Orientation

Graduate student orientation is an event that is useful for some people and useless for others. It gives a brief introduction and training on how to teach and interact with students. It teaches you how to plan for things in graduate school. It also informs you of services that the university offers to support their graduate students. This information can be helpful for some people, but it can be boring for people that already know or have experience with these areas.

The first important thing that orientation covers is how to interact with students and teaches you about privacy for your students. This is for you and the university to cover you so that you are not inappropriate to your students and that you are not sharing your student's grades with people that are not privileged to that information. If you have prior teaching experience from a career or being a TA during your undergraduate time, then the majority of this is a "well duh" topic. For those that have no teaching experience, which I found out is the common scenario, it gives them the important details so they cannot get sued or the university cannot get sued by students or parents. My university had a week of general orientation for all new graduate students (both Masters and PhD students), but then my department also held a week of orientation after the general to teach department specific information. Teaching is a very important part of being a first year at my school so the department spent a large amount of time teaching the graduate students how to teach. Again, if you have prior teaching experience, a lot of this information was stuff you already knew, but I found out that most people have no teaching experience even though they knew that they would have to teach while in graduate school.

Another important aspect of orientation was teaching you how to plan. Some of the information was ridiculous to me because I have always been good at planning, but the university and department gave us this information for those graduate students that may not be good planners. They taught planning for various things like how to manage your money, how to manage your time so you don't overburden yourself, and (most importantly) how to plan for the necessary steps to complete your degree. I think the finances and time will be covered by different blog posts so I will focus on the degree here. For a PhD (depending on the school) there can be a varying number of steps to obtain your degree. All schools that I know of at least have you do a program of study, orals, and your thesis defense. Some schools will also have qualifying exams or cumulative exams that must be completed before you can either do your orals or defend your thesis. The orientation gives you a rough timeline of when these things should be completed by and if your department does their own orientation, they will help you figure out which courses you should take to fulfill the department's requirements.

One final thing that you can get out of orientation is the services offered by the university. At the universities that I know of, graduate students get all the benefits that undergraduates have (access to gyms, health centers, etc.) plus some graduate exclusive perks. The graduate exclusive options vary greatly depending on the university. A lot of universities have been making changes to help graduate students stay healthy (physically and mentally) so schools, like mine, offer psychological counseling centers that are separate from the undergraduate ones. This helps to keep gossips from starting if an undergraduate saw their TA going to talk to a counselor or something. There can also be services that help mitigate conflicts or discussions. If you are having trouble with your PI or a fellow graduate student, these services can help to start the conversation in a manageable way and can even be confidential if need be. If needed they will also be present for all of the conversation to help protect both parties so the best outcomes can be achieved. I highly recommend learning of these options and keeping them in mind just in case you need it one day.

The Summer Before First Year

The summer before you start is a very important time depending on your pick of graduate school. For some schools, it is beneficial to move as early as possible and start in the lab asap. Other programs may be more lax so it is good to take some time off and relax and enjoy your last free summer (at least in the physical sciences, you work year around so graduate school becomes at least a full time job). Moving costs can also be expensive, which can be made worse by your first paycheck being half the amount that it will be usually, so it can be beneficial to make a little money to help alleviate these costs.

To do this you would need to talk to the PI that you would most like to work for during graduate school and work out an arrangement of either volunteering your time or getting paid out of a grant that the PI has. This scenario gives you the edge by showing the PI your work ethic and getting a foot in the door before the rest of the graduate students arrive. This lets you secure a spot in the lab or at least increases your chances of getting the spot in the lab that you want. Keep in mind that this may be a double edged sword, if you come in strong to show off to the PI so they pick you, then they may expect that level of work from you constantly. This could lead to being burned out and seriously considering dropping out of graduate school after two or three years.

