A Letter of Welcome From the Department Head

Dear Incoming Biology Graduate Students,

How lucky you are. You are at the beginning of a journey that promises great excitement. Your ultimate goal is to create knowledge about the essence of life. To get there you will undertake a research project that will require experiments no one has ever done before. You will construct ideas no one has ever had before. There will be trials and errors, successes and failures. Others having more experience and being concerned with your success will offer suggestions, but your most reliable companions will be your own curiosity, imagination and persistence. In the end you will finish a sentence that begins “My thesis is……………….”, and by doing so you  will not only earn a Ph.D., but you will also personally help satisfy humanity’s overwhelming desire to understand how nature works. Pretty thrilling, isn’t it?

So, how are you going to get from here to there? You will begin, of course, by choosing to work in a lab that specializes in an area of biology that is of particular interest to you. The faculty head of the lab will become your advisor. Together with your advisor you will select a project on which to focus, a problem you will seek to solve. Your advisor will provide you with the wherewithal to make the necessary experiments, and, together with a faculty committee, you advisor will both monitor your progress and provide guidance when needed. Some of you will interact with your advisor on a daily basis, others less often. Beyond all of that I don’t know the route you will take to achieve success with your chosen project. No one does. None of us who have gone before you knew at the beginning how we would proceed. Nor can any one of us who have made a career of biological inquiry tell you exactly how we will proceed in the next project we undertake, although experience has provided us with a sense as to probabilities for success.  Each project has its own set of difficulties that must be surmounted, not all of which are obvious at the outset. Each of you, as do we, has different talents and handicaps that may need to be dealt with. Although I cannot speak to the specifics as to how you will proceed, I will offer some suggestions as to how I would try to optimize my chances for succeeding in a timely way.

Choose a congenial lab.
In choosing a lab in which to work, I would not only be concerned that it specializes in an area that is of interest to me, but also that I would enjoy interacting with my lab mates, including the lab’s head, my advisor. No matter how interesting the projects a lab undertakes, no matter how highly regarded a lab is, if it is not going to be fun for me to work there, if I did not sense an air of shared excitement about the research, I would look elsewhere. Every lab has its own social character and, although it is greatly influenced by the lab’s head, it can vary considerably over time as different lab members come and go. Different people entering a particular ethos will respond to it differently. Accordingly, you might enjoy being in a lab, I wouldn’t. Every incoming student can rotate through as many as three labs during the first year or so of training. I would use the rotation to assess not only the labs’ science but also the quality of life I would have in them. It is difficult to think when one is unhappy. And think you must.

Select a simple project.
Selecting a project on which to work necessarily balances the potential usefulness of the project against the amount of time it will take to complete it.  Accordingly, I would look to the simplest project that falls within the useful range, stimulates my imagination and involves technology I would like to learn. Usually simple projects become complex by the time all is said and done, and they may make it possible to move through the layers of complexity in a systematic way. Some say great projects make great scientists. I am of the persuasion that great scientists make great projects.

Become the expert.
I would try to work in such a way that when I finished my thesis there would be no one more knowledgeable in the field than I. No one would know the relevant literature better than I. No one would have thought about the project more deeply than I. I would use new technologies that I help develop or modify for my specific purposes. No one would understand my results or their significance better than I. I would be the expert. It’s hard to refute the expert.

The faculty members of this department realize that different graduate students arrive with different motivations for earning a Ph.D. degree. Some wish to use it to pursue a career in biological research and teaching, some wish to use it to propel a career in a related field such as science writing, medicine, biomedical engineering, etc., and some wish to use it for a career in teaching only. We also realize that motivations can change throughout the course of study. Regardless of your motivation, we are delighted to have you join us and to have the opportunity to help you on your way.