TA vs RA

During graduate school, there are two standard sources of funding, teaching assistantships (TA) and research assistantships (RA). Typically your first year as a graduate student will be funded as a teaching assistant, then once you join a research group, if the PI has money, you can be placed on a research assistantship so you can focus your entire time on research and not have to spend 20-30 hours a week teaching. Often times graduate students will be on a TA stipend their entire time because that is less money out of the professors funds.

If you enjoy teaching and interacting with students, being on TA funding isn't bad at all. Typically you can work your way up in the ranks and become a head TA (usually a slight higher paycheck goes along with this) and in some schools you can even get the chance to be an instructor of record. This can be great if you are interested in teaching at a community college or university because it will show your potential employers that you have that experience already.

Being on an RA has its own benefits as well. You get to make more progress on your research so you can potentially finish school a year early if you work extremely hard. If you work even harder you may be able to graduate in three years even, but this is typically accompanied by working 16-18 hour days, 7 days a week. There is typically no ranking in the RA funding so there is not a way to earn a bit more money unless you get a fellowship that pays more than your department's minimum graduate stipend.

Some graduate students may be fortunate enough to have the choice between TA and RA, some may constantly strive towards RA, while others may be content with the TA funding for five or so years. No matter which source of funding you have, you should embrace every aspect of it and either utilize the teaching experience or the extra time to spend on your research.

My First National Conference

It is not typical for a first year graduate student to present at a national conference, at least not in chemistry. I was fortunate enough to be a part of a tight nit group and almost our entire group attended the spring national conference of my first year in graduate school. My PI gave me a short project that I worked hard on to get enough data to make a poster out of and I am very grateful for that because it was one of the best weeks of graduate school for me, especially so early on in my graduate career.

In this trip, since so many people were going, my group got an AirBnB to stay in so everyone could socialize together. It was wonderful! I was the low man on the totem pole, since I was the only first year student, so I took the couch while everyone else got to sleep in beds. It was fine with me, I was happy to be along. With this setup, we all got up in the morning and would get ready and then head to the convention center as a group. Then in the evening we would trickle back to the house in smaller groups as we got done with the talks we wanted to see. Then we would make dinner, drink, and play games late into the night. Wake up after four or five hours of sleep and repeat the process.

With this setup, I got to know the other grad students in my group much better, and we got several stories that we are able to reminisce on years later. If you attend a conference by yourself, it is a good time to make networking connections in industries and other universities. Get to know a few people, bump shoulders, exchange emails (it is a good idea to print business cards before you leave for the conference), try to find people that do similar work or could help you get a job after you graduate.

National conferences have two levels of presentations. The introductory level is doing a poster (I call this introductory because undergraduates are typically able to present posters at national conferences). The higher level is doing a talk, which are typically 10-15 minutes plus a few minutes for questioning. I had done a poster before in undergrad so I was comfortable doing a poster again for graduate school.

Poster presentations are, in some ways, nicer to do than talks. They are stressful to make because you need it finalized by your PI and printed, ideally before you leave for the conference so you don't have to try and print it at the conference. This means about a week of stress making it, but once it is submitted for printing, it is done. Nothing you can do to change it unless there are serious errors, which at this point there shouldn't be. Then you get to enjoy the conference and your only commitment is to present the poster at a two hour poster sessions, which typically offers beer and wine during the session. Once you put your poster up, get your drink in hand, then you just stand by your poster and casually engage people that show an interest in your work. Once the two hours are up, you get to take down your poster and enjoy the rest of the conference.

Talks are different beasts. I haven't given a talk at a national conference yet, only at a regional one so the experiences I will talk about is from the grad students in my group that gave talks. Talks are better than posters because you get to make changes all the way up until you present and you only have to present for 20 minutes rather than two hours. The downside is you get make changes up until you present. This can be a downer, especially when you are attending the conference with friends that are presenting posters. The ones presenting posters are carefree, enjoying talks, food, drinks, while you have a presentation that you are constantly working on, especially if your PI is at the conference as well. Talks are great, they are a right of passage that every graduate student should go through at some point.

National conferences are a party of sorts. Yes they are official and knowledge is exchanged, but they are not the pinnacle conferences in most fields. Most fields have smaller conferences (such as the Gordon Conferences) that put a huge emphasis on presenting unpublished results, bring together the top researchers in the fields, and encourage discussion after each talk. Presenting at a national conference is another stepping stone, another item to check of the bucket list of being a graduate student. Even though it is just one more thing to do, if you attend it with friends and colleagues, you will make many memories that you can share and reminisce about later in life.

