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It’s that time again – the virtual mail bag is overflowing, so we invited Susanna Harris of PhDBalance.com to help us answer YOUR emails, Tweets, and messages.
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See our previous episodes in this series:
With most jobs, you’ll need to submit a polished resume along with a handful of ebullient references. Maybe you’ll pass through a phone-screen with HR and then spend 20 minutes with the hiring manager.
To get into grad school, the interview process will take days.
Grad school interviews often start with a flight to a new city. You’ll have a casual chat with the grad student assigned to retrieve you from the airport, then meet the fellow candidate with whom you’ll share a hotel room.
The moment you get settled, you’re off to dinner with some faculty, followed by an early bedtime. That’s because tomorrow morning, you’ll pass through a series of orientation sessions, faculty interviews, a tour of the city, and finally, a late-night out with the current students in the program.
You’ll fly back home the next day, grateful to be sleeping in your own bed. And just when you get settled, you’ll need to hop on a plane to reach the next school where you’ll start the process again.
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Most PhD students attend traditional academic institutions of higher educations. It’s the world of classes, campuses, and mortarboards you probably think of when you think about a University.
But there’s a less-traveled path to a PhD that may actually hold some benefits for certain students, including those coming back to school after working for awhile, or those with families.
We’re talking about research institutes, and it’s possible you’ve never even heard about this alternative path to a PhD.
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In a world where it’s “Publish or Perish,” you’d expect “publish” to be the more favorable option.
But, if you’ve ever spent a year or more performing experiments, crafting figures, writing a manuscript, finding a friendly editor and arguing with reviewers, that “perish” option might just sound pretty sweet right about now….
It’s no secret that the publishing industry has an inexplicable choke-hold on the scientific community. A handful of companies exercise editorial control, deciding which findings are permitted to enter the information stream. They charge the researcher who submits the paper, then charge exorbitant fees to the reader to see what was ‘printed.’
While the information age has flooded nearly every aspect of our daily lives, its transformative power sometimes seems to be walled off at the laboratory door.
Luckily, there are a few scientists who are willing to chip away at that wall.
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