Advice For Graduate Students

1. Show up.

80% of life is just showing up. Just showing up isn't sufficient to be successful, but it is necessary. There's a certain amount of raw talent and smarts needed to succeed in academia, but beyond that, it's largely about showing up and working.

How hard should you work? If you're working 40 hours a week, perhaps you should consider getting a job instead of doing a PhD. Realistically, you are looking at around 50-60 hours per week (10-12 hours a day 5 days a week, or 8 hours a day with additional time on weekends) for a period of around 5-10 years. The point is, the PhD isn't a conventional job. It's an intensive training period, and you have to devote a lot of time to it. You may need to work even harder for brief periods, but much more than 60 hours a week for long stretches is a recipe for burnout.

Why so much time? Well, there are three reasons it takes so much time.

First, it takes time to become good at anything- you may have heard of the famous 10,000 hour rule, that you need about 10,000 hours to master a craft. That's 6 hours of intensive practice per day for 5 years. And as a researcher, one needs to master many skills- research design, research, writing, illustration, teaching, public speaking, networking, departmental politics. If you're not consistently in the lab practicing your chosen trade, you're not getting better.

Second, it takes a long time to build up a body of work, in terms of papers.

Third, with so many people graduating with PhDs, the bar has been raised both in terms of the quality and quantity of research. Someone who has worked 60 hours a week for 10 years has probably done more and better research over the course of 30,000 hours than someone who worked 40 hours a week in a 3-year European PhD over 60,000 hours (an important implication here is that you're not necessarily saving any time by going straight from undergrad to a PhD, or doing a short 3-year European PhD instead of a 5-6 year North American PhD- it just takes time, and you can't shortcut that). When it comes to job applications, the person who has done 30,000 hours probably has done a lot more and better stuff than the person who only did 6,000 hours. Its an arms race; people are far more educated than they were even 20 or 30 years ago, which means you have to work a lot harder to end up at the top of the field.

Maybe you look around and you see other students who aren't working that hard. But remember- most graduate students don't get jobs. 80% of UK PhDs have left research within 3 years of getting a PhD, and maybe half of those get a tenure-track job. You don't want to be average, you want to be in the top 10%. You want to be exceptional, literally, you want to be the exception. And it starts by working harder.

Consider the Navy SEALs for a moment. They are the guys who flew into Pakistan on stealth helicopters to kill Osama Bin Laden in the middle of the night. They're the guys who take on the Taliban and ISIS. They're trained for covert missions, night missions, underwater missions, demolitions. Basically, Sterling Archer. They are perhaps the most elite soldiers in the world, and their training course is grueling. A full 75%-80% of trainees fail the course every year. Whereas about 90% of PhDs fail to go on to a research job. It's arguably easier to pass the Navy SEAL exam than to become a tenure-track scientist.

Optimism isn't a viable strategy here. You need to carefully consider what makes the 10% different than the 90%. And luck is certainly part of it, but the nature of luck is that you cannot plan on being lucky. So you need to focus on the other stuff. It starts by showing up, but that's not enough.

2. Get S*** Done

Ultimately, it's not about input, it's about output. It starts with showing up, but if you're just wasting time on YouTube and getting and gossiping over coffee with your buddies and not actually producing anything, it doesn't matter how much time you're in the lab. So what does it mean to get s*** done? It means publications.

You've probably heard the cliche "publish or perish". It's a cliche for a reason, which is that it's true. Publications are what matters in science. A Wall Street investment banker measures success in dollars, a basketball player measures success in goals, we measure our success in terms of published research- the number of papers, the quality of the papers, and the number of citations. Publications are the primary determinant of who gets hired. TIt's not unusual for 100 people to apply for a fellowship or 50 people to apply for a job. To have even a chance of getting an interview, you have to have a good publication record. The PhD qualifies you to enter the competition, but nobody will ever read or cite your PhD. I advise students to treat the PhD as a formality, a hoop to jump through, and instead focus on producing papers.

