In a previous blog post, I talked
about what the characteristics of the best graduate students. But what about the “bad” ones? Around the dinner table at home, my wife and
children are probably most familiar with stories surrounding the students who
cause me the most anxiety, and in fact, if you asked my 15-year-old daughter,
she could tell you the names of my three least favorite graduate students of
all time! So in the interest of
completeness, I would like to share with you the personality traits and
behaviors that lead to a lack of success in graduate school. I will not give any names or enough
information to identify a particular person, but if you are reading this and
recognize the characteristics in yourself, you may need to do some
self-analysis!
I’ll start by saying how fortunate
I have been to work with so many truly outstanding and inspirational graduate
students. These are young people who are
innovative, self-starting, hard-working, honest, collaborative, optimistic,
aspirational, and hungry for success.
Those characteristics truly describe 90-95% of all the graduate students
that I have ever advised. These are the
people who are thoughtful, show up for work every day, get results, communicate
their results/problems/questions regularly, get along with others, and in
general don’t give me something exciting to talk about at the dinner table when
my wife asks me how my day was. (For
example: Wife: “Brian, how was your
day?” Me: “Oh, pretty good! Leo got some great results in the lab today,
and one of Meng’s papers just got accepted in a really tough journal.” My Kids (in my dreams): “Dad, how
incredible! Tell us more about how you
helped cure cancer today?!?!” My Kids
(in reality): “How boring! Can we change the subject to something besides Dad’s
work?!?”) No. The really interesting dinner conversations
occur when one of outlier students is doing something incredibly annoying. Over the course of 10 years as a professor,
there have probably been ~3 students who failed due to problems they brought upon
themselves. None of them will ever have
a PhD thesis with my signature on it.
So, how does a person get on this list?
Don’t come in to work:
It’s simple. If you are not at the lab, you cannot get any
research done. I have had students who I
would rarely ever see, even though my office door was only 15 feet away from
their desk. During normal work hours, I
would never see them in the lab. If I
stopped by the office at night or the weekend, I could not find them
either. When I meet with them every
week, and ask what they did, they would have very little to show. Before long, I would give them a lecture
about how they need to treat graduate school like a serious job, and not just a
hobby between classes that they dabble in when they feel like it. Some students have a hard time making the
transition from classwork to research, and come up with a lot of excuses not to
make it to lab.
Another serious problem is someone
who treats graduate school like they work at a bank. Students in this category come into lab at
10AM, take 90 minutes for lunch, and then go to the gym for a 5PM workout,
followed by dinner. It sounds like a lovely day to me, but these students are
making progress at an incredibly slow rate.
Really, a person should be trying to work between 8-10 hours per day in
graduate school. Some people will do
more than this for some stretches for a critical experiment or a deadline. The fact is, when you get out into any job in
Industry or Academia, you will be working at least this much (but getting paid
a lot more), and you need to build good work habits while in graduate
school. Try coming into work at 8AM,
working until noon, taking an hour for lunch, and then stay at work until
6PM. If you are focused while at work,
you will get a ton done, and still have time to sleep, eat, exercise, and see
your friends.
While there are some tasks for
which you may be more effective somewhere besides the lab (like reading
journals, writing, preparing figures…) it is best to try to schedule these
activities while you are at work, and to have the philosophy of focusing on
work while you are at work. You can
manage your time better by setting some time aside every day when your mind is
sharp to do some reading or writing, but avoid doing it at home. A lot of what happens in research involves
interacting with other people, and others (like your advisor) being able to
find you for questions and discussion. My
advice is to try avoiding being a nocturnal person (like a vampire) who works
from 10PM to 8AM. My students who tell
me that they do this seem to be a lot less productive than those who expose
themselves to daylight.
Come into work, but don’t work:
There
was once a student in my group who I would see at his desk very consistently,
but he seemed to never get much work done.
