How much time do you spend weekly doing meaningful work in your lab? (For everyone, but computational chemistry in particular)

[iammaxhailme]

I'm about 16 months into my PhD program. At my university (which is mid-tier but rising), you spend the first year knocking most of your required classes out of the way and join a lab during the summer after the first year (so about 10 months in). So for the last 6 months or so I've been in my PI's lab doing work, but I often have the opposite problem I see some PhD students mentioning... my problem is that I don't do enough work. It's not that there is work for me to do and I ignore it, there just isn't much for me to do. The PI gives me tasks and they either don't take very long or are so over my head that there's no chance I could do them without him being there, and he often only physically shows up 1 or 2 days a week because he's busy with other things. I am wondering what other people's experiences are in terms of hours. I know every lab and field is different, we're in the chemistry department, but it's a computational lab, so the work is all on the computer, I find it hard to get meaningful answers about this because what we do is so different from the rest of the chem department. The only other computational chem grad student I know is the other guy in my lab who has been there a year longer than me, but is in the same stage of the program (i.e. he hasn't started having committee meetings yet, etc) who always seems to have something to do, but I get the impression that what he's doing is learning stuff for himself and it's not really related to the lab. Since it's on the computer, the PI often works remotely and is slow to answer emails sometimes. When he comes in, sometimes I mention this to him but he doesn't seem particularly concerned. He's a nice guy and he seems happy to help with stuff when he's there, but he's a young guy, a new prof and I'm essentially tied for being his first graduate student, so he doesn't seem to have a lot of experience managing people. 

 

I'm too new to the lab to be independent/come up with stuff to do for the lab's research myself, and the prof doesn't give me much to do so I often only spend 3-4 hours a day actually doing anything, then I just go home and relax or half-heartedly skim some random publication related to the lab or read up on coding tutorials that I think will be useful later etc. At first I greatly enjoyed the lack of pressure (this is partly what drew me to computational chem in the first place... no getting up at 7 AM to prepare samples and do a bunch of chemical rundowns like when I did some short lab rotations in some more traditional labs that I was thinking about joining) but it's been a couple of months and I am getting worried that I'm going to be really behind when the department comes inspecting, or that I'll generally fall behind in some important way, such as publications (I don't have any, but the prof says that in computational chemistry, often you don't publish results formally in a journal and instead share a program or code so our field tends to have a low paper count). I can't say I've done NOTHING, because occaisonally there are weeks when I have a lot to do, but "a lot to do" for me means I spend 30-35 hours working instead of 15-20 (not counting TAing, which I spend 5-6 hours a week on). 30-35 still seems quite light compared to what I hear other chem students say they do, but on the other hand, they spend a lot of time doing more traditional chem labwork that is necessary to actually do research, whereas what we do is on the computers so we don't have that. Since it's such a different type of field, I'm not sure what's normal.

I would post this in the chemistry forum, but that seems to be all people asking about admissions, so I doubt I'd get any meaningful replies there. Thanks for reading.

 

Edit: I thought I should mention that I am not currently in any classes. My only real responsibility besides labwork during this semester is TAing freshman chem lab, which is 3 hours per week with an accompanying 1.5-2.5 hours of grading. There are no office hours

Edited October 26, 2016 by iammaxhailme

[TakeruK]

I'm not in chemistry but most of my work is also computational, with occasional data-collecting using telescopes (sometimes involving travel, but I often also control the telescope remotely). 

I would say that in my first year, when I was taking classes, I worked about 20-30 hours per week on research and 30 hours per week on classes. There's no TAing in our first year here. After the first year/classes, I work about 40 hours per week when there's no TAing (we only TA one quarter per year). My TA work is about 10-15 hours per week, so in the quarters where I TA, I work about 30 hours per week on research.

These numbers correspond to the majority of my work weeks, but in the first 4 years, there are probably 8-10 weeks per year where I work an extra 20 hours or so because of deadlines. This year (my 5th) is especially hard because I am applying for postdocs so I think I have been averaging 60 hours of work per week for the last 2 months now. The application season will end in about 5 weeks for me, which I am thankful for since this level of work/stress is not sustainable in the long term for me! So, my "average" number of hours worked per week is typically higher than the above.

