The Futile Cycle

I spent part of winter break at home helping my brother edit and submit his college apps, and it got me thinking about all the things I wish people had told me before I went to college. Here’s a list of what I think, as a recent college graduate, are the top non-obvious things that students should know before they go:

1. Get to know your professors

Yeah yeah, everyone says that, but really, this, along with the friends you make, is probably the most important thing you can do college, and it will have a lasting impact on your life. A good college professor can not only help you choose your classes, but he or she can also be a good mentor and advisor, expand your mind, and even help you find a job or help you get into medical/law/graduate school. These people will write your letters of recommendation.

In high school, it was easy to get to know teachers, even if you didn’t make much of an effort. Colleges are bigger, though, and professors are really busy. Most don’t seem to make much of an effort to get to know students beyond the classes they teach, but that’s not because they don’t like students; it’s because they’re busy teaching other classes, doing research, giving talks, or writing grants. Be proactive, seek them out! Go to their office hours (which are often surprisingly empty), ask them for possible research projects, ask them for interesting reading from their field. Professors are geeks; many of them love to talk about what they study.

Don’t stop talking to professors after the class is over. You need to build a better relationship than just the student-teacher one, especially if you plan on asking them for a letter of recommendation. The worst letters are the “this person got an A in my class” ones. They are pretty meaningless; most employers and schools will see your grades and/or transcripts anyway.

2. Go for scholarships and awards

Whether you sailed through high school with top honors and awards or barely made it through intact, you need to find a way to get good scholarships and awards in college. Employers and graduate schools love awards; when they hire and accept students with lots of awards, it makes them feel like they’re choosing a good candidate, because all these other people thought the student was good, too.

Besides, why would you say no to some extra cash or prestige?

But these things won’t just come to you. You need to go out and actively seek them, because most of the time, people don’t even know about them. Some of them are pretty obscure and unknown. Try looking at your college’s awards webpage (if they have one), or google for college scholarships and awards. It’ll be worth the effort, trust me.

3. Your grades don’t matter much…but they still matter some

You don’t need a 4.0 GPA; not even close. No one cares about the difference between 3.7 and 3.8. As long as you get a solid B+ average (3.5) or so, you should be fine, unless you’re absolutely sure you’re going to medical school or law school. Other stuff, like making friends, meeting professors, joining clubs, and going for scholarships and awards, is much better, and more fun besides. If your grades do turn out to be a little low, go work for a while before you go back to graduate school; by then, you’ll have had other experiences that are more important, and which will overshadow your grades on your applications.

Don’t fail your classes, though. It does look bad to have a 2.x GPA, and people will grill you about it, especially employers and graduate schools.

Still, try not to take all the easy ones, or all the hard ones. Challenge yourself in order to learn stuff and expand your mind, but don’t kill yourself over your classes. Find the balance. College isn’t a contest about grades. It’s about building relationships and a foundation for the rest of your life, and a few years out, no one will care what your GPA was in college.

That leads to…

4. Make friends

That’s a joke, right? Of course you make friends.

Well, this is more important than your grades. College is a school, yes, but if you want a job afterwards, your connections are more important, especially later on in your life. Join clubs. Make friends with smart people and outgoing people (outgoing smart people, of course, are even better). Maybe together, you can…

5. Start something

Something, anything. A club, a newsletter, a blog, a business, anything. Ok, maybe not another literary magazine; usually, colleges have 80 of those already, and don’t need one more. Starting something will show employers and graduate schools that you have initiative and creativity, that you don’t just follow the same old routine like everyone else.

It also feels good to start something and watch it succeed. Really work at it, and don’t just let it die. If it flops, hey, you got experience, and you can start something else!

Don’t worry that it’s not the most original idea, either. Google was yet another search engine when it came out, and Facebook was just another social networking site. Their success came from how they delivered it, how well they understood what the world wanted, and how hard they worked at it.

2008. The past year’s been quite a blast!

Let’s see, I applied to three fellowships and eight graduate schools, visited four graduate schools and chose one of them, graduated from college with a degree (well, two) in chemistry, attended the first wedding I’d ever been to, took a trip to Madrid, moved from Boston to New Jersey, and entered graduate school to go for a Ph.D. in biology!

Along the way, I learned a whole heck of a lot of biology, from biophysics to cell biology to genetics and computational biology. I also discovered what may be differentially regulated protein localization in yeast gametes versus newly-formed zygotes. All in all, a very productive year!

Apparently, now more people live in cities than in farms. Via the Freakonomics Blog, this is, according to Ed Glaeser (and I agree with his massive intellect), a Good Thing:

A central paradox of the twenty-first century is that declining communication and transportation costs have made cities more vital than ever. In the developing world, cities are the intellectual gateways between the human capital of India and China and the markets of the West. In the developed world, cities have enjoyed a remarkable resurgence over the last 25 years as the density that once made it easier to move hogsheads onto clipper ships now serves to spread knowledge in finance and new technology. Globalization and the death of distance increased the returns for being smart, and you become smart by hanging out with smart people. As such, cities remain important because they create the intellectual connections that forge human capital and spur innovation.