Committee Meetings

In graduate school, your committee decides your fate. They are the ones you have to please to pass your orals and your defence so picking the right members can be important. Your PI will have ideas on who should be on your committee, the problem usually is that you need to hold your first committee meeting (the program of study meeting) by the end of your first year. This is a challenge because it is difficult to get 5 professors in a room at the same time, so get on it quick and be organized and respectful when contacting them for meeting times. Some professors like things like doodle polls, some prefer to have a small selection of date and times to pick from, and some will ignore your emails all together so you need to go talk to them in person. Though this is difficult, you only need to organize these meetings a handful of times over four or five years.

The program of study meeting is the first meeting of your committee and it is when you give a short presentation on your research topics, and you cover what classes you have taken and will take. Then the committee members sign off on your paperwork if they approve of your course selection and you can submit it to the graduate school. This also officially selects who is on your committee at this time (it is possible to change committee members later on, but it requires more paperwork).

The second committee meeting is usually your orals, where you present your current research progress, possibly also present a new research proposal, and then your committee will grill you on everything, from your research to basic concepts that you learned the first year of undergrad. This is a stressful time, but few graduate students that prepare for this fail. Also if you fail, you are typically asked to present again within 6 months so you are not instantly kicked out of the program.

The final, and most stressful, meeting is your defence. This meeting is the deciding factor on whether or not you get your PhD. You will give an hour long presentation that is open to the public that is followed by a short Q&A session. Then there is a break for the public the leave and then it is just you and your committee. Like the orals, your committee will grill you on pretty much anything that you have taken a class on or should know about for your respective field. You can be so nervous that you can trip up on basic general science questions like "What is Gibbs free energy?" Once they are done grilling you, you leave the room and your committee decides whether you passed or not. If you fail your defence, it is not an instant out, you are typically asked to present again at a later time. Once they are done deliberating, you are called back into the room and they tell you the verdict. Whether you passed or failed, do not expect to get any more work done for the rest of the day and the day after.

Committee meetings are a necessary part of graduate school. They start off simple and basic, but as your research evolves your meetings will get more challenging. Passing your defence is the ultimate adrenaline rush for a graduate student because it means those years of hard work paid off. Always remember to have friends that will celebrate with you when you succeed in anything, and help you feel better when you fail at times.

Frustrations with PI

Hello to the people that come across this blog. I had the intention of doing regular updates on this blog about my experiences through the major parts of graduate school. However, I am now entering my third year and I have yet to publish every major thing that happened in my first year. This post here is an apology for not keeping up in case you wanted to read more and it is about to devolve into a rant about my PI.

The PI (Principal Investigator) that I work for is a micromanager. He watches the work we do like a hawk and plays favorites to other students. Our lab is divided between two disciplines and our PI will give preference to his native discipline (which I am not a part of) which frustrates those students in the other half of the lab. I do not even know if he realizes that he plays favorites, but he does. Additionally he will not be straightforward with us students. If he would just tell us why he does certain things, even if that means telling us he doesn't like doing the research that half the lab does, then he should still us.

It also doesn't help that my PI likes to try be our friend instead of our boss, but he will suddenly flip to being a boss. As graduate students, yes we like to go out and have a few drinks and it is totally acceptable for the boss to come along and have a couple every now and then. However, our boss gets upset when we don't invite him out. He also occupies a desk in the same space as his graduate students even though he has an office, it is just in another building on campus. There are reasons that bosses have an office separate from their employees, but our PI doesn't seem to realize that.

This rant is over for now, I am sure more will happen that will cause another rant again eventually. I am sure the majority of graduate students will have frustrations with their PIs at some point during graduate school, but when you can't confront your PI about it, that is when graduate school becomes its stereotypic hell. If you are a graduate student reading this, I bet you have had frustrations at some point, and if you are considering graduate school when reading this, don't be deterred. Everyone you talk to about graduate school will have stories of something their PI did that pissed them off. It is how you become part of the club.

The First Term

Some people saw that their entire graduate school experience was stressful, but I would say that there are only a few points along the path that are truly stressful. The first term is the earliest of these points. The first term involves getting used to new professors, taking classes that are (in some ways) more challenging than those in undergraduate, trying to find a research group, and getting used to the workload of being a teaching assistant (TA). Each of these activities can be stressful by itself, but you are also trying to find a balance between everything and you may or may not have someone helping you to find that balance.

