Behaviors & attitudes of annoying first-year students

[ghostar]

What are some annoying/inappropriate behaviors you've seen in first-year students (or chemistry grad students in general)? I'm just curious. And this will give me a better idea of how NOT to act in grad school

[Eigen]

1) Being sure you know more than any of the current grad students and most of the faculty.

2) Avoiding department events or senior grad students socializing.

 

Lots of other minor things, but those are the two big ones for me. The first is just annoying, the second is both annoying and damaging to becoming part of the department.

[Quantum Buckyball]

bxtching in public like lunch room, elevator, social events, bathroom...., don't get me wrong, I think it's alright if you do it privately 

[Quantum Buckyball]

One more thing, eavesdropping is also pretty bad. 

[jujubea]

Oh this is a good idea. I wish you'd posted it in the general forums instead of chem-specific! 

Following!

[Cookie]

Being annoyed by annoying behaviors is... annoying. 

[Quantum Buckyball]

Being annoyed by annoying behaviors is... annoying. 

 

What is this? haiku?

[Eigen]

I read it more as tempering expectations. IE, we generally expect the bulk of our junior graduate students to have poor professional socializing skills. They're still young. Expecting them to not be that way, and being annoyed by very common behaviors is, in itself, annoying. 

 

Or I could be reading it completely wrong. 

 

I do have on more to add though:

 

Avoiding seminars/talks by outstanding scholars in the field because they aren't the exact subfield you're most interested in. 

 

The complaints lately about mandatory attendance at department seminars (we don't do subfield specific seminars) is immense, with lots of people saying they aren't interested in anything outside of their current planned dissertation research. To me, that seems especially naive in terms of developing yourself as a scientist long term.

[TakeruK]

The complaints lately about mandatory attendance at department seminars (we don't do subfield specific seminars) is immense, with lots of people saying they aren't interested in anything outside of their current planned dissertation research. To me, that seems especially naive in terms of developing yourself as a scientist long term.

 

I agree with this sentiment. However, I don't think it's a good idea for us "senior" (I guess I can call myself that now) grad students to assume that every first year wants to develop themselves as a scientist** long term. 

 

Don't get me wrong--I still think all students should be encouraged to attend seminars not in their dissertation topic because we should use our time in an academic environment to take advantage of all it has to offer, especially early on in a student's grad career. 

 

But, I feel that PhD programs stereotypes every grad students as aspiring to an academic career. I think this is not healthy because it makes people who don't want this feel like they are doing something wrong. This might cause people to try to stick to an academic career path longer, which hurts both themselves and wastes resources for others. 

 

Which is why I think reasons like "you should do X if you want to be a good scientist" should only be given if you know the person receiving your advice do want to become a good scientist. Otherwise, I think there are plenty of other reasons to give to convince a first year student to attend more seminars without (un)consciously adding to the perception that non-academic career paths are "unsuccessful". I know this is not what you mean, but I think many of us in academia casually use language that can sound like this.

 

**Note: After writing this, I realise that you might have meant "scientist" in the more general term of "someone who does scientific work", while I interpreted as an academic position/title, such as a TT position or a staff scientist or a researcher at a government facility--i.e. all academic positions. At least in my field, people who don't continue in academia are generally not thought of as "scientists", even if they use science and other skills developed during their PhD in their work. So maybe what I wrote doesn't apply to this case specifically, but I thought I might just leave it anyways.

[Eigen]

At least in my field, scientist (or chemist) would describe anyone who works professionally in the field- and actually, probably, moreso those working in industry/government research than academics. 

 

I actually think developing outside of your dissertation area is far more important if you don't want to go into academia- you're much more likely to have to translate your work to other fields, or work on collaborative projects and know what's going on. Academia is far more forgiving of being a one-trick pony, in my experience. One common move that I see is going into consulting- either tech transfer type consulting work, or analyzing ideas for investors. In that case, the more breadth of background you have from your PhD, the better you'll be at your job. Heck, it's even good practice to take each seminar as a potential idea presentation, and take the opportunity to critically analyze the idea- what are its merits, where does it fall flat, how useful/practical would it be long term, etc.

 

That said, I completely agree with the first part of your post- thankfully, the majority of my department, junior or senior, are not looking for traditional academic appointments, so there are a number of options depending on exactly what you want to do and where you want to go.

[TakeruK]

Indeed, since my field is mostly academic only (there isn't really an "industry" for exoplanet science), the careers our colleagues pursue when not staying in academia are generally far removed from the "scientific" part of our training. Instead, these careers come from our ability to write code, manage datasets, data analysis, do statistics, etc. For example, a scientist who did their PhD running numerical simulations of planet formation might find a non-academic career creating models of the stock market or performing risk analysis assessment for another company.

 

So instead, students in my program interested in non-academic paths generally focus on technical skills outside of their dissertation area rather than scientific skills outside of their dissertation area. But at the first year level, it would indeed be naive to assume you know everything about your future career plans and skip these seminars because you don't think you need them!

