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Opinionated Advice for Incoming Graduate Students

1. You are a scientist, not a lab monkey. You ought not to view your degree as “six years of hard labor in the chemistry mines.” Always make time to go to interesting seminars, talk with other people about their research, and read the literature. Otherwise, what’s the point of being a scientist?
2. Only one person is really looking out for your best interests: you. Your advisor, your classmates, and your collaborators all have their own distinct incentives and interests, which will often roughly align with yours, but will never align perfectly.
3. Your research interests will also not match up perfectly with those of your advisor. Your job as a graduate student is to find the intersection between what the two of you care about, and work there. Otherwise, one of you will be unhappy.
4. The more non-chemists in your life, the better your mental health will be. (h/t Arthur Brooks)
5. Try to maximize the ratio of “thinking”/publishable work to mindless SI work. Any project will take some grinding, but the thinking work is (ideally) what you’ve been recruited for, what you’ll present on, and what’ll get you a job. If your advisor views you only as a set of hands… be very worried.
6. Cold emails to scientists work much better than it seems they ought to. Most professors spend their entire career trying to get people to care about their work—if you’re interested, they’ll usually talk your ear off.
7. Read your PI’s old papers, as many as possible. Too often students are totally ignorant of the work that occurred a decade before they joined the lab, and end up repeating it or falling into the same pitfalls time and time again.
8. Learn to code; please stop performing curve fits in Excel. (cf. pmarca)
9. Be outcome focused. Each day, ask yourself “What is the biggest problem I’m facing in my research?” If whatever you’re doing isn’t addressing that problem, you’re wasting your time. Sometimes this means stopping all experiments and reading papers for a few weeks; sometimes this looks like running reactions; sometimes this looks like just sitting at your desk and writing. (h/t Brian Liau for giving me this advice when I started graduate school)
10. Be outcome focused on the big scale, too. Figure out what success in graduate school looks like—what your ideal job is, and what it takes to get that sort of job—and then pursue those outcomes relentlessly. Perhaps in an ideal world we could all follow our natural curiosity to our heart’s content, but that’s not real life, not in science as I’ve known it.
11. Success in graduate school may be necessary for your life goals, but it won’t be sufficient. At the end of the day, science is just a job, and your molecules will never love you. So don’t work so hard that you put the rest of your life on hold; don’t make science the highest good in your worldview. (cf. Augustine)