Some schools are much more lax on joining labs and have the first year students do rotations. Rotations have you cycle through two or three labs throughout your first year so that you can better choose which lab to join and the labs get to say if they want you. In this scenario, it may be more beneficial to relax during the summer before you start because you will still get the opportunity to try out labs and for them to see your work ethic. This means showing up early in the summer doesn't guarantee you a spot in the group you want. This gives the opportunity to have a break and relax between finishing undergraduate and starting graduate school. Taking the break lets you be refreshed and prepared which lowers your chances of getting burned out half way through.

The final, very important, point of the summer before is moving to the new city/town. Some schools having moving stipends (this is something important to learn about during the visiting weekend) and you should not use the availability of a moving stipend to determine which school to go to. The moving stipend just makes it a little easier to start graduate school. If a moving stipend is available, it will likely be a large enough amount to cover the majority of your moving costs. If the school doesn't have a moving stipend, then I recommend saving some money during the summer to pay for it and/or using a credit card and paying it off monthly. The moving costs can also be made worse by when you start in the pay cycle. Most schools pay on a monthly basis at the beginning or end of the month. However, they may have you start in the middle of the month (not to mention having to attend orientation events that happen before your official start date) which means that your first paycheck will be half the amount of your monthly pay. This is all information to keep in mind when you start so that you know money may very tight during the first couple of months.

The final disclosure, my school does not have a moving stipend and I moved about a month before I needed too. Moving so early was primarily for my fiance because the start date for her job was a few weeks before mine. I tried to save up some money during the summer to reduce the moving costs, but I went without income for two months so I had run low on money and was forced to carry a credit card balance for a while. Also my school started in the middle of the month so my first paycheck was a half paycheck so I made minimum payments on my credit cards and tried to reduce costs as much as possible. After a couple of full paychecks I was able to pay off my credit debt and get into a regular routine for expenses. Some people may not get as stressed over money as I do, but being in a financial situation like that did add stress onto an already stressful time, but it was not impossible to fix the situation and the stress was removed after a couple of months and being able to manage money via tracking expenses.

The Visiting Weekend

The visiting weekend that comes after you here that a school has accepted you is a vital role that, at the time, I did not think was so vital. My mentor, Dr. C, told me that I should visit every school that I get accepted to, which is sound advice, but not very practical. The visitation was also the reason that I picked the school I did and why I picked the professor to work for.

Through my experience of applying to chemistry Ph.D. programs, the visitation were a welcomed release of all the stress and anxiety. The way the visitations worked for me was that once I was accepted to a school, they would also tell me when their visitation weekend was. Some schools just asked me to let them know if I wanted to visit or not and if I did then they would setup and pay for all of the travel arrangements. Other schools told me to make my own travel arrangements and then they would reimburse me for those expenses after the visiting weekend. I highly recommend having a credit card by this point in your life so that you can put everything on the card and then you just need to wait for the reimbursement. After I had been accepted to the schools I applied for, I decided not to go to certain visiting weekends because I knew I didn't want to go to that school at all. This narrowed down how many weekends I was planning on attending which leads to some interesting occurrences.

I ended up planning on going to only two visiting weekends and I had a very good idea of which school I was going to attend in the end. One day I got a phone call from the member of the graduate committee of one of the schools I was accepted to (this was one of the schools that I was not planning on going to). This was a school I was not planning on attending because there was only one PI out of the 40 faculty that I wanted to work for and Dr. C always told me that I should go to school where there are two or three people I would want to work for in case I didn't get into my top choice of research groups. Through this phone conversation, the man on the other end of the line was the one PI at this school that I wanted to work for and he was doing everything he could to just convince me to attend the visiting weekend. After a thirty minute conversation I finally told him that I would go to the visiting weekend.

I ended up going to three visiting weekends which happened to be three weekends in a row. All my professors were very understanding so I was able to skip classes and turn in some homework late due to my visitations. The first visiting weekend that I attended was at the school that I was sure I wanted to attend. I talked a lot to the PI that I wanted to work for and talked a little to my second choice. I was also given a lot of opportunities to talk to graduate students and get a sense of how the PIs acted and how the department worked. All this information was very valuable and I kept getting a vibe that all the professors acted friendly in front of the prospective students, but that they really didn't like each other very much. This made me a little apprehensive about coming to this school, so I decided to go to my other visitations with a more open mind then I originally intended.

