All IB graduate students should have received an email announcing the new batch of programs offered by the university to help graduate students with one of the most difficult academic skills: writing.
“Dear Graduate Faculty, Coordinators, and Graduate students, Our analytics indicate that those students who receive writing instruction and consultation early in their graduate programs complete their degree requirements sooner. Our programs are designed for graduate student writers at all levels and stages.
This is an important issue, and I have already spent 4 news items on this. A recent publication in PLOS ONE investigated some of the strategies and resources PhD students (and postdocs) use for non-academic jobs. This is very important because more than 80% of our graduate students end in these non-academic jobs (although these numbers also includes MSc students). I should not have been surprised, but there are sociological theories and active research programs around this issue, resulting in publications where I am only comfortable reading the abstract and discussion, and hoping that the reviewers did their job.
Since starting these news items, we have discussed themes related to mental health issues, their causes, and some solutions. Ardon Schnorr, a Biology PhD student at Carnegie Mellon University wrote a very powerful article around this theme that touches on a lot of issues surrounding this problem: http://www.chronicle.com/article/Grad-School-Is-Hard-on-Mental/240626. It is a must read for any graduate student. And if you are inspired by the positive effects of science communication, but do not know where to start, you can always start with the University of Guelph Let’s Talk Science outreach program.
As expected, I was not the only one providing some push back to the Nature Jobs article I discussed previously. Together, they make reasonable suggestions, both towards the supervisor, and the university. The first one by D. A. McDonald acknowledges that supervisors should be open aware of all aspects of their graduate students’ lives (“what they do when they are not in the lab”). The second one by D. Mehta and K. Vavitsas point out institutional resources that can help tackle one of the root problems (“providing more courses and resources to train principal investigators in management and leadership”).
In the previous 2 blog posts, I discussed some sobering figures on the graduate experience, and how this is probably (partially) related to the lack of advisor evaluation (and training?). And then I read this column from naturejobs.com “A growing phobia”. The author, with “30-plus years as faculty member” experience, proposes his (I assume a white man wrote this) solution to a student’s fear of interacting with their advisor:
One of the most satisfying aspects of graduate school is working together with graduate students to solve fun, important, novel problems. This “working together” can cover the gradient from supervisor, to advisor, mentor, and collaborator. However, from the perspective of a graduate student, the leadership style implied by these different terms can have important effects on graduate student well-being (last week’s news item). In one of the mentioned articles, the authors explicitly quantified three different leadership styles:
Graduate student well-being has received a lot of attention lately. As far as I know, it has not reached the level of the urgency as for undergraduate students, but graduate students are exposed to a unique set of challenges too. Two recent studies quantified these challenges: Student Experience Survey 2017: investigating well-being at university and Work organization and mental health problems in PhD students. The second study also argues convincingly that these challenges are unique to the graduate school experience, and are not shared with similar persons in other contexts, such as for instance employees.
Anne Krook has a page full of practical advice on how to get a non-academic employment, which is something that I have been looking for for a long time. So here is the link, and all beginning grad students should consult this page in the first semester of their program. She even has a post titled “can non-academic careers be Plan A yet?”!
Great story, with a clear message that is equally applicable to non-academic jobs after your PhD or MSc degree: you should be thinking about this during your graduate work, and not wait until you are almost done. Below, I have taken the her final paragraph, and I have made it a little bit more general (the bold sections are my changes):“In general, I’ve seen that the people who get ahead in [academic ecology] the job market are those who have a clear vision of what [research] job they want to pursue and why it matters.
Despite the click-bait nature of the blog,this blog post has some perspectives that a lot of graduate students in our department will probably be able to relate to. Now I just wonder how many faculty members have a different perspective.