Tag Archives: Advice

Student Stories

Three things I learned from the grant writing process

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I spent a lot of time this past semester applying for two vastly different grants, the National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship Program and the American Heart Association Predoctoral Fellowship, and I learned three key lessons from this experience:

  1. Start early.

It is impossible to start writing a grant too early. The earlier you start developing a draft of your research statement, the more people you can have read over your grant. And don’t think that an application like NSF won’t take you very long because there is a cap of two pages on the research proposal. The short ones are often more difficult than the long ones because you have to really distill down your project into a few well-formed, purposeful sentences. Additionally, if this is the first time asking some faculty members for a letter of recommendation, you must give them at least a few weeks notice and they may even want to see a draft of your research proposal. On top of that, many grants, like the AHA, require you to submit all of your materials to a grants officer at the university in order to submit the application, so you need to contact them early because they need a few days or weeks to review all of your application materials.

  1. Be familiar with every detail of the application requirements and process.

Before you begin to write a single thing, know all of the requirements for that application, from what questions they want you to answer down to the fonts and margins. A lot of applications will have very general requirements such as font no smaller than 10 and any readable typeface. However, some are more detailed. It would be really awful to not have your application reviewed just because you didn’t read the directions carefully. Also, don’t count on anyone else to know what the requirements are. Even though your advisors and referees will get an email telling them when and how to submit their letters, you should make sure you tell them again and keep reminding them that the deadline is approaching. For example, the NSF application has a different deadline for referees’ letters than for the rest of the application, so fear not if their letters are not turned in when you hit submit.

  1. Submit as many applications as you can.

I’m not suggesting that you forgo your research and drive yourself insane submitting dozens of grant applications, but don’t ignore grants just because you don’t think you could possibly win. Don’t even let past rejected applications keep you from trying for the same grant again if you have new data or a new spin on your research. Grants are really competitive but somebody has to win and you will only win if you try. Even if you don’t get a single grant, the process of applying forces you to think critically about your research, fix flaws in your plan, communicate that plan in a way others can understand, and create a roadmap for your future research. Or if you are like me and a second year student, you are most of the way to completing your comprehensive exam by doing all the background research, gathering citations, and developing specific aims.

Happy Writing!

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Student Stories

Tuesday Tips: Create your own opportunities

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It’s been a while since I’ve written – I was busy getting a new ACL (Tuesday Tip: Don’t tear your ACL by playing soccer with teenagers when you are not a teenager), but I’m bringing it back with a thought that’s a little tough to articulate, but has been a key part of my grad school experience. This post is a bit anecdotal, but stick with me.

Grad school is a time when we’re journeying down the path from being protocol-followers to independent scientists. We start by learning a system, and then move to posing questions, and finally, to seeing complete projects through. Said like this, grad school seems like smooth sailing from point A to point B. We all know that isn’t true. What is true is that no two grad students follow the same path, no two experiences are identical, and no two Ph.Ds are the same.

That leads to the question we all have to ask ourselves: what is it that you want out of your grad school experience?

Shannon Burns

Most people answer this by saying what career they want after they graduate, but this overlooks all of the years that you spend in school. What can you get out of that time that will be both valuable and rewarding and might even make grad school enjoyable (gasp!)? For me, this has meant giving myself a broad base and expanding my scientific network to set myself up for a future career in plant biology. It’s meant getting to know people and learning from them and figuring out what I do, and don’t, like to spend my time researching. I, like any grad student, have had to take ownership of my project, critically evaluate it, and figure out what I’ve needed to do succeed.

Once I identified gaps in my project, I had to address them. Two obstacles arose: I couldn’t get these solutions in my lab, and I didn’t have any money to go to those other places. After some searching around and talking to other scientists, I applied for funding from the Company of Biologists and spent four months at the University of Nottingham, and, a few years later, applied for funding as part of the NSF GROW program and spent six months at the Umeå Plant Science Centre in Sweden (side note, winter in northern Sweden makes State College seem tropical).  From these two trips, I generated valuable data for my projects that I wouldn’t have had otherwise.

Other students have similarly taken advantage of programs and created their own opportunities. Some have obtained AAAS mass media fellowships and AAAS policy fellowships. Others have created organizations on campus, such as the Center for Science Advocacy, to bring conversations about science policy to campus. Students in the ecology program have launched the Penn State Science Café to increase conversation with the community. Check around, see what’s out there, and go for it. Don’t miss opportunities, either, or your future self will be a sad Jürgen Klinsmann watching your current self be 93rd minute Wondo.

Source: Giphy, Reddit.

We, as scientists, are problem solvers. Solutions don’t find us; we have to seek them out. Grad school is full of obstacles, but many people have gotten through grad school before you, and many will after you. It’s not really about buckling in for a ride, but about actually driving the car*, and fixing it every time it breaks down. You can, luckily, seek out help and advice, but in the end, it’s on you to drive and to figure out where you’re going.

 

* I am not sure how self-driving cars will impact this analogy, but we’re grad students and the thought of affording self-driving cars is laughable.