My second visiting weekend was at the school that had only one PI that I wanted to work for. This visiting weekend was so much more friendly and open than my first weekend was. This school had gotten nice hotel rooms, all single rooms with king sized beds so no one had to share a room with other prospectives. This also allowed me to bring my fiancee with me, and the department was warm and welcoming to her as well because she would be moving with me when I would go to graduate school. This made me happy and my fiancee happy so this school seemed to have us in the bag, but there was still only one PI that I wanted to work for. I spent a lot of time with graduate students from that PIs group, but I still feared that there would not be enough spaces for me to get into his group. This ended up getting fixed because two days after the visitation, I emailed this professor asking him how many opening he was planning on having in his group and that I wanted to make sure that I would be in his group if I decided to go to this school. His response was that there was a spot in his group for me if I wanted it and that he wanted to have me in his group. This sense of having a PI want me to be a member of his group and that I already had a spot without the need of doing rotations synched the deal and I decided to go this school. I sent in my acceptance paperwork the next day even though I still had one more visitation to go to.

My final visitation was a bit of a throw out because I was only considering that school because it put my fiancee and I close to her home and I had a friend that was already in that program. Since I had already accepted to another school, I decided to just use it as an opportunity to hang out with my friend and see some cool chemistry research. This school was also in a big city which discouraged me from going there in the first place. All in all it was a fun weekend and it was good to catch up with my friend.

These were my experiences from the three visiting weekends I attended. Looking back now, I am really glad that I attended a visitation that I had not originally planned on going to so I would recommend to go to every visitation unless you have some extreme reason for not going. You may find that one professor that wants you in his group or discover some interesting research that you didn't see before. Even if you come out of the weekend knowing that you will not go there, you will likely have made some friends with the graduate students and you can network with them in the future and you may even end up starting a collaboration because of that networking. The visiting weekend was a key piece for me and it is likely a key piece for everyone so it is important that you go even if you don't think you would want or need to.

Picking a School

Picking which graduate schools to apply to and which one to accept is an important part of the process. My undergraduate mentor, Dr. C, had the philosophy that you should apply to ten schools. Two of the ten would be your far reaching schools that you think you don't stand a chance of getting into. Another two of the ten would be safety schools, schools that your very sure you could get into. The remaining six schools would be divided amongst schools that are in between your safety schools and reach schools. The second part of his philosophy is that you should go to the best school that accepts you. Even though this is sound advice, it didn't really suit my personality and I sought out advice from other professors on what to do.

I was all for Dr. C's strategy of picking ten schools to apply to, but I quickly ran into a problem that I still regret not getting help with to this day. I had decided on which schools I was going to apply to, but the majority of the schools require you to pay an application fee. My professors said that you can usually get around this fee by applying directly to the department rather than to the graduate school. There was also a problem because when I tried to contact the departments, they would just tell me to apply to the graduate school which meant paying the fee. There was only one of my ten schools that would let me apply directly to the chemistry department and the other nine I would have to pay a fee. These fees are not cheap, they range from $50 to $90 depending on the school. Instead of planning on applying to all ten of my schools, I know how to prioritize which to apply to first because I was running low on money after paying for the GRE tests and testing materials. My main regret that comes out of this is that I was unable to apply to my reach schools. At the time, I did not think that I would regret this decision because I figured I would get rejected from some of the schools I applied to and my logic was that if I was rejected from those schools then I would have been rejected from my reach schools. This was fine for a while, but then I starting getting the acceptance/rejection letter

from schools and I was accepted to all of the programs that I applied to. In my mind, this meant that I would have stood a chance at getting into some of the ivy league schools, but due to the fact that I did not have the money, I was unable to apply to those schools. My regret is that I did not ask family members to loan me money to pay the fees so I could apply to my reach schools. I still got accepted to some very good schools, but I did not hit a wall that would tell me the limits of my potential. Many would say that hitting the limit of your potential is not a good thing or is impossible, but I had been successful in everything I tried and I did not yet know where my boundaries of what I can and can't do are. This would later come back to bite me once I started graduate school and discovered my limits in a stressful and painful way.