You might be thinking, if output is what matters, and not input, couldn't I spend less time in the lab if I was more efficient? The issue here is that output is a product of efficiency x time. You need to be both highly efficient and to put in a lot of time to get stuff done.

3. Get the right s*** done.

I started out grad school by learning to do research. Then I learned to do good research. Then I learned to do important research.

The point being, it's not enough to just do research. Anyone can do mediocre, middle of the road research, and there's hardly a shortage of it. You have to do high-quality research. You have to do important research. In part, you need to be doing interesting, significant research to be competitive for grants and jobs. But perhaps more importantly, why would you want to waste your time doing projects that aren't either interesting, or important? Why not do great research, groundbreaking research, research that redefines the field?

So what is the right kind of research?

4. Find research you are passionate about

During graduate school, there was a fashion for a particular school of biomechanical research that involved sticking electrodes in animals and recording how their muscles fired as they moved. This, I was told, was good science, rigorous science, real science, not like the wishy-washy paleobiology that I'd gotten excited reading about in high school. This was the kind of stuff I wanted to do.

There was just one problem: it wasn't the kind of research I wanted to do, at all.

Partly I'm just too impatient to show up and teach a bird to walk on a treadmill every day. Partly, it just sounded boring. Partly it was the thought of performing surgery on a bird, getting it to do all this work for your research, and then as a reward, euthanizing the thing at the end of it. So I decided instead to pursue a more old-school approach to doing science. I shouldn't have gotten a job doing unfashionably old-school research. But here's the thing: I was driven to do that research. I enjoyed it. I stayed late at the lab, and worked in the evenings when I got home. I would have made a terrible biomechanist; by following what I was deeply interested in, and doing what I loved, I got really really good at it.

Another way of looking at it: science doesn't pay well and the job prospects are terrible. The only reason to do it is if you love it. If you're going to spend 60 hours a week doing something you hate, why not go into investment banking, and at least make money at it?

It's really hard to work 60 hours a week doing something you hate. But if it's something you love, you'll want to come in early and stay late and do the work on the weekend.

5. Play to your strengths

Everyone has different passions and different abilities. Some people are great analytical thinkers and love math and numbers. I'm terrible at math, but I like writing, drawing, studying fossils, so I tend to focus on more classic descriptive paleontology- finding new species, investigating their systematics, and that sort of thing.

It's like, if you're tall and skinny, try out for the basketball team. If you're short and stocky, try wrestling. Ironically, I actually did try to play basketball, when I had a stocky build, a tactical mind that would have been good in wrestling. hindsight is 20-20 I suppose. Anyway, the point being, each person has strengths and weaknesses. You need to be reasonably competent at a number of things (e.g. you cannot get away with being completely unable to do stats) but you can figure out where your strengths are, and focus on those.

6. Don't worry about getting the right answer. Focus on getting the right question.

Sun Tzu was a Chinese general from the Warring States period. Sun Tzu never lost a single battle. Envious, one of his colleagues challenged him.

"Are you really a great general, Sun Tzu?" he asked. "In the most recent battle, you fought against an enemy you outnumbered two-to-one. In the previous battle, you engaged a worn-out, demoralized army with a fresh, highly motivated army. In the battle before that, you had the advantage of the terrain and the weather."

"What's your point?" responded Sun Tzu.

"My point is, anyone could have won. Are you really a great general? You only fought easy battles."

"Exactly," replied Sun Tzu.

You need to pick your battles. Sun Tzu made the argument that being a highly skilled general didn't mean winning a fight against all odds, it meant choosing your battles carefully.

There's a similar principle in science. What I noticed reading papers as a graduate student is that some scientists fought easy battles- they seemed to have a knack for finding simple experiments that provided interesting results. What I realized is that it wasn't luck: they were just really good at picking questions. What sets the great scientists apart isn't their ability to solve problems, it's their ability to identify the questions to ask in the first place.

It's a bit like Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. The answer to Life, the Universe, and Everything is 42. That's the easy part. The hard part is figuring out what the question is.

7. Be self-interested, but not selfish

Hillel the Elder, a Jewish philosopher writing in the time of Jesus, said this:

"If I am not for myself, who will be for me?

