The Gradual Life and the Personal Hair Dressing Degree

1. The Gradual Life and the Personal Hair Dressing Degree

2. The Graduate Life and the Ph. D. Degree Douglas Wick, Ph. D. Department of Chemistry SCCC

3. Application • Undergraduate research experience • Strong references • Review professor’s research http://chem.chem.rochester.edu/~wdjgrp/wdj_home.html • Consider new geography • GRE requirements • Language requirements

4. Visitations • Interview Professors • What projects are planned? • What are the funding sources? • Where do graduates go, industry, academia? • Interview Graduate Students • Get the pulse of the lab • Learn about the demands of the professor • Learn about how social life mixes with scientific life

5. The Process • Year 1: Course work, qualifying written exams, choice of lab, TA work, research, say goodbye to summers off if you were fortunate to have done so previously • Year 2: Research, group meetings and presentations, Ph. D. candidacy exam (an oral presentation with many interruptions), TA or RA

6. The Process • Year 3: Research, (TA work), group meetings, departmental literature lecture, thesis committee meeting • Year 4: Similar to Year 3 • Year 5: Final experiments, writing, writing, writing, post-doctoral position or job campaign

7. The Process • Dissertation (thesis): oral presentation to public, closed defense with thesis committee: advisor, 2 chemistry faculty, outside chemistry faculty, non-chemistry faculty • Celebration (brief, often anti-climactic) • During the process years you will attend professional meetings, and usually give posters and/or talks depending on the progress of the research project. Usually, but not always, at least one paper is published by the end of your graduate career

8. Things to Know • You are paid to do research and teach • $15,500 in 1993, ~$22,000 today • Tuition & Fees paid by overhead on research grants • You will become a devotee of pasta in its only form, i.e with sauce from a jar, coffee and/or beer • You will be socialized through softball and volleyball in the summer and at departmental holiday parties • Medical school students have the best parties

9. Better Things to Know • You will contribute new information to the scientific knowledge base and in doing so find your “scientific voice” • “No one ever got the Nobel prize by doing too few experiments” • You are developing the skills needed to investigate new phenomena and to test existing theories as an independent investigator

10. A Human Experience • An up and down life • Attrition of fellow students • More is always expected • Mentors can be hard to come by • A remarkable experience of truth, endurance, ego, and humility • And you get to meet some really cool people and thinkers • You get to do some great science

11. Questions • 1. What are the best ways to contact and maintain contact with professors with whom you're interested in working? • 2. What are the advantages & disadvantages of getting Ph.D. instead of first getting a masters and then a Ph.D.? • 3. How does one decide the best research topics for graduate level work? • 4. What are some resources for grant writing? Do you “starve” while doing your research? • 5. Where is the work? What is the demand for Ph.D.s? Where is it highest? • 6.Why get a Ph.D.?