The other part of Dr. C's philosophy I did not agree with so much. He was taught and would teach that you should go to the best program you get into. This is great if you want a career that is the best you can achieve, but graduate school (if you are going for a Ph.D.) is five years of your life. These five years should be filled with happy memories, not memories of spending day and night in the lab, surrounded by science all the time. You can't put yourself through that for five years and still expect to be the same person you were when you first started. I wanted to attend a school in a location that I liked. I don't like big cities so I wanted to avoid that as much as possible, and I wanted to stay relatively close to home so that I could drive home in a half a day to a day of driving rather than needing to fly. These factors made it so that my top tier schools looked unappealing to me. All
they had was the science and nothing else to offer me. I ended up picking one of my "safety" schools because I met a wonderful PI during visitations and I don't regret picking my school at all. I think you can excel in any program so long as it suits your personality and needs. I came from a small public university that wasn't known for its science, but I was able to become published as an undergraduate and got accepted to top tier graduate programs. This means, to me, that so long as you have the motivation and the support of those around you, you can do well no matter what the school. I will not of the name of a big university attached to my degree, but if I excel in other areas such as awards and research, I will not need the name.


These are the philosophies of my mentor along with the input of some of my other professors that I had to balance. These factors played a part in which schools to apply to and which to finally go to, but a large factor that helped me choose a school was the visitation weekend. The visitation weekend ended up being such a vital part of the process that it will deserve its own post.

Meeting the School's Requirements

I was taught by one of my mentors that there are five things a graduate school looks for in when it receives applications. These things are, in no particular order, GPA, publications, GRE scores, letters of recommendation, and personal statement. My mentor taught me that if you were lacking in one of these five you could make up for it by excelling in the other four and still stand a good chance of getting into a graduate program. These five categories laid the ground work for what I needed to achieve to be able to go to any graduate program that I wanted.

My GPA was good, but not perfect. I had a very high GPA for someone in the STEM fields, but I did not have the perfect 4.0 that would allow me to compete in ivy league schools. My GPA did not discourage me though, it only showed me that I needed to work harder in other areas to make myself look good to the graduate schools I would be applying to. My mentor, Dr. C, knew my GPA and he wanted me to be able to go to the best graduate school I could get accepted to, so he encouraged me to study hard and do well on my GRE.

Now the GRE is another one of those standardized tests that the majority of the population loath, but schools love because it helps them weed out applicants. The GRE is the graduate equivalent of the SAT (the same company makes both the SAT and GRE as well). I knew that I needed to study hard and do well on the GRE because it can be a limiting factor in what schools you can apply to because some schools have a minimum GRE score requirement that must be reached before they will even look at your application. My desire to do well was also brought on by the fact that I do not perform well on standardized tests that will test me on aspects that are not related to my field of study. In light of this, I spent a few hundred dollars on all the test prep material that I could get my hands on (i.e. study guides, flash cards, etc.). I studied, studied, and studied some more and when I finally took the test, I did reasonably well. I did not ace the GRE, but I got scores that would allow me to apply to all the schools that I was interested in.