[Cookie]

What is this? haiku?

 

I think of grad school as a very personal journey. I've seen so many people still acting like they are still in high school and spending too much time gossiping/bickering about others. 

[Quantum Buckyball]

I think of grad school as a very personal journey. I've seen so many people still acting like they are still in high school and spending too much time gossiping/bickering about others. tr

 

tru dat and guilty

[Cookie]

tru dat and guilty

 

Yea, I guess because everything in grad school is pretty much ambiguous: no set schedule, very few hard deadlines, and everybody makes progress in their own term.

I try to keep a positive mindset by setting concrete personal/professional goals. If today I achieve something towards those goals, I'm happy. There is no need to compare yourself with this fellowship winner, or that Crossfit girl

[Eigen]

It's a personal journey, but I also spend more time in close proximity to my lab mates than I would any coworkers.

I honestly would say chemistry, and most other bench sciences are more like a job you progress through by ranks and promotions than the personal journey in less individual areas.

There are certainly far more defined hierarchies of responsibility, and I would definitely say my boss would consider me partially responsible for the development of the junior grad students in the lab.

I'd also say categorizing gossip as "high school" is a bit off... Most faculty I know gossip more than the grad students. People who spend a lot of time in close proximity interacting with the same other people talk. A lot.

[TakeruK]

Scientists are still humans. "Gossip" isn't high school--I've worked in non-academic places and hear it all the time, from people in their early 30s, from middle-aged people and even from old folks. It's human nature. Some people like to gossip a lot, some hate it, some will do it occasionally. By choosing grad school, we don't magically lose all of our humanness and somehow makes us different from the rest of the world.

[rising_star]

Avoiding seminars/talks by outstanding scholars in the field because they aren't the exact subfield you're most interested in. 

 

The complaints lately about mandatory attendance at department seminars (we don't do subfield specific seminars) is immense, with lots of people saying they aren't interested in anything outside of their current planned dissertation research. To me, that seems especially naive in terms of developing yourself as a scientist long term.

 

Not in the sciences but, I had the same complaint as a graduate student. My field is a huge one with people working in very different areas (some study apples, some study bananas, and others study lasagna). I always viewed department seminars as a way to learn about another area of the discipline in 45 minutes, without having to do a lot of reading or preparation. What I found was this made me more conversant at conferences (that is, I could walk into a session and have some clue of the conversation happening) but also made things easier for me on the job market. If you're looking for an academic position, you tend to meet individually with every faculty member in the department for at least 30 minutes. In that time, you talk to one another about your research among many other things. Having that breadth from department seminars made it easier for me to ask intelligent (or at least not completely ridiculous) questions about research way outside my field. Now I'm in the position of having a job in an interdisciplinary department where, once again, having some exposure to a bunch of different areas is helpful for speaking with my colleagues and interacting with the guests we bring in.

[TakeruK]

Not in the sciences but, I had the same complaint as a graduate student. My field is a huge one with people working in very different areas (some study apples, some study bananas, and others study lasagna). I always viewed department seminars as a way to learn about another area of the discipline in 45 minutes, without having to do a lot of reading or preparation. What I found was this made me more conversant at conferences (that is, I could walk into a session and have some clue of the conversation happening) but also made things easier for me on the job market. If you're looking for an academic position, you tend to meet individually with every faculty member in the department for at least 30 minutes. In that time, you talk to one another about your research among many other things. Having that breadth from department seminars made it easier for me to ask intelligent (or at least not completely ridiculous) questions about research way outside my field. Now I'm in the position of having a job in an interdisciplinary department where, once again, having some exposure to a bunch of different areas is helpful for speaking with my colleagues and interacting with the guests we bring in.

 

Sometimes my worry is that I don't know if me, a lasagna-studying person, would be able to actually understand a banana-talk in 45 minutes. Some speakers are very good and know that they are speaking to a wide audience and I get a lot out of the seminar. Sometimes though, the speaker is actually not very good at communicating (or was incorrectly informed that the audience is all banana-studiers) and I get lost in 5-10 minutes and the rest of the time is a waste. I wish it did not appear impolite for me to just walk out when a talk is going to waste my time. 

 

If I were able to design my own seminar series, I would have all seminars begin with a 10 minute summary (like a conference talk) of the material, a short 2-3 minute break, then 40 minutes of a full traditional seminar talk. If the audience likes the summary, they can stay, otherwise, they would be free to leave. I feel like this would encourage many more people to hear about a wider breadth of topics because they are only risking 10-15 minutes of their time, not a whole hour. 

[Eigen]

I have yet to find a seminar I couldn't understand enough of to be worth the time. 

 

And sometimes, what was worth the time was realizing exactly how not to put a seminar together. Or how not to respond to questions. Or even just an interesting way of approaching a problem that has some vague applications to things I'm interested in.

 

Or even "Hey, look, I can do research with that many holes in it and still get funding and tenure". 

