Congratulations!  You’ve been accepted into grad school!  You’ve worked hard, gotten good grades and finally, you are in.  So, now what?  Well, you are faced with one of the most important decisions of your graduate career.  Finding a research topic.  But more than that, you need to find the right mentor who will nurture, inspire, challenge and teach you to be a rigorous, critical scientist.  A mentor who will make sure you set goals and  help you achieve them, a mentor who sincerely wants what’s best for you (whether or not that’s a PhD).  

 

Let’s face it, the undergraduate curriculum  is no preparation for the real world.  You work from deadline to deadline--assignments, presentations, tests and get regular assessments in the form of grades.  As a graduate student, you largely set your own goals and this freedom is often overwhelming to new students.  Granted, there are committee and lab meetings and a few courses, but day to day, your job is to produce publication quality data.  This is a lot harder than it sounds, and it requires feedback.  Someone to teach you how to design, execute and critically interpret an experiment.  Someone who will help you imagine models, design strategies to test them, and if necessary, help you abandon them (also harder than it sounds).

 

So where do you find such a mentor?  As an undergrad, you’ve accumulated some vocabulary (limited at that) so it’s in fact quite hard to know what it is you are really interested in.  Keep an open mind.  As an undergrad, I thought I wanted to work on lipids until I met a PI--principal investigator--  whose enthusiasm for jumping genes opened my eyes to the fun of pushing DNA around, and I never looked back.  Since I hated killing mammals (I did that as an undergrad) and really didn’t care for the smell and the constant attention that flies required (who wants to give up Saturday and Sunday mornings to collect virgins???), I was ideally suited to a nice, fast growing, freezable model organism.  Because one gets interested in whatever one is working on however, the topic isn’t actually that critical at this stage of your career (not the case for the post-doc).  What is critical is  training.  This is pretty much all you are going to get, so make sure you’re going into a lab that has a vested interest in your success.  Pick a lab where you will get lots of constructive criticism.  Where people don’t just give you the answers so you’ll go away but they’ll challenge you to find your own answers.  Your toughest questions should come from the people who most want you to succeed.  What kind of lab is that?  Well, generally speaking, it is much harder to be forgotten/ignored in a small laboratory where the PI and everybody else knows what the lab is doing.  This isn’t always true, and there is much to be said for being under the wing of an outstanding post-doc.  It’s just that it’s hard to know if the post-doc in charge of your life is outstanding.  And however much a post-doc looks out for you, he/she will only give you a part of their attention.  They’re looking for jobs remember, and have their own projects to worry about.

 

Next, know yourself.  Research and personal style is important.  Not all supervisors suit all students.  Likewise, not all research topics suit all students.  Some labs function in a “sink or swim” model.  In you go, you putter around for a few years making use of the lab’s extensive equipment and resources and eventually you find yourself a project.  This ideally suits people with a good amount of experience already but still, it tends to take longer to get a PhD.  The other extreme is the micromanager PI, that tells you exactly what to do and when to do it.  He/she plans your day, your experiments, writes your papers etc.  While this kind of mentoring (in limited quantities) can get you started on the right foot, it’s equally important for students to be allowed to make mistakes, and learn from them.  How many of you know that you can’t substitute NaOAc for KOAc in a miniprep?  I learned that by trying it (I was out of KOAc), and then figured out that it’s because sodium SDS doesn’t precipitate whereas potassium SDS does.  You also should expect to get to see  your own data first.  A supervisor that looks at  your plates in the incubator before you come in should keep their mouth shut--because the fun of science is in the discovery.  And you need a chance to practice interpreting your own results.  Then you can talk to your supervisor, once you think you know what it means and what you should do next.  A good PI will give you the time and space to figure it out, but also challenge you with questions to help you (rather than giving you the answers).  The proverb is right:  “Give a man a fish, feed him for a day.  Teach a man to fish, feed him for a lifetime”.  Well, I want to teach you how to fish.  This is what your graduate training is all about.  

 

Ideally, your PI should talk to you every day or two, just to check in, but allow you the space and freedom to plan your own experiments.  He/she must resist the temptation to do it for you, but rather send you off with enough information to figure it out for yourself.  Importantly, your supervisor should be someone you respect and trust.  The student-supervisor relationship is one of trust, and your PI should look out for you.  He/she must also give you honest feedback so you know when you’re doing well and when you are underperforming.  (If everything you hear is praise, be suspicious--maybe you’re exceptionally gifted or maybe it’s too much trouble to really think about it).  He/she must stick up for you (in case that’s needed) and cheer you on when you’re learning something difficult like giving talks to large audiences.  Your graduate advisor is your mentor, your friend and your role model.  Choose wisely, you will need them for a long time yet.