? Your PI WAS writing to his colleagues when he wrote his recommendation. First of all, the grad students are his junior colleagues, and in probably < 2 years will be his peers. Second of all, it's not like the professors aren't reading the recommendations at all.

In addition to what Eigen and TakeruK already said, your post (and your issue with this) strikes me as incredibly naive. Graduate students have an impact on admissions at all programs. Berkeley's situation might be unconventional in its formality, but not in its practices. I have been asked my opinion on applicants and I have known that my opinion mattered and was factored in, particularly when the applicant was going to come into the lab. Labs are an ecosystem and incoming students need to be able to get along with everyone. Besides, I am thankful that the professors and staff in my program treated me and my fellow grad students like a junior colleague and not like a "minion." They trusted our judgment. Graduate students also play a role in hiring professors, too, btw. In some departments, there are one or two grad students formally on the search committee. In others they aren't, but they attend the job talks and give input on the candidates - which is taken seriously. A formal lunch is scheduled between the grad students and the candidate. This is no different from the non-academic world. Co-workers often help make decisions about who to hire in their department. Sometimes, subordinates are on the interview panel for their future managers. In my last position, I was on the committee that helped hire my own boss.

Yeah, I think it's a bit pointless to speculate about what you could've done better - and we don't know every single thing you did, so it's difficult for us to help. In that vein: Did you try to get along with the teacher who apparently hated you? To be fair to her, your reaction to her may have been because of her treatment of you but your words here make me a bit wary. For example, why is it relevant that she was abused as a child and divorced by her husband? What has that go to do with anything, and what did you hope to gain by sharing that kind of personal information here? It also sounds like you talked to a lot of other people about her behind her back. Perhaps you were just trying to figure out why she would be so angry with you. Who is this "everyone involved in the situation" who agreed that she hated you because you were male? Frankly, I'm skeptical. It sounds like the only people directly involved in the situation were you and her (and your boss and boss's boss indirectly). Who are these other people who were commenting on her motivations with so much certainty? Did you ever ask her directly whether she disliked you or disliked what you were doing? Did you ever directly address her behavior? E.g., when she was "blatantly disrespectful" to you in front of the students, you could've taken her aside during a free moment and explained to her (professionally) that you felt she was undermining your authority in front of the students and asked her why she did that. Is there a possibility that you simply rubbed her the wrong way? Maybe she thought that you were being cocky, or maybe she thought you were trying to undermine HER authority. Maybe she didn't like the way you taught. Maybe she thought that you thought you were better than her, and she resented you for that. Who knows? Could you have asked to be switched to another teacher? As an aside, people can and are often hired for both personal connections and qualifications/credentials. The fact that your boss was friends with your boss's boss before she got the job doesn't indicate foul play or that she's unqualified to do the job. And so what the boss had a personal friendship with the teacher you disliked. What does that mean? Who are these "others" you are getting that information, and how are they in a position to know how and why the boss was hired? Honestly, to me it sounds like the entire situation was at least in part dysfunctional. People are distrustful enough to reveal personal information they learned about other people in casual gossip (I wouldn't discuss another person's divorce or childhood abuse with a third person, because why?) People are gossiping about why this person got hired and how that person is friends with this other person, which in a normal workplace is not a problem. But...does it really surprise you that the school was more interested in protecting one of its veteran teachers than vindicating a part-time graduate student, even if you are right? It could've been cronyism, or it could've just been professional interest. I recommend nothing. Unless you intend to return to this program and get the fellowship back, which would involve talking to whoever's in charge.