Also, I count everything I do towards my research progress as work, not just time in the lab/office. So, reading papers, writing research related emails, making flight bookings for work travel etc. all count.

--

I think that in your case, you should talk to your advisor and ask them for more guidance if you need it. Let them know that you are interested in doing more work.

I think 16 months in should be enough for you to start considering independent work: definitely not necessarily experienced enough to advise yourself, but usually in my field, grad students in their 2nd year start to become more independent in their use of time (i.e. find readings on their own, find training modules on their own, find out about conference/workshops on their own etc.) But this could vary by field so maybe other computational chem people here can help you. I did have some periods of time in my 2nd year especially (our quals are at the end of 1st year and committee meetings begin in year 3, so year 2 is a "slow" year) where I felt like there wasn't anything I could do to make progress. So, I filled those hours with additional reading and taught myself a new coding language (python).

What I mean is that it's not abnormal/unexpected that you need to "be your own boss" and set your own research and educational goals and then motivate yourself to do the work for 40 hours a week (or whatever amount you think you should be working). When I did this, I still had weekly meetings with my advisor so I discussed my goals with them and they gave suggestions and guidance, but no one told me to read X paper or to learn python. It sounds like maybe more communication between you and your advisor would be helpful. So let them know how you are feeling!

[biotechie]

Right now I don't TA, but I do usually have a rotations student or a high school student doing an internship working under me. I'm in a molecular biology lab, so I normally spend well over 40 hours per week doing bench work, reading, writing up data, etc, sometimes 60+ hours. I tend to work more than some other students as my experiments happen in bursts that require long time points, but I also want to stay in academia, so it is important that I be as productive as possible. Recently, my wet lab experiments have slowed (because I have to wait for my mice to get old and fat), so I'm doing something similar to you are doing and what Takeruk has done; I'm teaching myself how to code in python so I can understand and process my sequencing data. I've been splitting my time, spending about 20-30 hours a week on lab-related tasks and about 20-30 hours a week on my online python classes, downloading and troubleshooting the new scripts I need for my new project, and writing up my data for a paper we're submitting.

However, the difference here is that I'm a little further along in my studies; I've already progressed to candidacy and am preparing to graduate in the next year or so. I know where to look to get the information and help that I need, and in this case, help that my PI doesn't have the knowledge to give me. I'm doing these things on my own, but my PI still checks in with me to see what I'm up to almost daily. This is a little uncommon, but you really need to be able to talk to your PI at least once a week to set goals and make sure you're making adequate progress. 

You need to make sure that you have everything you need to learn and do these things so that you can start becoming more independent as you progress through your studies. I was working independently from the end of my rotation onward; we simply discussed goals, and I went for them; by over a year into your studies, the majority of what you do should be something you can tackle independently after a short planning session with your boss. To me, that truly is one of the biggest goals for my PhD: Learn to think independently to create my own hypotheses, test them, and then take those ideas and be able to write grants, mentor others to test the hypotheses, and share that knowledge with others. You just need to set a strong base for yourself with the help of your PI, and you should be able to reach those goals.

Edited October 28, 2016 by biotechie

[Butterfly_effect]

I'm a second year in neuroscience/genetics. I aim for 40 hours per week in lab/class, but usually go a little over. I usually arrive in lab at 9:10 and leave around 5:30 (or earlier on my afternoon class days), though I've definitely stayed later or gone in on weekends on occasion. I try not to make a habit of it though. My viewpoint is that graduate school is like a job. If you try to do too much you'll burn out. If you force yourself to be in lab late or spend a lot of time in lab, you may end up procrastinating more or distracting yourself because 'hey, I'm going to be here all night anyway'. Obviously, my kind of schedule doesn't work for everyone. YMMV. But I find myself a lot happier than I was in undergrad, where I basically studied or did research all day and all night. I think it also matters that I have a girlfriend that I live with (i.e. something really important and awesome to come home to).