First off is the classes. Keep in mind that I am in the chemistry field so class structure and amount of work will likely be different if you are in another field. Many people would say that graduate level courses are more difficult than undergraduate for varying reasons. They are usually higher in class number, they move at a faster pace than undergraduate courses, and they usually only have a couple of graded assignments that determine your grade for the course. I took a couple of graduate courses as an undergraduate, which I highly recommend to anyone considering graduate school, and that showed me that these courses are different, but not necessarily harder. Yes, my grades for the class were usually only determined by a midterm and a final, no homework assignments in between, but that also meant I wasn't swamped with homework while trying to do research and teach. The professors also give themselves a lot of leeway in how they grade, which can help or hurt you. I have had classes where I got in the 70%'s on the midterm and the final, but the professor was able to see how much I knew through my conversations with him and by the problem solving activities we did in class so I was given an A- for the overall grade of the course. I have also had classes where my classmates had slightly better grades than I did on assignments, but the professor liked me personally so I received a slightly higher letter grade at the end. Some classes were also on a curve, and in grad school you need B's instead of C's to be able to continue on, so the courses were curved to a B instead of a C. This meant that you only needed to be in the middle of the pack and you would be safe. The best thing to do, is it learn as quickly as possible how the professor teaches and how to interact with them. You need to be able to adapt to multiple teaching styles and personalities to do well in classes. The final note is to make sure you get a good night's sleep before a test. The tests that I have had are not for the students to memorize and regurgitate information, but to use the basics they learned in class to solve problems. Once you know the basics, there is no point in becoming overly stressed about the test, the best option is to go into with a clear and concise state of mind.

The second stressful activity can be finding a research group. In my case, I already knew what group I was going to join before I had moved to the area and started my first term. This meant I didn't have to really worry about finding a group, but I saw what others went through and so I can give a little advice on this. First of all is whether or not your department does rotations. If a department does rotations then you will pick two or three research groups to try out and you are not expected to make a commitment until the end of your first term. This can be good because it gives you options, but it can be stressful because you need to show that you can be productive and you need the professor and other graduate students to want you in their group. My department does not do rotations, so it is up to the students to try different labs if they want to or to find a lab and instantly join. This can give the student more work because labs fill up at different rates so there may be a lab you are considering, but they could stop taking new students before you've made your decision. There can also be scenarios where your department limits the number of students a professor can take based on if they have tenure or not. My department limits the amount of new students if there is a drastic shift in how many students want to join a single group. This scenario rarely happens, but a new untenured professor did do a great job at recruiting so 80% of the students wanted into their lab which meant fewer students for the tenured profs. Just keep in mind that you need to make an informed decision as early as possible, otherwise you may wind up only having the option of joining a group you don't like or dropping out of the program.

The final task that eats away at your time is teaching. This can vary greatly depending on the workload of the class you are teaching. For my department, some students do the general chemistry course which means two recitations and two labs with approximately 25 to 30 students in each one, but the introductory chemistry course doesn't have a lab. For the introductory course, the TA's do six recitations of 50 students per recitation so they end up grading 300 quizzes and 300 assignments each week as where the general chemistry TA's do 60 quizzes and 60 lab writeups. There is clearly a divide in the amount of grading each TA does, but the general chemistry TA's spend eight hours a week in recitation and lab while the introductory TA's spend six hours in recitation a week, all the while the introductory TA's have more grading to do each week as well. Unfortunately, we did not get to choose which labs to TA our first term so it was a luck of the draw on if you got the introductory course or the general course. The best thing you can do in either case is to find ways to grade efficiently so that you are not taking any longer than you need to. The professors that you TA for will tell you to take as much time as possible, but this would never work because you need time to do other things. The best thing to do is to talk to your other classmates and see how they grade. Most people can come up with a tip or two on improving their own grading so if you could gather the tips and tricks that several others have discovered, then you could find which ones suit you best to reduce the amount of time spent grading.

Of course, on top of the trinity of graduate life (research, teaching, classes) you want to be able to do stuff that you enjoy. Let me change that, you need to do stuff that you enjoy! If you don't do activities outside of graduate school that help you relax, you will get burned out and be miserable. Find what you can do in your work schedule to take breaks. Go outdoors on the weekend, go socialize with other graduate students (keep the research talk to a minimum), stay indoors and be lazy one day a week.

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.