Incentives to have grad students finish

In the home country, the time to finish your PhD is four years. From the start it is clear that you will need to finish within that time, because then the money has run out. I have to add that you can only start a PhD program when you already have a master’s degree, so there’s a lot less course work than in the US. Also, truth be told, most people take longer, but you have to ask your PI to support you longer, or write your thesis on welfare money. Also, departments usually get money (I don’t know how much) when grad students graduate, so that’s an incentive to get grad students to finish too. 

However, in the US it seems that there are very little incentives for grad students (or their PIs) to finish their thesis and defend. For PIs, keeping a grad student around a bit longer seems only beneficial: it’s a trained person who costs relatively little. Or, what I recently see around me quite a bit, is that PIs just seem too busy to read a grad student’s manuscripts and that keeps them around a lot longer than necessary in my opinion. And from the grad student’s point of view I guess sometimes it’s nice to stick around a bit longer to wait for job opportunities (or the lack thereof).

So what am I missing? What are the incentives to finish your PhD in the US, either for the grad student, the PI or the department?

All the reasons NOT to go to grad school

DrugMonkey is trying to fix the NIH and especially the way the money is allocated with lots of ideas, one of them being to stop training so many PhDs.

Source

If you see this graph, it makes sense a lot of sense, because indeed biomedical PhDs are going through the roof it seems. But who are all those people that go to grad school and why do they do it? As my summer student said after hearing us complain all summer about how little we got paid and how hard it was to find jobs after a PhD/post-doc:”I’m not so sure I want to go to grad school anymore”. Because you can blame it on the NIH if you can’t find a job or get a grant, but you can also perhaps blame it on yourself. So here are a couple reasons why you should NOT go to grad school:

1. Not knowing what else to do. There are people who are done with undergrad, may have a year of technician experience and then don’t really know what to do with their lives. Grad school seems like an answer, because it will occupy you for at least another 5-infinite years. Don’t do it though. Because when you’re done with grad school, you will be older, more jealous of your friends who do earn actual money and still clueless about what to do next. Also, you will be overqualified for a lot of things.

2. There are no other jobs available because of the economy. This is kind of related to reason 1, and of course it is nice to know that you will be paid (albeit little) for the next 5-infinite years, but if your only reason to go to grad school is to keep you from being unemployed, don’t do it. Search longer for something you actually want, because being stuck in a lab when you don’t really want to be there is not going to make you happy, and again, you might be overqualified for other things when you’re done.

3. You want to do something sciency. This might be a good reason to go to grad school, but think about it first. Because if you want to be a science writer for example, you don’t need a PhD. And there are many other jobs, for example in industry where you don’t need a PhD to do sciency things.

What other bad reasons can you think of for going to grad school?

How much I like my advisor

Recently, I realized that I now love my PhD advisor more than ever. Even though during my PhD I have frequently thought otherwise. This graph nicely illustrates how liking my advisor changed over time.

Advice to the grad-student-me

The other day SciCurious wrote a post about “Knowing what you know now”, talking about what advice you would give yourself if you could go back in time. She got the idea from The Molecular Ecologist who is hosting a carnival about it. All together this will probably create a boat load of excellent advice for grad students, post-docs and young faculty! But knowing myself, I will probably think that I know it better than anyone else and not take all that good advice. Although maybe I would from myself… As a giver of unsolicited advice, here is my two cents: (it’s mostly very practical advice)

Write down everything, even the most trivial things. You may think you will remember the sequence of turning on machines for a certain experiment, but if you don’t use it for a year you won’t.

Don’t start to do an experiment without thinking it through. Even something simple as putting a rat on an elevated plus maze can fail.

Don’t think an experiment through too much, because if you realize the full extent of a 24 hour time course when you have to take samples every 2 hours, you may not even want to start the experiment.

When your PI tells you to do something you don’t want to do, just say yes and then don’t do it. Don't make a fuss about it in a meeting. Ze will most likely have forgotten you talked about it. The only exception to this rule is when the same thing keeps coming up at different meetings. Think about it and if you really don’t want to do it,just say so.

Then some very specific advice: In my home country, the grant system for post-docs and early faculty allows a certain number of years after obtaining your PhD in which you can apply for those grants. However, since the grant deadlines are sometimes only once a year, it can make a huge difference if you’ve defended your thesis on 12/20/09 or on 1/5/10, because in the latter case you will be allowed to apply for the grant a whole year longer (grant deadline is the first week of January for the post-doc grant). No one tells you about this but it may make or break your career. So the take-home message here is: Know what the rules are before you start!

Yes, that's MY hand holding MY thesis!

And I want to end with my most important advice, which is enjoy it! Even if science sometimes makes you cry I find it very important to enjoy what I’m doing. Celebrate the small things, even if that means dancing around in the lab when your positive control is actually positive. Celebrate the big things big! A good way to celebrate finishing your PhD is by getting your thesis printed as a book. In the home country that is required, but even if it’s not, it’s awesome to have your own book on your shelf to remind yourself of the blood, sweat and tears time and energy you dedicated to getting your PhD.