 

But I have yet to find one that was a complete waste of time, even some of the hardcore modeling and computational seminars that make my head hurt just looking at 100 slides worth of equations and derivations. There's also something to be said for the fact that the more seminars you go to, the more you pick up, and then the easier getting more out of future seminars gets. 

 

I'd also say that there have been very few times in my program when an hour a week was so crucial to my success in the program that it wasn't worth the tradeoffs in networking and competency. 

 

There are also definitely times I take a notepad, listen intensely to the first 10-15 minutes of the talk, and then diagram schemes for my own work or write for the rest of the time.

 

Besides, our seminars have free beer and food!

 

That said, the students I usually have an issue with are ignoring seminars they really, really could (or should) be able to understand and go to. You'll have someone who's, say, studying Mongolian basket weaving techniques, and they refuse to go to seminars on the history of Mongolian baskets, or overviews of eastern basket weaving techniques. Because, you know, the seminar isn't titled "Mongolian basket weaving techniques", and they couldn't possibly need to know or be interested in anything not titled that.

[TakeruK]

The food analogy was fun but maybe confusing. I study the processes that drive the migration of a certain type of planets around other star systems (exoplanets). I go to all seminars that are related to planets around other star systems (whether it's about migration or not, and whether it's about "my" type of planet or not). I go whether the study uses the same techniques as me, or something completely different. I also go if the study is actually about other things (e.g. galaxy dynamics) but can be applied to planetary systems. And, I also go to seminars that are about planets in our own Solar System.

 

But my division seminars cover a much wider breadth of topics and I don't go to (nor understand very well) some of the other stuff. I don't usually attend seminars about measuring the haze layer on top of big cities. I don't usually attend seminars about oceanography, climate change, petrology, etc. A running bad joke is that "planetary scientists" will study all planets...except Earth! However, when an oceanographer, environmental scientist, petrologist, etc. is invited to give a planetary science specific colloquium, then I do attend, because supposedly they will tailor their work to show us how we can apply their stuff to our planets. Unfortunately, a lot of people interpret this as "let's tell an uninformed audience the very specifics of my work" and they go way too deep too fast and lose us. 

 

Overall, one great thing about being in a really multidisciplinary field is that we have all sorts of expertise and seminars going on. We have people working with us that have prior training in Physics, Chemistry, Astronomy, Biology, Atmospheric Science, and Geology. We also have 6 seminars per week. On average, I attend 1-2 seminars per week. Most people have one seminar series that they regularly attend and sometimes go to additional talks where there are relevant interests.

 

I agree there is a lot to learn on what not to do from attending bad seminars. I make it an extra priority to attend certain types of seminars (e.g. job talks or special prize lectureships from distinguished scholars) but overall, I can't afford to spend 6 hours per week attending seminars just because. I'm willing to risk up to 1 bad seminar per week from my regular seminar series but I'm a bit more picky when it comes to picking from the other 5 series.

[eeee1923]

My field is a huge one with people working in very different areas (some study apples, some study bananas, and others study lasagna). 

 

I find this to be one of the most amusing yet true analogies when it comes to seminar talks in general.

[rising_star]

I had something interesting typed out and then lost it. Oops. In a nutshell, it was to agree with Eigen.

 

Another thing that is annoying about first year students is all the assumptions they can (and do!) make about how things run (in the department, at the university, in academia, etc.). You don't know as a 1st year what things people are keeping track of so it behooves you to do everything you can to look and seem like a happy, productive, contributing member of the department. Attending department seminars is part of that. So is coming to class prepared. So is not trash-talking other grad students, the undergraduates, or faculty because you never know who is listening. You also don't always know as a 1st year how you will be evaluated, especially since that varies from one program to the next. My MA program let every faculty member comment on each student as part of the student's confidential annual evaluation. They literally just put up a slide with your picture and your accomplishments then let people talk. One prof slyly took notes on who attended departmental seminars (we call them colloquiums), another commented on how students behaved in their required grad seminar. While no one lost their funding, you don't want to be in the position of having profs talk crap about you based solely on the fact that they've never seen you when a guest speaker is around. 

 

To TakeruK's point about various fields, I will say that as an interdisciplinary person (or, more accurately, everyone finds my actual discipline to be interdisciplinary) I find that I can learn something from basically any talk, even if it's bad. In the era before smartphones, I sat through a 45-minute talk about something I didn't understand in no small part because it used an acronym I didn't know. I ended up whispering to a friend and asking what it was about halfway through. I've also never forgotten what that acronym means and I rarely use acronyms in my own talks because of that experience. People in my field have an array of backgrounds, ranging from the humanities (philosophy, literature, history) to the social sciences (political science, psychology, anthropology) to the natural & physical sciences (physics, meteorology, geology, hydrology) and then there's computer scientists. I have attended talks by speakers with basically all of those backgrounds and have been able to find something useful to take away from those talks. Especially as a first year, you have no idea what you can take away from those talks if you just go and sit there like a sponge waiting to soak up cool things.