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Sure, scientific conferences are not a competitive sport, but the sheer volume of information, introductions, and events can leave you feeling like you just lost a round of rugby.
This week, we share some sage advice for making your next conference the best one yet.
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The best thing about the Hello PhD podcast is our amazing audience of grad students, postdocs, and career scientists. We get emails, tweets, and website comments full of thoughtful questions and insightful observations.
And though we try to read and respond to each message, not every question makes it into the show. Sometimes, we can reply with just a few words of encouragement, or a link to a prior episode.
But this week, we wanted to dig into the mailbag and offer a rapid-fire response to some of the burning questions you’ve sent over the last few months.
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A PhD takes years to complete, so it’s no surprise that your situation may change during that time. Your PI may move to a different University, your spouse may take a job in another town, or you may need to move back home to care for ailing parents.
In these situations, you’re forced to make a difficult choice: “Should I stay with my lab and finish my work, or find a way to finish this PhD remotely?”
That’s exactly the question we got from “Walker” this week. He and his wife desperately want to move to a new city, but he also wants to finish his degree.
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We got an email from a first-year student who seems to love everything about grad school… except the tests. He’s wondering: Do grades matter?
Dear Josh and Daniel,
I am a first year chemical engineering PhD student and am currently working through a class-filled semester. For two of my classes, my midterm grades were much less than desirable for me. Now, I’m not the quickest when it comes to math, so a lower score in classes like transport compared to other students has been the norm, but these scores are even lower than what I usually expect.
Nerves have been a typical part of my exam state of mind, but past experience has shown I can usually overcome them. I feel like I understand the concepts, and my homework and quiz grades for the class would seem to indicate that. However, the tests have gotten the best of me both times.
I have to maintain a certain GPA and while I don’t know what the final grades will be yet, I feel like I should be doing better.
I guess my real question is, are class grades indicative of whether or not a PhD is right for me?
I have a master’s and have done research for more than 3 years, so I feel that the actual research portion of the program will not be the issue. And every time I get to talk research with my lab group and new advisor, I love it. For now, it just seems like my grades aren’t indicating that I’m a good enough student for the program, and I really don’t want that to be the case. I plan on talking to my advisor about it all soon as well as older grad students.
Thanks for listening and thanks for your show,
Sincerely,
Zachary
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“Things are not progressing as they should. You’re having a hard time focusing on the research, and we know that you don’t want to be in academia anyway. Do you want to quit?”
The question landed like a punch, and Mónica’s committee meeting took a turn she hadn’t expected. She was in the fourth year of her PhD training at Harvard, and her committee had just asked her if she wanted to leave the program.
“That was incredibly devastating to have these four people that you respect, and that their main role is supposed to be supporting you and helping you, and to have them ask you, “Do you want to leave?” It was devastating. But I somehow found the strength to say, ‘I don’t want to quit!'”
Mónica Feliú-Mójer finished her PhD and went on to a dream job doing science outreach and communication, but that committee meeting was a turning point.
Her story holds a valuable lesson for any graduate student considering a career outside of the academic tenure track.