 

Student Stories

Tuesday Tips: Advice on TAing

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Whether you are a first-time TA, are TAing a new class, or are a seasoned pro, the first couple weeks of teaching can be a bit daunting. We’ve all been there, but don’t worry, you’re going to be great! I myself have TAed for three different courses and was a Senior Graduate Coordinator for a 500-person biology course, so I thought I would put together a few words of wisdom now that a new semester has begun:

1. Be prepared

I think being prepared is a rule of thumb for all facets of life, but it’s especially true for teaching. Spending just a few hours preparing for your lab or class that you are a TA for will make your life so much easier! Make sure you understand everything that your students will be doing or learning, concentrating not only on the small details but also the big picture. Trust me, if you’re doing a lab, at least one student will ask you what the purpose of it is. Also, if your students start asking you questions about what they’re doing and you don’t know the answers, it’s going to look pretty bad. However, we aren’t super geniuses, so if you don’t know the answer to a question, tell your students you will find out and get back to them (and then actually do it).

2. Communicate

Again, another rule of thumb for being successful, but it’s always good to give examples for certain situations. Whether you’re one of many TAs for a lab course or working with a professor in a class, communicate with your superiors if you find anything confusing. It’s better to clarify than to guess (and end up guessing wrong!). Also, this should go without saying, but communicate effectively with your students, too! If you want the formatting of a lab report to be a certain way, tell them. Finally, if there are other TAs in the course you are working with, communicate with them, especially if they are seasoned pros. Chances are they know where all of the mistakes will happen and can help you to prepare yourself and your students! If you’re a first-time TA, I would recommend observing other, more experienced TAs to get an idea of how things are done most effectively.

3. Have a good attitude

As a graduate student, most of us would rather be working on our thesis research so that we can graduate instead of spending our time TAing. I get that. But, if you’re going to do something, you should do it well, and that goes for TAing, too. If you come into the lab or class every week with a sour attitude, that’s going to trickle down to your students. Try to be enthusiastic (without going over the top) and circulate throughout the room and talk to students about what they’re doing. This will also give you a good idea of how well your students are understanding the material.

Good luck on the first week of classes!!

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Student Stories

Tuesday Tips: Back That Thang Up – Part II

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Carrie stopped by last week to remind you to back your data up. I’m going to reiterate that, and add a few things.

http://giphy.com/gifs/decapitation-disk-floppy-zzfGlkOGNRAjK
Don’t let your data get the best of you.

A PI that I know well tells the story of a student whose apartment building caught on fire while he was writing his dissertation. Luckily, he was able to get himself and his family out safely. As soon as he did that, though, he ran back inside and began throwing floppy disks out the window to his family. This was, obviously, a few years ago, but it’s the ‘you better back your data up’ story that is told frequently in our lab. It was probably the most heroic data recovery mission in the history of my lab, and hopefully it stays that way.

Because of this, we have a rule in our lab that says you must have both an onsite and off-site backup (you know, in case one of those two sites catches fire). So how do you do that?

You can follow Carrie’s method and backup to an external drive. Just back up twice and keep them in separate locations.

If you haven’t noticed from my earlier posts about reference managers and finding papers, I really like coming up with methods that don’t involve me doing the work. For backups, I’ve been using Crashplan for a few years. It runs in the background and backs your files up to a location of your choosing. Right now, I have my work computer backing up to an external drive that I keep in my office, my home computer, and to the cloud. This last option isn’t free, but my data is worth more than the $49 that I hand over annually. I’ve recoered data from the servers multiple times and even just used it to fetch files that I put on a hard drive that I didn’t bring home with me.

Crashplan isn’t the only option. You can see reviews of others here and here (or for Mac-specific use, Time Machine). But use something, and keep your data backed up.

Student Stories

Tuesday Tips: Back That Thang Up

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I decided to join Molly’s weekly Tuesday Tips series with a friendly PSA to BACK YOUR HARD DRIVE UP!

Can you imagine sitting down to write your thesis when all of a sudden, you get the blue screen of death, and your entire hard drive is lost? I don’t know anyone personally that this has happened to, but I’m sure it has happened more often than it should. That being said, in today’s electronic world, I beg of you, PLEASE back your data up.

I personally back up my entire computer at the lab every week on my external hard drive – I have a reoccurring reminder on my Google calendar to do it every Friday. External hard drives are pretty cheap these days — you can get a 1 TB hard drive for less than $100!

If you don’t want to be responsible for remembering something so important, an alternative is to use a cloud-based system that will do it automatically like the Apple Time Machine. However, if you’re going to take this route, make sure you are using a secure system and also have permission from your adviser to do this. It also wouldn’t hurt to check it every so often to make sure it’s still working. If your lab already has a systematic way of backing up data, then figure out what it is and do it! Finally, don’t forget to also back up data from other computers that may be connected to microscopes, in someone else’s lab, etc.

Happy saving!

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Student Stories

Tuesday Tips: Google Scholar Alerts

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Two weeks ago, I touched on using a reference or citation manager, but where are you finding all of those papers? We all know about google scholar or Web of Science, but why not make the papers come to you? I’m all for getting someone (or something) else to do the work for me, so I’ve been using Google Scholar Alerts to comb the internet for newly published papers for the past few years. From them, I’ve discovered work that I wouldn’t otherwise come across either because it’s from a journal that I don’t normally read or because the work has been published as a pre-print on a server that I don’t normally visit. So what is this magic?

Scholar alerts send you email updates whenever something appears that matches your search terms. You can set these up a few ways, but the easiest is to just search for something in Google Scholar and then click on the “Create alert” button in the left hand sidebar:
gscholarWhich then leads you to a site where you can set up your specific alert based on search terms. My advice? Be concise with your terms, and use descriptors like “intitle” and quotes to specify phrases, otherwise you get a lot of junk. If you use gmail, consider setting up a filter to put all of these messages in a specific folder that you can access whenever you have some time to do some literature browsing. Then add all of the papers to your reference manager.

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