Now you’ve found a supervisor and a research topic that fires your imagination.  Excellent.  It’s a bit of a leap of faith but that’s all right.  Now what?  Make no mistake, the transition from undergraduate to graduate student is a challenging one.  There are few classes, tests, assignments  providing you with benchmarks and therefore reassurance that all is well.  Just you and your research topic.  How to start?

 

Step 1.  Read the papers--from your lab and your field. Read them (more than once), ask questions and really try to understand them.  Try to be critical of what you read (it’s hard to learn to read papers well).  What you are trying to determine is where your project (the one you and your supervisor discussed) fits into the broader field.  If you don’t have a clear project yet, then find one.  Find an interesting and important biological question in your field of interest, imagine the possibilities (make up some models) and devise experiments to test your models.  You’ll need help with this, just like you’ll need  help planning the experiments, correct controls, and interpreting the results but that’s why you are in graduate school, to get that training.  

 

Step 2.  Ask questions.  The best students make it easy to train them.  They know what they know and more importantly what they don’t.  So they ask questions.  I love that.  They query protocols, and keep coming back as new things occur to them-- “shouldn’t we be doing it like in this paper?”  They talk to me during experiments--”hey, these cells aren’t arresting what should I do?”, they show me weird stuff, they keep me in the loop.  I love that, because I wish I spent more time at my bench doing what they’re doing, so I’m living vicariously through my students.  In addition, because I have spent a lot of time at the bench already, I’ve probably learned a huge amount by making mistakes, taking shortcuts I shouldn’t (and some that even worked) etc.  Your PI is a good resource--use them!  They’re going to be on the paper to, so they might as well make themselves useful right from the start.

 

Step 3.  Be adventurous.  Almost always, a lab’s first student is an adventurer.  Unafraid of being first, they get the lion’s share of the PIs attention, go to the best meetings, are treated like post-docs.  Expectations are high, and invariably, the students rise to them.  So, don’t imagine monsters in the closet.  If it scares you, good.  You are stretching beyond your comfort zone and are therefore learning.  Follow the science wherever it goes.  By the same token, try new experimental strategies.  If the lab has never done it, find someone in the institute, the university or heck anywhere that has and is willing to help you.  And listen to your instincts (some of them anyway).  On Saturday morning,  when your supervisor isn’t there, you get to try stuff just for fun.  The crazy ideas your PI doesn’t think is worth your time or his/her $.  Most of these don’t pan out, but I’ve never known a scientist to complain when presented with a new and surprising piece of data.  You’ll likely hear “I’m really glad you did that”.  So it’s OK to follow your gut, provided you aren’t investing large amounts of time and/or lab resources until you have some good data that warrants it.  Never forget that the person  at the bench has a real advantage, those weird cells you sometimes see suddenly account for a high proportion in  your new mutant.  Sometimes you just have an instinct, and hey, that’s what Saturday morning science is for.  Play.

 

Step 4.  Pay attention and take good notes.  Keep track of how big that pellet is, what color it is, what the volume of the supernatant was.  Take excellent notes so you can reproduce your data.  Count stuff.  Don’t just tell me your cells were G1 arrested, tell me what % of the cells were (it takes 2 minutes to do this and provides a much better record for troubleshooting later).  Even things that occur at a low frequency (count them as “other” if you must).  The day will come when you find a mutant where this happens at much higher frequency, and you will recall having seen it and under which conditions.  The best test of your notes is to see if someone else can follow them.  In reading them, I should feel like I was there doing the experiment.  That means you record everything--the volumes, the pellet colors, sizes, the % cells in G1 or M phase, the exact times of incubation...all of it.  Make sure your notes are complete or your very results will be suspect.  This takes a lot of practice, but it will save you time in the long run.   Lots and lots of time.

 

Step 5.  Understand your tools and protocols.  Never undertake a protocol you don’t understand.  Kits are time saving but fundamentally detract from the learning process.  How can you innovate if you don’t understand what’s going on?  How can you troubleshoot if you have no idea what you are doing?  Adding A to B to C is for automatons.  Not graduate students.  So, never guess.  Never assume.  There is lots of information out there (books, the web, publications) so take the time to really understand and be an expert at whatever you do.  You use a pipetman 8H a day--how do you know if it is accurate?  what’s the basic principle it uses to measure liquids?  does it measure all liquids with the same accuracy?  (this is all in the booklet that came with your Gilson...if you don’t know, look it up).

 

Step 6.  Talk to your supervisor.  Every day (or two).  Check in.  Supervisors are directly invested in your research (much more than anyone else in the lab can ever be).  They are there to help and they like to help.  If it’s not working, barge into the office and ask for input.  If it is working, put some figures together and see if they convince somebody else.  Your PI’s job is pretty much to give you an alternative viewpoint, so expect criticism, feedback, suggestions.  Science is collaborative and always benefits from other points of view.  Now talk to your lab mates.  They are your family and will share in your successes and defeats.  They will have useful ideas and maybe even reagents for you.  Excite them with your data, and let them support you through the disappointments.  

 

Step 7.  Remember that your job as a graduate student is to produce publication quality data. Publications are your passport to a successful thesis, post-doctoral positions and jobs you want, so don’t squander your time doing random experiments.  Identify your question (how do cohesins mediate sister chromatid cohesion?), imagine a few models and then design experiments to test these (start with the easiest).  Once you’ve got some preliminary data that pretty much tells you how your story is going to go, map out a paper in Figure by Figure format (6 or so with each figure concluding something), imagining the controls (positive and negative) and results you expect based on what you know.  You may be wrong, but that’s OK.  You can change your outline as you go to fit with the data you are accumulating.  The point is that you should have a clear idea of the story you are trying to tell, and what data you will need in order to make it compelling.