….

Humans are a social species, and our greatest achievements are all collaborative. Cities are machines for making collaboration easier. Thus, I am delighted that our planet has become increasingly urban.

I love cities. I’m currently living in a giant, semi-rural-ish suburb with farmland five minutes from my room. I do love the green, massive trees that bury my university, especially during the fall when it all turns a spectacular gold, and I love having star-filled nights, but I also miss the bustle of people, the soaring skyscraper skylines, having friends, family, and fun in walking distance, and just the sheer energy that comes from the city.

Not to mention all the brilliant science that was happening in Boston. My department is great, but there are just so many more people in Boston doing science; there are always exciting talks to go to and new discoveries coming out just down the street. I miss that very much.

I’m excited to be starting my next rotation on Monday! I just found out today that my next lab is one that studies quiescence, which is basically how cells in our body “hibernate” until they need to wake up to do something. In high school biology, you might have learned about mitosis, where cells copy DNA, separate out the chromosomes, and divide to create two new cells. Well, cells aren’t always constantly dividing, and there’s a specific “hibernation” state (called quiescence) that cells go into when they aren’t needed. Fibroblasts hibernate until you get cut, at which point they start responding to the wound by dividing and turning on genes that help with healing. I’m very excited, as I’ve never worked with mammalian cells or tissue culture before. It’ll be an experience, and hopefully really productive!

I really enjoyed my last rotation, which was in a yeast cell biology lab. I did a lot of microscopy to find out some mechanisms by which yeast cells have sex. I don’t want to get into the specifics too much, but basically no one knows how the specific mechanisms of yeast sex happens, especially how the two cells fuse together to become one cell. It was a really great project to start with this year, as it involved some very basic biological techniques, it wasn’t too hard, and I was able to start generating data right away while working on other side projects that were harder and riskier.

So overall, am I happy in graduate school? Yes, I think so. I’m learning a lot, which I always find awesome, I’m discovering new stuff, which is neat, and there’s something quite satisfying with the bench work in biology.

I recently read Paul Graham’s essay How Not to Die, which is about how to keep your startup company from dying. His focus is on internet and tech startups in Silicon Valley, but as I read, working at a startup started to sound a lot like doing research in graduate school.

Here are some sayings that seem to apply to both working at a startup and doing research:

For us the main indication of impending doom is when we don’t hear from you. When we haven’t heard from, or about, a startup for a couple months, that’s a bad sign. If we send them an email asking what’s up, and they don’t reply, that’s a really bad sign. So far that is a 100% accurate predictor of death…When startups die, the official cause of death is always either running out of money or a critical founder bailing. Often the two occur simultaneously. But I think the underlying cause is usually that they’ve become demoralized.

This sounds a lot like how some projects go in graduate school. If the student doesn’t talk to the professor often enough, the project will probably die, the student will become despondent, and will probably not get his or her Ph.D. This quickly leads to the converse possibility:

Maybe if you can arrange that we keep hearing from you, you won’t die.

I find that I was especially productive in my rotation this time around, because my professor meets with everyone every week. Our lab is small enough that at our weekly lab meetings, each person gets up to talk about what he or she has done or tried this past week, to talk about possibilities, get advice, troubleshoot, or even draw greater conclusions. It’s a fantastic economic self-contract, where I pre-commit myself not to fail.

Running a startup can be demoralizing…I’ve been there, and that’s why I’ve never done another startup. The low points in a startup are just unbelievably low. I bet even Google had moments where things seemed hopeless….Another feeling that seems alarming but is in fact normal in a startup is the feeling that what you’re doing isn’t working. The reason you can expect to feel this is that what you do probably won’t work.

This is probably a familiar statement to all graduate students in science. There are times when things just get bad, and the point is that those who succeed are those who power through the times when it just doesn’t work. And frankly, if it was obvious that the research would work, then it probably isn’t worth doing.

The number one thing not to do is other things. If you find yourself saying a sentence that ends with “but we’re going to keep working on the startup,” you are in big trouble.

This is really interesting, and I don’t know how much it applies to graduate school. Perhaps the similarity diverges here. Or maybe this is actually sage-like advice for research. There is a certain amount of focus that’s necessary to complete some research topics, but one certainly spreads the risk out on at least two projects, so that if one fails the other can succeed. On the other hand, the spreading of risk and attention does lead to a lack of proper motivation to persevere on each project…

Founders are more motivated by the fear of looking bad than by the hope of getting millions of dollars. So if you want to get millions of dollars, put yourself in a position where failure will be public and humiliating.

I don’t know how much this applies, either, but in a sense, pre-committing to the professor on how well you’ll do is a good motivation to do work, as long as the professor understands if the project is very high risk.

All of you guys already have the first two. You’re all smart and working on promising ideas. Whether you end up among the living or the dead comes down to the third ingredient, not giving up.

