come do an environmental chemistry phd, they said. it'll be fun, they said. you'll get to learn and use words like heteroscedasticity and autochthonous even though you're not a data scientist OR a geologist!
my favorite part about being a phd student so far, now that i'm 4 years and 9 undergrads in, is how many times i've said to my undergrad mentees "i don't know how to do that yet but give me fifteen minutes and i'll figure it out for you"
sometimes being a scientist is saying "poop is just dirt with different microbes" out loud, in front of your non-scientist friends and watching them go through the five stages of grief in real time
one of my distinct memories from high school physics class was, after watching The Martian, someone in my class asking our teacher if being Educated In Science ruins sci-fi for you. my teacher said no.
im a phd candidate now and that was definitely a lie. im watching rebel moon for the first time and the narrator just called a pile of bones (CLEAN AND DRY BONES) organic matter. bones is not organic
Next time someone asks me what grad school is like I’m going to tell them that I just sent an email to my advisor (at 3:21am) complaining about having to spend hours learning python for a thing that would have taken me minutes in Matlab and then the file I was supposed to attach was too big so it got sent as a google drive link but I know better than to trust that gdrive will keep my formatting so I had to attach a pdf of it as well (just in case)
Anyway someone needs to take away my middle of the night email privileges
if you're a grad student (or an undergrad that plans to continue) i highly recommend moving your academic twitter (if you have one) to bluesky. the vibes are better, engagement is high and genuine, and people are really excited to be away from the echo-chamber. i wouldn't abandon twitter entirely (some have, as is their right, but for now i won't be because some of my favorite people haven’t moved yet) and not every discipline has moved over yet, but it seems to be where things are headed for the time being
how to get through grad school without losing your mind
I'm in my third year of my PhD, here's what's worked for me:
First and foremost: DO NOT attend a grad school that is not paying you to be there. At minimum your tuition should be covered. Universities run on the un- and underpaid labor of undergraduate and graduate students. Often times a (STEM) professor will have students operating lab equipment and processing data that they then take and present as their own. This is generally considered acceptable practice, but mostly depends on your funding source. I, personally, am self funded, meaning that my paycheck comes from grants that I proposed for and submitted for me. Many graduate students are funded by their supervisor, who will have them working on projects that aren't necessarily their own. As a warning to students in this situation, you will still be expected to manage your own projects on top of this outside work. Being a TA is also a way you might be funded, and it's my opinion that everyone should do that for at least a year.
Optimize your working hours, working location, and workstations for you. There is a balance between the expectations of your supervisor, your funding source, and your own preferences. For me, this means using the pomodoro method when I'm having a hard time staying focused, working from home on the days I'm planning to write to reduce the likelihood of being interrupted and voluntold for tasks, taking an actual lunch break, and having all the amenities of my desk at home also in my office.
Citation manager. I use Zotero and have made it a point to religiously utilize the folders and tag function. I use folders to group by project, and subfolders for individual pieces of writing for a project and tags to group by subject matter
DON'T let the first powerpoint you make be one for a committee meeting or another important presentation. Build a slide library of things like introductory material and figures of your own data. Take photos of any instrumentation you use, of the places/things you're studying. When you have this already set up, making a presentation takes maybe half an hour, and you get a ton of practice making slides
KEEP TO A CONSISTENT POWERPOINT THEME! Having slideshows that are formatted identically makes you memorable AND makes the scavenging through your old presentations to make a new one much easier.
Your powerpoint theme should be uncluttered (should not visually detract from the information you're trying to present)
MAKE YOUR FIGURES IN THE SAME SOFTWARE (when possible). Having more consistency just adds to making your stuff nice to look at.
There will eventually be a point in grad school where you're freed from the responsibility of taking classes (usually the third year in a USA 5-year PhD program). If you were spending 3-5 hours per week in class, try to still spend 3-5 hours interacting with literature (either papers or grad-level textbooks).
A lot of supervisors say a good rule of thumb is reading one paper every day, but I've found that's a wildly loose guideline. Here's what I did: I was given a set of papers that were seminal to my subject matter. I then took their citations and started reading those as well. You can (and should) also do this with any papers your supervisor publishes.
Google Scholar is a good way to find papers, but doesn't let you sort by number of citations. Beware bad papers.
Snacks are crucial. So is exercise. Sometimes a break should be a five minute jog around the building and a granola bar.
Come up with some sort of literature note taking method. I built myself a template for each of the types of papers I am reading (for example: literature review vs method development vs field study) that helps me extract the most relevant information for MY purposes. If you really like powerpoints, you can do this in there (good for Ctrl+F later on), but mine is pen/paper because I remember stuff I've physically written down better.
Steal figures you like from other people's papers for comparative or introductory purposes during presentations (cite them on the slide, obviously). Add them to your slide library.
If you use excel for your figures, we shouldn't be able to tell. You can build figure templates. Do that.
Defeat imposter syndrome by remembering that you don't actually have to be extremely smart to get a PhD (or a masters degree). You mostly just have to be stubborn. (One of my housemates is the stupidest person I've ever met and she somehow got into grad school. That said, she's not very stubborn, so she's having a really bad time.)
Set up weekly meetings with your supervisor. This will ensure you have accountability for your progress, and time to address any roadblocks, ideas, personality clashes, and equipment malfunctions in person. If your supervisor is stubbornly unavailable, see if one of your committee members might be willing to step up. Take notes at those meetings. Not everything you talk about you'll be able to address immediately, so it's good to have a record of what you talked about.
Try not to let problems remain unaddressed for more than a week. (If you can resolve them within that first week, too, that's also ideal.) For example, we've been trying to delineate lake catchments in a place that's so flat there's not really any true catchments to delineate. It took nearly 9 weeks of bringing it up at the weekly meeting for us to finally realize we'd been trying to answer the question the wrong way.
If you're moving away from your undergrad field of study, I recommend reading some undergrad material for your new field of study within your first semester. Or, if you know what you're doing that far in advance, the year or summer before you start your program. I moved from analytical chemistry to biogeochemistry, and there were terms and concepts from microbial ecology, limnology, hydrology, oceanography, geology, and ecosystem science that I just wasn't aware of. Make flashcards for all those words you don't know, it helps. If you like digital flashcards, use studylib (dot) net, it's like quizlet but has no ads :)
Speaking of ads, I highly recommend switching to Firefox. Here's posts where other people have more eloquently put why this is a good idea and their favorite extensions (if someone asks, I'll share mine): 1 2 3
To avoid google's shitty AI overview: use https://udm14(dot)com/ instead of google(dot)com. They're the same thing, the UDM14 addon to the URL yeets the AI overview into the void, never to be seen again.
Some supervisors will not give you hints for anything. This can be frustrating, but what they're trying to do is get you to answer your own questions. ("It wouldn't be research if we knew the answer," I was recently told, by someone who definitely knew the answer)
Always be on the lookout for funding opportunities. These can be for stipends, lab consumables, payment for an undergraduate assistant, or travel for conferences or field work. The more of this you can bring in on your own, the less dependent you are on the whims of your supervisor for opportunities.
Make an academic twitter (i've also seen that many people have moved/are moving to mastodon or blu sky, but twitter is still the hub). Follow people in your field, journals you like, organizations/agencies you like, but try to keep personal things away from it (also all of my personal accounts for stuff are set to private because i have no interest in an employer knowing things about me). This is one of the best ways to find job opportunities (post-docs, lab management, and phd positions), extra-institutional funding opportunities, conferences, and new papers in your field. Great for networking, better than linkedin.