Week after week I would meet with him, and it seemed like whatever
progress he had to report to me could have been done in just a couple of
hours. One day, out of curiosity, I
walked up behind him at his desk to see what he was working on. Was he reading journal papers, researching
some information to help him solve a problem, emailing his mother? No, it was Facebook! Basically, every time I saw his computer
screen after that, he was spouting nonsense to his friends back in his home
country. He made the mistake of
friending me, so I unfortunately got exposed to all the various posts made
throughout the day. My advice: save the video
games and social media playtime for outside the office, and focus on work while
you are at work.
In
a similar vein, another student always seemed to be on the phone during
work. There may have been some kind of
complex family situation, a side business, or something that required a lot of
loud arguments. It seemed impossible to
have a 30-minute meeting with this student without his cellphone sounding off
several times, and he was constantly running out of group meeting to answer
calls (or doing text messages while another student was speaking at group
meeting. Very rude.) Once again, my advice is to be engaged at
work while you are at work, and do not treat the lab as a place to do a lot of
personal business. Sometimes it is
necessary, but it should be the exception, and not the rule.
Refuse to work with other people:
I
once had a student whose philosophy was that he should be able to accomplish
everything in his thesis work without the input of anybody else. He felt that asking one of the senior
students in the group for advice was a sign of weakness. This person had such problems interacting
with other people that it was necessary for me to hold weekly sub-group
meetings in which I had a written matrix of tasks and assigned “finish-by”
dates, so he could not agree to do something and then wriggle out of it
later. This person found himself
rediscovering things that people in my group already figured out years before,
finding out everything the hard way, and not making any real progress. People also learned that they could never
rely on him for lending a hand with anything, and so eventually they stopped
asking. This student found himself
completely isolated from the group, and unable to duplicate results that others
were able to achieve easily because they took the time to ask questions that
enabled them to learn how to build and measure things correctly.
Antagonize your fellow group members, so all of them refuse to work
with you:
An
antagonistic personality will also serve to isolate a student from the rest of
the group. I have had a small number of
students who had an attitude of superiority that led them to not only question
the work of other students, but to belligerently accuse them of being wrong,
and to insinuate that their projects were not worthy of serious time. These students would engage in prolonged and
aggressive questioning of other students during group meeting that would extend
into heated arguments during the rest of the week. Interestingly, the students with this attitude
were also those who had the least to show in the way of their own
accomplishments, and also the least amount of background knowledge. While a certain amount of questioning and
challenging is a good thing, these students could never let things go, and would
conduct their questions in a manner that was seen as threatening. After a while, the senior students and
postdocs in the group just stopped listening to them, or offering them any
advice that they could have benefited from in their own project. My advice to students is to ask plenty of
questions, but conduct yourself in a gracious manner if you want your fellow
group members to be helpful collaborators.
Rudeness and aggressiveness rarely gets you the results you want with
your co-workers in any context.
Antagonize students in groups I collaborate with, so their groups
refuse to work with my group:
By
now, you might realize that the same people that I was referring to in the last
section could not limit their rudeness impulses to people in their own research
group, but indiscriminately extended their approach to whomever they
encountered. Unfortunately this also
included students from other professors who I collaborated with. I ended up having to apologize to the
offended faculty and student in the other group, and chose other students with
more pleasant dispositions to collaborate.
Collaborations are really important to a faculty member, so students
should take it upon themselves to try hard to make them work, rather than get
into fights that the faculty have to straighten out.
Break things by being stupid, and fail to take part in fixing them:
In
one of the most egregious examples of incompetence that I have ever
encountered, a visiting postdoc managed to completely destroy a $750K piece of
equipment the very first time he laid hands on it without someone carefully
watching his actions. How did he manage
to do this? He underwent training, and
was taught all the ways that he could incur serious damage, but apparently none
of the training lodged itself into his brain.
During the first time he was allowed to operate the equipment solo, he
encountered an unexpected message.
Rather than stop what he was doing and ask the experienced person what
to do, he put the machine into “manual” mode, and just seemed to start pressing
buttons. 30 minutes later, the machine
was ruined. What was worse, several
other people needed to spend many hours to repair the damage, but this person
did not offer his time or assistance in any of the work. This postdoc’s behavior (in this instance and
other related ones related to safety) got him permanently banned from the lab.
