Graduate School Can Be The Best Part of Your Life…But look out for these three common mistakes
I am really excited to share a guest article this week from Maria Athanassiou, PhD, Founder of The Cancer Cure, a non-profit foundation to educate cancer patients about treatment options.
When I first read Maria’s article, what struck me right away was her positive outlook on life and her experience in graduate school. In contrast to the common view that graduate school is an experience you must “survive” before you can move on with your “real” life, Maria viewed graduate school as a learning experience to prepare her for a career in research. I feel really privileged that Maria has contributed to my site to share her experiences with my readers.
The Three Big Mistakes All Graduate Students Must Avoid
My time in graduate school was one of the most enjoyable parts of my life. For one, I was right where I wanted to be: I had come to the United States all the way from my native country, Greece, to pursue my dream of doing research in Molecular Biology at the highest level.
When I left my country, many of my friends and acquaintances could not understand why on earth I would ever put a whole ocean between myself and everyone and everything I knew and loved until then. My graduate studies were just a natural step in the single-mindedness with which I was pursuing my dream of a career in Science, a single-mindedness that has been a driving force through which I accomplish everything in life.
While graduate school was a great learning experience, I noticed that there were three common mistakes nearly every graduate student makes. These mistakes can hold back your personal and professional growth, but with a little bit of awareness, you can avoid them and achieve your full potential.
Mistake # 1. Single-mindedness that stunts personal growth
If I were to name mistake number one, in life or in my graduate pursuits, my single-mindedness would fill the criteria. In fact, I think that single-midnedness that stunts personal growth is one of three common mistakes every graduate student makes.
Personality traits are double-edge swords. One side of them is what gives us an advantage. When taken to an extreme the same personality traits are our disadvantage. To strike a balance between advantage and disadvantage in most of our personality traits is to find personal balance and avoid as many pitfalls as possible.
My single-mindedness was the relentless driving force to pursue my science studies in the USA. It might have also been the reason why I wore blinders to any opportunities offered me through my graduate studies other than the pursuit of the academic track.
In my experience, many of my fellow graduate students, as scientists or engineers were likewise closed up to many possibilities of personal and professional growth during their graduate studies. Many of us may have stayed cooped-up in our lab or in our floor. We spent very little effort connecting further in our department or with people from other labs.
We didn’t have the time, busy as we were pursuing our tasks, or so we thought. In reality we may not have seen the necessity to make the time. That was a big mistake.
Graduate studies are vocational training and while we establish a network of career connections, we recruit peers to our aid. They may function as reviewers to our papers and grant proposals within our narrow field of expertise, or give us ideas and support for a career change later in our lives.
My single-mindedness in pursuing an academic career deterred me from seriously exploring other career paths post-Ph.D., exploring the opportunities afforded at the MIT career office and acquiring, at that stage, skills that would have come in handy later in life, no matter what career track I had ended up taking.
A career office in a University is there to give tools in creating a professional job-seeker identity and to build one’s communication skill-set. These are necessary aspects of one’s professional development, and no graduate student should be passing on opportunities and services that exist in school but will cost them tens of thousands of dollars to obtain at a later time.
If you are pursuing graduate studies not just for the love of Science but believing a Ph.D. will help you get a higher income you may want to consider professional schools. An MBA, or JD along with a Science background has better prospects in achieving high incomes. Graduate school may in some cases be a good stepping stone, of course. Back in the day, Wayne State University Medical School was free for Michigan Residents who had completed at least a Master’s with a GPA higher than 3.5/4.0. Wayne State University has the number one Program in the country for family care Medicine.
Still, if you think a Ph.D. will help you pursue a career in industry it is best to ask your advisor about their industry connections and agree to your exploring summer internship opportunities.
Not only may we not see this limitation of personal growth or acknowledge it in ourselves, while in graduate school but we might also cultivate it in each other, as we are people of similar tendencies, thrown together in similar circumstances, enjoying each other’s company and the commonalities that have brought us together.