Well that was one GRE test down and only one more to go, the subject test. Most of the schools I was applying to did not require the subject test, but there were a few that did so I was forced to go through the extremely difficult chemistry subject test. I was happy that I was finally going to be taking a standardized test that was related to my field of study, and I was in the optimal position to take this test due to the fact that I had finished all of my chemistry courses and only had physics classes left to take so I felt very prepared for this test. When I was sitting in the room taking the test, I went through the entire test and only answered the inorganic and physical chemistry questions first because I felt the most confident on those. The next time through I focused on the analytical and biochemistry. The last time through I focused on the organic. The reason I took this strategy was because I understood inorganic and physical the best because they revolve around mathematics and physics which makes sense. Organic chemistry, or at least what they tested on for the organic portion, was largely your ability to memorize ridiculous reactions that are named only by the scientist that discovered them, two-thirds of which were never covered in my organic lecture. When I finally received my subject test scores, I was sitting at the fifty percentile mark which devastated me. This had been that first time since grade school that I did this poorly on a test and Dr. C was the first person to give me some enlightening words on the matter. Paraphrasing what he said, the majority of the schools that require the subject tests are the best schools, and the best students apply to the best schools, therefore the people that take the subject tests are the best students so I was in the middle of the pack of the best chemistry students in the country. These words that he gave me helped to lift my spirits and gave me the encouragement to finish up the graduate school applications.

The personal statements for graduate school give the school insight into your mind before they even meet you. The statements allow the school to know why you want to go to their school and these statements can be used to judge how serious you are about your graduate work. In my personal statements, I gave reasons for going such as I wanted to live in that area of the country and I wanted to work with these specific professors at your school. I repeated this same formula for every personal statement so it did not take much work once I got the first two or three written to finish off the others.

Letters of recommendation are one of the most useful things for graduate schools because they can see how others think of you. Let me start by saying if you do undergraduate research, you must have a letter of recommendation from your PI. Their letter will be the strongest of all your letters and if you talk about undergraduate research in any other part of your application and the school does not see a letter from your PI, they will start to formulate reasons why your PI did not write a letter for you which can hinder your acceptance to the graduate program. The other letters of recommendation can come from other professors and mentors. I tried to pick people that could talk about various aspects of me. My PI was able to talk about my research and some of my classes, I picked another chemistry professor who was in charge of the TAs so that he could talk about my TA and tutoring abilities, and I picked a physics professor because I had a physics degree and he could talk about my physics experiences.

Last, but not least, publications. Publications as an undergraduate can be a hit or miss in my opinion. Part of it comes from how hard you work on your research, part comes from the motivation of your PI, and part comes from luck. I was semi motivated on my research, I worked in one group for a little over two years and then my project was finally complete and I was able to publish it. Then my senior year I decided to try a new area of chemistry and worked in another research group and one of the projects I worked on their became published. This meant that when I was applying to graduate schools, I had two publications under my belt from different areas of chemistry. This put me far above a lot of the other applicants that would have one or no publications at all. This showed that I can do multiple fields of research and it showed that I was a dedicated researcher. Again, a large part of what got me these publications were my PIs and luck. I was lucky to have such wonderful and amazing professors that would let me go the route I wanted even if they knew it wouldn't work. I was also lucky that these professors gave me the opportunities to work on these projects and put in a lot of hours themselves in writing and editing the paper.

I have explained my thoughts and experiences on these five aspects that graduate schools look at. I didn't excel at the personal statements and my GPA wasn't perfect, but I was able to make up for in the other three areas. These were my experiences of applying through chemistry, but I think they can be carried over to many of the STEM fields for those that are also considering a graduate school.

From the Beginning

I am currently nearing the end of my first year of graduate school and I have gotten the urge to start this blog to share my experiences at graduate school. With this, I will back track a little and start at the very beginning of my graduate school experience which started during undergrad.

My undergraduate work was done at a relatively small public university. I majored in chemistry and physics, which also gave me a minor in mathematics.  My desire to go to graduate school started after my first term of being TA and I decided that I wanted to be a professor. With this goal in sight, I began to take all the necessary steps to get into graduate school. I participated in as many chemistry related activities that I could so that I would look good to a graduate program. I worked as a tutor, lab teaching assistant, and stockroom assistant, I was a part of a research group, and I was an officer in the chemistry and pre-pharmacy club for a few years. Shortly after deciding on going to graduate school, I found a research group that let me do undergraduate research and would mentor me in hopes of turning me into a great graduate student.