So I’ll tell you now: bad shit is coming. It always is in a startup. The odds of getting from launch to liquidity without some kind of disaster happening are one in a thousand. So don’t get demoralized. When the disaster strikes, just say to yourself, ok, this was what Paul was talking about. What did he say to do? Oh, yeah. Don’t give up.

This is highly relevant. My professor and others keep telling me that the best predictor of graduate school success isn’t so much intelligence and whatnot as much as the ability to keep going when things fail. The ability to troubleshoot, manage errors as best as one can, and just get things done is the best predictor. So, in a sense, graduate students, throughout their Ph.D., are honing the same skills that startup founders are.

It’s an interesting parallelism. Maybe someday I can talk up a venture capitalist with this hypothesis!

When I was little, I thought it was awfully boring how grown-ups would sit around and just talk. I mean, not play games, watch movies, they’d just talk! How could they spend hours doing that?

I realized today, though, that’s what I do now. I like talking to people for hours and hours. Am I grown-up now? This made me sad, and so I indulged my inner child a bit as I waited for my experiments to finish.

Dry-ice filled plastic vials that make loud bangs in people’s trash cans to startle them? Check. Water with bubbling dry ice and heavy vapors to make me feel like a mad scientist? Definitely. Squirting ethanol solution on the little crawly bugs that appear in our lab? Of course! Looking at random puddle water on a slide under the light microscope? Awesome.

Little things that keep me from growing old too quickly.

When I was in college, my biology friends would all mutter “ethidium bromide” in hushed tones, as if discussing the devil incarnate. It was the evil-but-necessary chemical, the mutagen that would cause dozens of cancerous masses all over your body with the slightest bit of contact. Meanwhile, I happily worked my hours away in a chemistry lab using pyrimidine, benzene, toluene, and plenty of more mutagenic stuff than that. Pansies.

But when I started working in biology, again, safety training indoctrination told me: Ethidium Bromide is hazardous stuff. Use a fume hood. Any spill must be cleaned immediately, and so on. It’s dangerous.

Well, apparently not. (via Life of a Lab Rat) Eh. Guess I shouldn’t worry so much that we heat our running buffers with EtBr already it in. I probably do worse things to my body by being lazy about sunscreen in the summer.

For my current lab research, I spend a substantial portion of my time filming and photographing sex — baker’s yeast mating, or pheromone-y, cytoplasm swapping, petri dish action, if you will. Take a look at this classic shot:

They’re finicky, shy little things. I have to go to a lot of work to make them comfortable. Not too hot, not too cold, just the right humidity, not too crowded, not hungry or too full. I hope they appreciate my efforts!

Since right now it’s both fellowship-writing and graduate school application season, I figured this was as good a time as any to post about this.

For those undergrads out there considering whether to enroll in a four-year combined Baccalaureate/Masters program, a word of advice: if you’re planning to try for a Ph.D. in the sciences later, the Masters may not be worth the hidden cost: you may lose a year of eligibility for applying to graduate fellowships during your Ph.D. program.

If you’re planning to do a Masters in, say, philosophy, and then you want to do chemistry for your Ph.D., then fine, no worries, get your M.A. and be joyful. On the other hand, if you plan to go do your Ph.D. in the same field as your Masters, it’s probably not worth it.

First of all, you’ll get a Masters in most Ph.D. programs after a year or so, regardless of whether or not you pass the qualifying exams. Secondly, your Masters work is sufficiently related to your Ph.D. work such that you may not be eligible to apply for many graduate fellowships—such as the NSF, DoD, or DoE fellowships—as a second-year Ph.D. student. Since getting the fellowships is a bit of a crapshoot, the extra year of eligibility in graduate school is quite helpful.

The main reason to get that Masters in chemistry (or whatever science) would probably be if you want to take time off before graduate school and get a job, in which case the Masters might come in handy (I’m assuming), and that advantage might outweigh your possible fellowships eligibility loss later on.

In any case, the choice ultimately comes down to personal factors, of course, but this is an often-overlooked factor when people consider the four-year Masters program in college.

Since I’m right at the start of my Ph.D. training, I’m looking for anything that’ll reduce my stumbling blocks ahead. This article on maxims to survive by is more oriented towards physicists, but is quite applicable to almost any field, including biology.

I particularly like this maxim:

Don’t make your equipment better than it needs to be. “The best piece of scientific apparatus is one that falls apart the day after you finish using it.”

I’m currently using a flow-cell that’s made of a glass slide, some scotch tape, nail polish, and a sheet of tissue paper. I could conceivably use epoxy and a syringe pump to construct a more robust, more controlled flow cell, but what’s the point? I only needed the flow cell for one experiment, and I’m doing cell biology with non-synchronized cells, which means that there’s too much noise to do anything more precise anyway. I feel like half of science is done with patched up equipment that falls apart right after that grad student or post-doc leaves.

I also used to think that people who used kits were sissies. “Just” do a phenol extraction! But really, kits are good enough. Who wants to troubleshoot a purification step if it doesn’t lead to a paper?