Some graduate students may even consider networking as a shallow social interaction, a thing appropriate for salesmen, a manipulative art in which they do not wish to participate. This sort of limited, elitist and at the same time people-phobic mentality is problematic. We may think that our smarts and intelligence, our hard work, recognized by our peers and mentors will suffice to carry us through our entire career.
Wearing blinders, being single-minded, prevents personal growth and that is the number one mistake of professionals in any setting: failing to use opportunities for personal growth. Graduate school, as an environment where people work towards professional development is no different. Problems of “stinted” personal growth in graduate school will hit us sooner or later. Hindsight is always 20:20.
The question is how to keep our eyes, mind and ears open in the present to maximize our opportunities for personal growth.
As strange as it may seem to somebody who feels pressured by an advisor to deliver certain results by a deadline, there is a need to make time for personal and professional development. It is part of taking ownership of one’s own future. A second common mistake graduate students often make is not taking ownership of their own future.
Mistake #2. Not taking ownership of one’s own future
When we are in graduate school we think our mentor/teacher/advisor will tell us all we need to know. Not taking ownership of our own future, expecting our advisor to actually be responsible for our career development, is a very grave mistake we can make.
The support graduate students can get from their advisors in their career will vary greatly. Some advisors are really helpful:
- They will explain to the student every detail of how to write a paper, how to prepare a presentation, how to even correct grammar mistakes.
- They will teach the student their own style. They will brainstorm the problem with their student. They will follow the development of the student’s research.
- They will still ask the student to do the problem-solving for the most part.
- They will ask them to complete their own submissions.
- They will follow the progress of the student’s job hunt and offer advice in application preparation.
- They will encourage the student to apply for fellowships that may often give the student more independence, such as an NSF fellowship.
- They may have the goodwill, interest, pull or connections to call a person they know to notify them about a student coming into in the job market. This type of advisor is rare and ideal and if you’ve had them, pat yourselves on the back for a good choice.
Thank also your lucky stars to have them available to you.
My graduate student advisor told me what deal I was getting into from the get-go: “You can join my lab, if you want. But you need to realize one thing: my career is already made. Yours is what you make of it.” My immediate thought was that there must be a little mistake in this thinking, because, if I did not produce and, if the rest of the people in my lab did not produce, my advisor’s career could not continue as stellar as it had began.
On the other hand, it suited me as a fiercely independent person to be self-directed. Surely my advisor was there for me when I had technical questions and he was excellent in answering them but most of the skills I developed in presentations or in the process that led to an academic job came from seeing what people in other labs and other disciplines were doing. This is where being a social extrovert, making connections without really thinking about it in such terms, was coming in handy for me.
My advisor was fun, smart, and easy-going. He was working in a field I was interested in. He was not disinterested in my progress, he respected my choices and at some point he was ready to cut the umbilical cord. Deep down he was right on the mark. It is necessary to take full ownership of one’s own career in its totality. I was lucky I found and chose somebody, who suited my personality and I could flourish under them.
On the other hand, one of my closest friends was working with a famous person, who was a total micromanager. He assigned each person enough work to last two weeks and made everybody accountable on a weekly basis. The purpose of this was to ensure nobody was straying into doing independent work.
The lab’s rich resources were under tight control and no creativity was allowed unless directed expressly from the boss. Performing a set of unauthorized experiments, however, interesting their outcome, was seen as disobedience and penalized. There was a technician, who functioned as a snitch, notifying the boss about people’s dynamics and about unauthorized experiments.
My friend explored the possibility of leaving and was given the opportunity, twice, to go work for a better mentor. They were, however, so bent on completing the work they were doing, on enduring and not appearing to have failed under any circumstances that they chose to stay.
Even though they did a wonderful volume of work, it has remained unpublished because their micromanager mentor chose not to support their further career development. They had chosen a hostile mentor unwilling to provide proper mentoring.