But if I am for myself alone, what am I?"

Hillel's point is that we tread a narrow line. We have to look out for ourselves. If we don't, there's no guarantee anyone else world. The world can be a pretty cruel place. But if the only thing we do is look out for ourselves, our life is a mean, shallow thing. Human beings to a large degree find satisfaction through helping other people. Personally, I find Hillel's philosophy perhaps a little more realistic than that of Jesus.

Academia requires treading that line. You need to be phenomenally self-interested to succeed. You need to focus on getting yourself into a good school, getting funding, getting your work published, getting your name out there. You need to be extraordinarily self-interested to survive in a field where 10% of people get jobs. If you aren't pushing yourself forward, nobody else is going to.

At the same time, you cannot be selfish- only focused on yourself. Nobody wants to work with that person who only cares about their own career and their own self-interest. Nobody wants to hire that person. Nobody wants to promote that person.

Academia is about working with other people, and it requires a give and take. You need a lot of help from other people- your supervisor, your fellow students, your colleagues. That incurs a karmic debt. If you want other people to help you, then you need to help them in return. The most successful people are the ones who are effective not only at advancing their own careers, but who can at the same time advance all the people around them.

8. Leadership

Male chimpanzees are hunters, and when the alpha male kills a small mammal such as a bushbaby or an antelope, he does a very interesting thing. He tears the antelope into pieces, and then gives the pieces out to the other members of the tribe.

This is called leadership.

Acting with a sense of entitlement, conspicuously exerting dominance and barking orders isn't leadership. Real leadership is about working for the needs of the group. Leadership is ultimately an exercise not in looking out for oneself but in looking out for the group. It is unfortunately a surprisingly rare skill. For every real leader there are the narcissists who hunger for attention, the politicians who crave power and influence, the sociopaths who enjoy manipulation.

Ultimately, a position as a PI is as the head of a lab, and that means being a leader- looking out for your group and making sure their interests are taken care of. It's not an easy skill; far from it, it's one of the hardest things you can do, which is why it is such a valuable skill. The best way to learn this skill is by doing it- by mentoring younger students.

Leadership doesn't mean necessarily being the center of attention. Often it requires playing a behind-the-scenes role- quietly making things happen, facilitating, smoothing over conflicts, making helpful suggestions. Listening.

9. Humility and Pride

You have to be willing to admit you don't know everything, to admit that you're ignorant. The whole point of graduate school is that you're there to learn, after all. If you knew everything, why would you go? You have to be able to let go of your vanity.

I remember a lot of students from my grad school days who were insufferably arrogant. They thought they knew everything, and spent a lot of time putting everyone else down. They did well initially, but then something interesting happened. Their careers plateaued soon after their first job. They published a couple good papers, and then they just sort of settled down, and seemed to stop trying. The thing is, they knew they were so awesome, and everyone else was such crap... so why would they even need to try? And meanwhile, the field moved on, with important new discoveries and ideas, and they've been largely left behind. They spent all of their time trying to convince everyone, including themselves, that they were awesome, so they stopped actually trying to improve their game.

Vanity- excessive self-regard and self-obsesson- is toxic. But pride is important. You should be justifiably proud where you have accomplishments to be proud of. As they say, "it ain't bragging if you really done it". The trick is that if you want to feel proud, you should do something you can be proud of.

It's a careful balancing act. I think the Cat Poster in the Lego Movie sums it up best.

Remember what Vitruvius says ? "All anyone needs to do to be special, is to believe that you can be."

At first glance this seems like it's one of the worst excesses of the Self-Esteem movement which encourages children to believe that they are wonderful and special, no matter the evidence to the contrary. But it's not really a self-esteem statement. It's a statement of ambition. The Self-Esteem culture would have us believe that all we have to do to be special is to believe that we are. The point of the Lego Movie is that we need to believe that we can be. Not that we have arrived, but that we should try. Not that we are great, but that perhaps we can do something great. We need to be humble enough to admit that we aren't as good as we could be, and proud enough to admit that we could do better.