Get banned from the lab:
If
you are banned from the lab, it is very hard to make research progress. The person mentioned above actually got
banned from another lab for breaking yet another piece of equipment. I think he is the only person to ever be
permanently banned from two labs at Illinois.
I ended up having to pay for all his damage from my grant funding. After that, this person spent the rest of his
postdoc in his office surfing the internet, and never first-authored a paper
with my group.
Blame all your problems on everything except yourself:
Sometimes,
when things are not going well, people seek to identify the source of their
problems. Problems are not hard to find,
and some common ones are:
“My advisor did not tell me
exactly what to do.”
“My equipment did not work.”
“I did not get the result I
expected.”
“I did not know how to perform a
technique.”
“I needed some piece of equipment,
and I did not have it.”
“I did not know what other people
already knew about this topic.”
“My classes are giving me too much
homework this semester.”
One of the most important
characteristics of successful researchers is resourcefulness, and this is a very
important lesson to learn.
Your advisor will not likely be
able to tell you every single detail of how you will perform your experiment,
or give you a bulleted list that will tell you, from start to finish, every
step you will need to perform to complete your thesis. It will be up to you to get input and
direction from your advisor, but to use your resourcefulness to fill in the
rest. Not sure what to do? Then talk with some other members of your
group, and develop a written plan that you can review with your advisor. If a piece of equipment does not work, you
may need to get into it, and discover how to fix it or get it repaired. Don’t know how to perform a technique? You may need to take a class, attend a
workshop, or get someone to show you how to do it correctly. Need a key piece of equipment? Try to figure out who might have it on
campus, figure out how to get one on loan, or find one for your advisor to buy
on EBay. Not sure how others have
approached this problem in the past? Go
to Google Scholar and read up on some published scientific literature. If you are spending all your time on
classwork, your priorities need an adjustment, or you need to structure your
day so you can keep making steady research progress.
Certainly
a graduate student cannot solve every problem, but considering that you are
among the most intelligent and highly educated people in the entire country, it
is expected that you will take initiative to aggressively identify and solve
problems on your own. Science is hard,
and this is part of the learning experience!
Fail to draft a paper on your research:
The
most problematic students that I have advised are also those who never
completed a project from start to finish with sufficient attention to detail
and thorough understanding to prepare a manuscript that was of high enough
quality to submit to a peer reviewed scientific journal. For these students, there was always a lack
of understanding of what had been published by others previously, a failure to
listen to my suggestions for what experiments would lead to convincing
arguments about their hypothesis, or just a failure to follow though on what
they started.
Need to know EVERYTHING before you can do ANYTHING:
This
issue can trip up people who are perfectionists. Sometimes, it is indeed useful, when
encountering something that does not meet with the expected result, to revisit
the fundamentals, simplify the experiment, and tease out the variable that may
have been giving an undesired effect.
However, when it becomes necessary to take this approach for absolutely
every element of a project, it becomes an impediment for achieving the goal at
hand. For example: I need to completely understand all polymer chemistry and
biophysics before I can use this epoxy material in the construction of my
device! Another example: I need to take the highest level classes in
electromagnetics and quantum mechanics before I can consider how to fabricate
this device for performing surface-enhanced Raman spectroscopy! One particular student kept finding places
and reasons to return to the fundamentals without ever making much practical
progress on the stated goal of reproducing and optimizing a device that had
already been working in the lab for two years.
Typically, people can gather information on the fundamentals while
simultaneously making practical progress in the lab. It is a parallel process rather than a serial
one.
So,
that’s my advice on how to avoid becoming one of the graduate students who your
advisor will lament daily at the dinner table.
You will find that a collegial attitude towards your fellow students, a
philosophy of treating your lab research like you would treat a “real” job,
being careful not to carelessly break expensive stuff, some self-motivation,
and ability to make progress despite the lack of perfect conditions will take
you a long way in graduate school and in life.
Good luck!!!
