gnetophyte

Yeah. I signed up for a Ph.D. program with grand designs of building the next golden rice, have hated every minute of it, and I might just squeak out with a M.S. in Plant Biology in a year and a half. What the heck am I going to do with an M.S. in Plant Biology? I can be a laboratory assistant, but is there any room for advancement in that field? I want to move into biotech, but all those jobs require you to have mammalian cell culture experience. I don't want to work in the agribusiness industry. I'm only halfway done with the program. Should I just finish? My degree might be useless. Or should I leave and try to enroll in another degree program, and have to explain that half a degree on my record?

Just came back from my meeting with the Director of Graduate Studies. I've still got the NDSEG and an internal fellowship pending, but other than that, I'm screwed. My leading option right now is take a leave of absence and see if the money's better next year.

I got Honorable Mention! This is great, but it doesn't come with any money. Got to go talk to the Director of Graduate Studies today about the funding implosion in my department. Maybe I'll have time to feel honored later.

Representing MN, the frozen north! (Grad school and undergrad.) Or CA – I lived there before that.

Okay. If I don't get the NSF fellowship, I'm going to ... have a long talk with the DGS. There's three other sources of external funding I've applied for that I'll hear about soon. And I'm allowed to TA for three semesters (there are more students who need to support themselves on TAships than there are TA slots, so they have to ration them). That gives me three semesters, minimum, for my advisor to get her funding back or something else to work out. Maybe the DGS and I can piece something together. In the meanwhile, they're not going to announce today. I'm going to go enjoy my weekend as best I can.

Oddly enough, I find this therapeutic. Since, you know, whether I get to stay in grad school or not depends on me getting the NSF or some other external funding...

@ etale and NBK - Thank you! Thank you! I would never have had the guts to call like that.

Plus I just finished my rotations but I can't join the lab that I want until I hear about funding, so I'm stuck in limbo...

Because of some weird stuff that's happening with the state budget, my program doesn't know how they're going to fund me if I don't get this. (I'm a first-year student.) ARRG. What about people whose admissions decisions are riding on this? They've got to announce it April 15 or before, right?

I gripe about school often enough, but I truly do enjoy research. I signed up for this because I want to spend my career in a laboratory.

Yeah, my advisor told me I should specifically address the broader impacts in a separate section. Since both reviewers dinged me for broader impacts last year, I tried to really drive it home this time. I was rotating in a biofuels lab, so I talked about that, and my interest in popular science writing.

Thank you, everybody. Yeah, it's going to be okay. I just have to stick my head out the window and scream sometimes.

Hi, Olive! This is my second try, too. Plant Biology last year, and I'm trying again in Plant Biology this year. So, I know the NSF likes to award fellowships in a diversity of fields and geographical regions. Does anybody know how they spread it out? It is it like, "Let's aim to fund 10% of the people who applied in each field," or do they assign raw numbers of fellowships to each field, or what?

Hello, everyone, I'm a first-year student in a Ph.D. program in Plant Biology. The past twelve months have just been ... argh. Alternating between on top of the world and the pit of despair, about every week or so. Real research is hard! Undergrad research was all fun and games. When I look at the whole thesis thing I have ahead of me, I don't know if I'm good enough, but every time I do an experiment and it works I feel brilliant. When I applied for Ph.D. programs, I was a starry-eyed liberal arts student and I figured I was going to try for a Nobel Prize someday. Pretty naive. Now that I've learned more about the actual grit of academia, I think I might go for a job in biotech. Now I find that I could get a good job with just an MS. But I could get an even better one with a Ph.D. if I stick it out for three additional years... I hate, hate, HATE the snow in this part of the country. I've just endured a four-month-long winter and the prospect of three or four more winters is daunting. Sometimes I get lonely. I work at maintaining an active social life with the grad club and the fantasy writer's group in the city, but I feel guilty whenever I'm not in the lab. And my PI has really high standards. Writing a dissertation feels like I'm going to have to climb Mount Everest, but I look back at the past year, and I've made so much progress, and I just don't know. And looking at the forums here, it seems like just about every other grad student in existence is going through the same thing. Can we commiserate, please? P.S. Plus, I don't know where my funding is going to come from next year. Waiting on a bed of nails to hear back from the NSF fellowship in a couple of weeks.