And if you haven't seen the Lego Movie, you should.

10. Listen, ask questions, and seek out mentors

The fool learns from his own experience, the wise man learns from the experience of others. Few lessons are learned as well as those learned the hard way, but it's an expensive way to learn. We need a certain number of those lessons- you don't really respect fire until you've been burned- but it's expensive to learn everything that way. A monkey watches another monkey get eaten by a snake, and he's can either go, "well, he got eaten by a snake, but I'm a really clever monkey, that doesn't apply to me," or he can go, "damn, I better stay away from snakes."

A typical PI typically has anywhere from ten to fifty years of experience; in a department with dozens of PIs, you are dealing with literally centuries of hard-won experience. They may not have dealt with the precise problem you are dealing with, but they have probably dealt with something similar.

That being said, you want to be careful who you ask for advice. You're much better off asking a postdoc for advice on grad school than a PhD student for example, because they've already been through it. And remember that most PhD students and a lot of postdocs don't get jobs. You want to find the people who are actually doing a good job, and doing what you'd like to do, and ask them.

Mentorship is particularly important. It's critical to seek out people to help guide you. Ideally this is your supervisor, but sometimes your supervisor can't provide what you need, but it's typical to have more than one person who helps guide you. Different mentors may serve different needs, or be able to advise you on different parts of your career.

11. Be Audacious

In Back to the Future, Marty is actually less impressed by the possibility of violating the laws of space and time than the means by which Doc Brown intends to do it, which is with a DeLorean sports car. "Doc," he says, "are you telling me you built a time machine out of a DeLorean?"

"Well," says Doc Brown, "the way I see it, if you're going to build a time machine, you might as well do it with some style".

I remember thinking that the decision by Peter and Rosemary Grant to study Galapagos finches to document evolution was simply brilliant. They could have chosen any animal they wanted, but they chose an iconic species. If any organism would do, why not one that is associated with the theory of evolution, in the place where the theory began? It got me thinking, if I am going to work on a fossil species, why not work on Archaeopteryx, one of the most iconic fossils in existence? Somebody has to work on it, why not me?

Why not do it with a little style, and a little audacity. Someone has to solve unsolvable problems, do great research, charge into the unknown, to take the initiative. You are someone.

12 Suck it up and Deal

I don't mean this in a callous, cruel sense. You are going to face adversity, things won't always go your way, some things will seem unfair, and some things will legitimately be unfair. I know this sucks, and I'm sorry it sucks. And it's called Life.

You will have your failures. But play a little cognitive behavioral therapy game here. Every failure is, in a way, an opportunity. If you trip, figure out why you tripped so you won't do it again. It is an opportunity to learn how to pull yourself back up again. If you deal with adversity with courage and grace, you will gain the respect of others. Deal with failure constructively.

Sometimes others will treat you unfairly. Where this reveals a genuine lack of character, you may want to deal with that accordingly. But people are also, well, people. Much as you have your bad days, and make mistakes, and are trying to get by as best you can, they are too. Consider this before being too certain that you are the unique and special subject of all the injustice in the world. And consider that you have probably treated people unfairly and made mistakes, and yet would hope others would forgive and tolerate you.

13 Failure is underrated

Failure sucks, but it's also part of learning. The head of IBM once said, the only reliable way to double your success rate is to double your failure rate. The only way to make discoveries is to try new things, which means you don't know if they'll work, which means a significant percent of the time.

When I went to university, it was with a bunch of overachievers who had all gotten straight As and high scores on the SAT. They'd spent their entire lives trying to never get a question wrong, all to get into the best school they could. But this kind of perfection can be paralyzing. When you spend all your time never trying to get a question wrong, never to get a B, never to get a college rejection letter, you start defining success in a really perverse way. All of a sudden, "success" means never getting anything wrong. And you're paralyzed by the fear of failure, of being seen as a failure. And you stop taking risks.

