1. Who Am I and Who Are You?

2. An Adult Attitude Will Change Your Life

3. Give First, Ask Second

3. Choose Rotations Deliberately

4. Approach the Bench with a Hypothesis

5. Read Papers from the Inside Out

6. Start Every Talk with an Outline and a Question

8. What I Told You

1-Who Am I and Who Are You

I learned these principles while doing a seven-year post-doc at the University of Miami with the award-winning geneticist, Rik Myers. I watched students flock to him for advice, which proved so valuable that I decided to compile it and make it more generally available. Graduate students in all fields in any year of study will find useful lessons here, although the specifically intended audience for this publication is first and second year graduate students in the life sciences, including biology, genetics, molecular biology, biochemistry, bioinformatics, biophysics, microbiology, immunology, virology, cell biology and related fields.

With this insider knowledge in hand, you will be propelled out of the starting gate way ahead of the pack, and you will be able to negotiate graduate school and a life in science with grace, dignity and a greater chance at academic success.

Start grad school with this question: What am I here to learn? If you don’t have a learning plan in place now, when the going gets tough, you will wring your hands in despair and say, “This is torture. Why the hell am I doing this?” With a concrete plan in mind, you will recognize your progress as you struggle and you will have the motivation you need to pull you all the way to the end: a most rewarding place to be.

2-An Adult Attitude Will Change Your Life

When you are challenged, ask not if I can, but how I can. Fact is, you can. Know this in your bones and you’re unstoppable. Perhaps for the first time in your life, nobody owes you anything: not your professors, not the department, not the administrators, not the secretaries, not your classmates or labmates. When you need something (information, equipment, guidance), make every effort to find it yourself before asking for help. Once you have made a sincere effort, then you must ask for what you need. It is the only other way you’ll get it. Complaining about it will only reduce your standing in the community. If you don’t ask for help when you need it, you will never learn the things you need to learn. Science is a social activity, and most of what you need to know cannot be found in books, manuals or on the internet.

Respect and be respected. Comport yourself like an adult by remembering that you matter, and your professors, colleagues and support staff matter. You are intelligent (otherwise they wouldn’t have let you in) and they are intelligent (yes, they make mistakes, but so do you and will for the rest of your life). Their errors in no way confirm their stupidity, incompetence or inferiority. Finally, you are ignorant and your professors have knowledge that you need. Sometimes it is difficult to appreciate what they have to offer, but their experience is long and their understanding is deep. Maintain your humility without self-debasement. Yes, there are things you don’t know, but that does not mean that you suck. You are in grad school to learn. Finally, no diss! In other words, let no unkind word pass through your lips about yourself or anyone else. At the risk of sounding repetitive, don’t diss yourself or anyone else.

Once you have earned the respect of others, they will go out of their way to help you. Without it, you’re on your own, or worse, you will have people standing in your way (subconsciously or otherwise).

3-Give First, Ask Second

When approaching your mentor, bring something to the table. Make every meeting a value-added enterprise for all the participants. Read and formulate questions. Not a question about something you could have looked up yourself, but something deeper, like “I’ve been thinking/reading about this biological question, and I’m wondering if we can address it using this method” or “I’ve been thinking/reading about this phenomenon and I’ve generated a hypothesis to explain it and wanted to see what you thought”. Later, when you have more to offer, helping a colleague with her/his work before you ask for advice can make the difference between them helping you or passing you off with, “Sorry, I can’t help you. Go see so-and-so.” Scientists are busy people.

4-Choose Rotations Deliberately

Firstly, read the papers of the professors in your department to see if their work is of interest to you. The largest motivating factor in any kind of work is interest. Secondly, talk to them. Pay attention to how they approach their work because if it isn’t clear and systematic, you won’t get the guidance you need to get out in a timely fashion, or to engineer a well constructed thesis. Go with the person who gives you a coherent presentation of the work in their lab, starting from the simplest principles and the big picture. If nobody gives you this, ask for it. Thirdly, talk to their students, techs and post-docs to see if they are reasonable to work with. This step can be invaluable in assessing your quality of life during your rotation. However, take their comments with a grain of salt because one person’s experience isn’t always generally applicable. Finally, while it makes life more pleasant to like the person you’re working with, it is not necessary.

5-Approach the Bench with a Hypothesis

Come to the bench having read and discussed enough that you can propose a reasonable hypothesis to explain to a biological phenomenon.

General Example 1: This structure is related to this function in the following way.

Specific Example 1: We propose that the catalytic site of this enzyme binds this substrate in this way to do such, and not such, for the following reasons. The biological significance being...

General Example 2: This process or pathway is important for evolution in the following way.

Specific example 2: We propose that this widget arose from this ancestor, and not this one, through these evolutionary steps for the following reasons. The biological significance being...

Try to test more than one hypothesis at a time. Formulate hypootheses so that they produce mutually exclusive predictions that can be falsified by experiment. Then design the experiment such that you can say, “If we get this result, then this hypothesis is rejected and the data are consistent with this other hypothesis, and if we get this other result, then this hypothesis is supported and the other rejected.” A well constructed experiment should support one model in favor of another, not simply support one model or disprove it. Such hypothesis-driven thinking leads to a cogent proposal and later, papers and a thesis. Sculpt a series of experiments to test the hypothesis, and the story will build itself. If you don’t, you may waste months, or even years dabbling in unrelated experiments that are ultimately unpublishable.

6-Read Papers from the Inside Out

Start from the figures and figure legends. Tackling the data first gets you right into the meat of the paper, without wasting your energy on the stuff people tack on at the end anyway. Draw your own conclusions from analyzing the data and THEN compare your views with those of the authors. Early on, you may need to skim the introduction to help orient you to the field and the discussion of the data to understand the experiments, but you run the risk of being swayed by the author’s interpretation of the data. Moreover, you may end up reading thousands of introductions and no science. Your time is precious.

7-Start Every Talk with an Outline and a Question

A  good talk should make the audience feel like a bunch of geniuses, so teach them something they don’t already know in such a way that they are able to understand it with minimal effort. It should be clear enough that they can summarize your talk to the people in their lab who didn’t come. Remember that hardly anyone studies what you study, so begin with very basic principles without being condescending, but then ramp up quickly. The introduction should not be a lengthy discussion of the literature, but supply just enough information that your audience can appreciate your work.

            Writing an outline will help you organize your thoughts as you compose your talk, and displaying it to your audience at the start of your talk will help them follow the logical flow. Providing them with a structure around which to organize the information as it ‘s coming at them will make it easier for them to absorb and process it thus leading to a more interesting discussion at the end. In the outline, tell them what you will tell them. Then, give the talk. Then summarize by telling them what you just told them.

As a guide to how much information to impart, do not exceed the 7 +/- 2 rule. If you include more salient points than 5-9, you risk losing your audience to information overload, irritation and tuning out. While constructing your introduction ask yourself, “Why should they care?” The answer will capture and keep the attention of your audience.

8-What I Told You

You are a competent, intelligent individual with much to offer the world, and your colleagues in turn are eager to receive it.

PS. It may not have escaped your notice that I patterned this publication according to the principles I just outlined for giving talks.

With love and good intentions,

Tia Vellani, Artist by Night