I sympathize with you. Disorganized professors are annoying. But the first thing I will say is that I think you have to stop thinking about your program as whether you are "under contract" or not. There's contract and then there's the actual work and reputation you build. I completely agree with setting boundaries. But at the same time, you don't want to become known as the student who always mentions whether or not she's "under contract" wrt when you respond to your professors or do work. There are a variety of reasons for that, but generally speaking academia is one of those fields in which you often work even when you're not technically at work. Generally speaking, my perception of breaks has shrunk a lot since being a grad student. Yes, technically the day before or after (or both) Thanksgiving may be a university holiday, but a lot of academics do at least some light work those days, and checking through emails and selectively responding to ones that seem pressing (even if it is just to say "I got your email, and I can't do this right now - I will get to it on Monday") is probably a good idea on one or both of those days. Obviously if you are in the wilderness with no email access that can't be helped, but when you're not, even just a glance on your smartphone if you have one is probably good. It's also probably a good idea to let your PI know when you'll be out for breaks. Since this one is disorganized, you can send it in writing. That way she knows ahead of time that you won't be back until Monday evening, and knows not to expect work or immediate responses from you. But I wouldn't even mention the contract - I would just say you were going to be out of town with family and only on email intermittently (or not at all), but you'll be back by Monday evening at 4 pm. Another thing I got real good at in grad school was telling people no, I couldn't do that. Unless absolutely necessary (or I'm returning a favor or being nice to someone, or I have literally nothing else to do) I don't do any last minute work for other people. I don't like it; it's stressful, and it's not fair to me to be super stressed out because you waited until the last minute. This of course depends on your relationship with your advisor - but could you start pushing back a little? Like if she tells you Monday morning she needs something for Tuesday morning, as you say she does often, could you say something like "I don't think that I'll be able to get it done by then. How does Wednesday evening sound?" or however long you think it will take you. On my part, when people asked me how long it would take me to do something, I would calculate the time and then add an extra day or two just in case something came up. There are rarely emergencies in academia, honestly. The time crunches that come up are often the result of poor planning.

For my PhD I had to take 4 classes a semester, otherwise I would be taking classes for nearly 4 years and I wasn't willing to do that. I think 4 classes a semester is quite doable if you have few other commitments. It sounds like you don't have any (no RA, TA, work, etc.) so I think you can do it. It is a little rough, but not impossible.

Why would you say that your professor is not qualified to teach your statistics class? There's a difference between not being a good teacher and being actually not qualified. If you are interested in going deep into the theory and math behind statistics, you should investigate whether your university will allow you to complete a concurrent MA in statistics or a graduate certificate. Many universities do allow this, but they don't widely advertise it - it's something you have to ask about. Even if they don't, you might be able to cobble together your own, although if you haven't taken multivariable calculus yet you will have to do that. Psychological statistics classes are not really going to go into depth about the theory because most psychologists aren't interested in that; they want to know the applied stuff. (Quantitative psychologists being the exception, of course, spunky ) If you really want to know the math and theory behind stats, you may be interested in taking calculus I-III (which is through multivariable) and a linear algebra class if you haven't already. I haven't taken calc III, but I took calc I and II and linear algebra and that's what helps you understand the math.

I wouldn't say that it's "undeniable" the BS -> MS -> PhD is better from a student perspective. I went straight from a BA to a PhD and quite frankly, in my field, I don't see a real difference. In the first 2.5 years of my program I completed pretty much the same curriculum a master's student would - in fact, most of my classes were taken with mostly other master's students. If I had gotten a master's first and then gone to the PhD, I would've been taking a lot of classes all over again. Plus I would've had to pay for the master's. The people who had gotten a master's first spent, all told, at least 1-2 more years in graduate school total than I did. Case in point, one of my close friends actually did her master's at the institution where we did our doctoral degree. She still had to take 30 more hours of coursework (the normal is 60, so she got exempted from 30 hours because of her master's). I remember her struggling to find relevant classes that she didn't already take in the department, and she only finished one year before me. Time isn't everything, of course, and I do think that there can be a benefit to doing a master's first depending on the student. But it's not a universal thing, IMO. The only other thing I will add is that while it is true that you usually do your coursework first and the later parts are mostly research, in the U.S. you also begin research right away in a PhD program. A new graduate student will usually begin assisting in the lab with some lesser tasks and perhaps presenting a poster at a conference and/or giving a brown bag in the department. As time progresses, they take on more demanding/advanced/independent tasks and spend less time on coursework. But it's not like you are doing no research in the beginning; you're juggling research and classwork and sometimes TAing.

^^^^^Wha proflorax said, times 1 million.