The problem is, you cannot really succeed if you don't fail. The only way to never fail is to never try. The only way to never be wrong is to never say anything interesting or novel. We need failure. It is the price we pay for success. We must write bad papers to learn to write good ones, and do failed experiments to find successes. I eventually failed out of my first PhD program, and it was devastating, but it was also liberating. Once you're at the bottom, there's nowhere to go but up. Once everyone thinks you're a loser, nothing you do can really harm their opinion of you. Once you've tasted failure, really tasted it, you stop wanting to succeed just to keep the failure away. You start wanting to succeed because you like the taste of success, and you know that success is something more than the absence of failure, and cannot really happen without it.

14. Don't f*** any sheep.

In a bar in a wee little town in the rainiest, dreariest part of Scotland, a man named MacGregor was well into his third pint. “Look at that house!," he said drunkenly, "I built that! Every nail, with my own two hands! I built all these houses you see! But do they call me MacGregor the house-builder? Nooooo!" he lamented. "Look at that bridge! I built every inch of that bridge, with my own two hands! But am I MacGregor the Bridge-Builder? Oh, noooh!! Now, look at that fence. I built that fence, and all the fences around here. But am I MacGregor the Fence Maker? Oh no! But, I tell you, you f*** one sheep…”

It’s a rude joke but there’s a pearl or two of wisdom in it, which is what makes it funny. First, you can do everything right and one sufficiently big mistake can undo everything. Make peace with failure, but understand that certain kinds of failure are survivable, whereas others can have severe and lasting consequences. Risk is not just a function of the probability of failure, but the consequences of that failure. You have good odds in Russian Roulette but the consequences are dire.

Second, people have a bias towards hearing negative information; it registers much more strongly than the positive. A reputation is an important thing, and you start developing it not once you’ve got your PhD, but the moment you start applying for graduate school and interacting with faculty and other prospective students, people who may go on to be your colleagues. People have long memories, and if a few years isn't that long. If you were an asshole or a pain in the ass in grad school, you can bet they'll remember it when you're a PhD or a postdoc.

15. Take care of yourself

Academics are like elite athletes, except instead of using muscles, we use the grey stuff inside our heads. And much as an athlete can stress and damage a muscle, a bone, or a joint, it is possible to injure your neurons.

These injuries manifest themselves as anxiety, sleep disruptions, and depressed mood. And much like an athlete needs to take care of an injured limb, you need to take care of hurt neurons. A critical thing to understand is that the brain-body dichotomy is bulls***. Your brain is an extension of your body; if your body is unhealthy, your brain will be too.

The first thing to do is exercise. Exercise is the single best thing you can do for anxiety, insomnia, and depressed mood- there are lots of scientific studies to this effect- it has no side effects, and you may lose some weight as well. Humans do not do well confined to a small box- even voluntarily- any more than a lion or a wildebeest would. Rats are provided with exercise wheels by law so that they can exercise. It's inhumane not to let them exercise- are you really not going to let yourself exercise? It may seem like you don't have time; the reality is, you can't afford not to do it.

Second, keep a regular sleep schedule. Much like light controls when flowers bloom, sleep-wake cycles control fundamental aspects of human physiology. Get up and go to bed at a consistent time. Insomnia can actually cause depression, and resolving it can help resolve mood issues.

Third, do something to relieve stress. Meditation is an effective stress-reducer and unfocused (mantra-based) meditation is especially effective in relaxing the body and calming negative thought processes. Yoga is another way to relieve stress.

Fourth, make sure to spend time with friends and family, and doing activities that you love.

Fifth, nutrition. Avoid refined sugar, eat whole foods, supplement with Omega 3, B and D vitamins, and zinc.

16. Don't let school get in the way of your education

School is good for a particular kind of learning, and books are a great way to learn things. But some lessons are best learned through experience; and insights can come from many places.

Read books, not just on science but on anything that catches your imagination. The key information you need to unlock unsolved puzzles is probably not in the journals in your discipline; if it was, someone would have already noticed. Do art, and be creative. People who do art and music and dance are far more likely to win Nobel prizes. Get some work experience, to learn how to work in a disciplined fashion, to work with a team, and to accomplish real-world tasks, no matter how mundane and boring.