They did not cut their losses early and ended up losing more time and experiencing bigger failure for not abandoning a bad situation.
Mistake # 3. Not getting out of difficult situations
Taking ownership of one’s own career while in graduate school, definitely means looking to find the right fit for a mentor. It also means to not depend on the mentor for all vital decisions. It also means to drop a mentor when he/she has proven a bad fit. It is difficult to handle difficult mentors but it is necessary.
When choosing a mentor fit one has to take into account the mentor’s track record. It is true that Science is a nepotistic field. The general idea is that the more famous and accomplished a mentor the better your chances to continue your career in Science. But you need to double-check.
A supportive mature mentor will have created a “school” of successful academics and professionals. A famous person whose students or post-docs have been largely unsuccessful in landing good jobs is in all likelihood a poor mentor. That, of course, was the case of my friend’s advisor but she failed to look into it before her commitment to his lab or even during her tenure there.
I had another friend who chose to do his Ph.D. with a faculty member known to let his graduate students leave after 10 years of studies with only a Master’s. My friend suffered from the pressure throughout the time that he spent in graduate school. His personal life was destroyed. The rest of us were wondering what made him think he would have better luck than all the other students in this lab. We still don’t know, if when he left graduate school, fifteen years after he had started, he had succeeded in getting his Ph.D.
If you are caught in a bad situation, do not think you are going to make the exception. Just like in any line of business, my advice would be to cut your losses and run. The earlier you get out of a bad situation the better.
It is not as easy as it sounds to get out of a bad situation. You worry about having failed, about not being good enough to make it through the impossible odds. You worry about looking bad to the department. You worry about repercussions.
It is true that professors who do not treat their students properly will go after the defecting student with a vengeance. It is also true that there is still a majority of faculty within an institution of learning who understand that the student is there to learn, not to be taken advantage and who will be willing to shelter you, if you have a genuine complaint and proof of your plight.
You must not come across as a mere whiner, or somebody that would be unhappy no matter what their circumstance and environment.
There are mechanisms in place to protect the student and the institution at the same time from bad faculty behavior. Seek the proper channels within your Institution. If you are uncertain where to start, you can always ask Dora.
For example, one professor had a student do all of their teaching. The student had stellar independent work that he had completed, enough to secure him his graduation. Through connections he had made in conferences and meetings he was already discussing job offers. The professor would not allow him to prepare his thesis defense, and wanted him to get a departmental teaching assistantship.
Once he had the assistantship the professor demanded the student would teach only their course as he had already done many times before. The course-load was very heavy and would not allow the student to graduate. The student complained to the graduate student advisor showing some of the emails in which the advisor’s behavior was demonstrably unfit for the Institution.
The student was assigned a new advisor, instructed to prepare his thesis defense and given a light teaching load so he could graduate within the year.
Is Graduate School For you?
Sometimes, your entire program might not be a good fit for you. It is good to acknowledge a bad fit early and look for a better one. We are inhibited by feelings of gratitude for having been accepted to a program, by feelings of loyalty to the people we have met there. These are all good things to weigh-in and consider. But if your heart is dead –set in working in another area, not offered in your department or in your advisor’s lab it might be worth it for you to take the leap.
There is no need to burn down bridges. Try to communicate your needs openly and clearly with all parties concerned. Maintain communication with as many people as remain open to you in your old environment once you have moved.
What do you think are the biggest mistakes that students make in graduate school, and how can they be avoided? Please be specific as we have readers from all over the world who are looking for inspiration to finish graduate school and advance their careers.
A Cancer Biologist and Cancer Survivor, Dr. Maria Athanassiou got her PhD in Toxicology from MIT and completed a postdoctoral fellowship at Howard Hughes Medical Institute. She continued her research at University of Michigan and won research awards at a National and International level. She has extensive experience in the management of nonprofit organizations and to educate the public about cancer treatments and to speed up the process of scientific discovery she has founded a public benefit company The Cancer Cure.