Do you remember the adjustment you had to make when you left high school and arrived in first year undergraduate studies? No-one took attendance, no-one called you if you missed a mid-term, and your marks were reported to you, not your parents.  It took some adjustment, as you left behind a system you knew and were let loose at your own responsibility.

Graduate studies is a change like that, and as big. You may have courses for a year or two, in grad school, but they’re less about your broad education and more about specific training you need for the research you will take on. Gone is the structure of due-dates for assignments, the posed challenge of pre-cooked questions from midterm tests or final exams, the need only to respond to what is set for you. In your MSc program, your supervisor probably will lead you along, and likely even give you a project to try, but soon for your PhD you should be asking and answering your own questions while operating under the umbrella of your PhD supervisor, and probably in a close or perhaps diffuse team of other graduate students at different stages of their ambitions. It’s your PhD, but very likely you will be collaborating with others whose own progress depend on yours, and you won’t really be welcome to opt to ‘take a B’.

Probably every supervisor has had the experience of setting goals for the team, giving a particular assignment to a new student to find an answer for an important question, in the laboratory or in library research, and having that student come back in a few days asking “here’s what I found -- is it right?”. Maybe the supervisor answered “I don’t know the answer, and I don’t know if yours is right -- your job is to figure it out, and come back ready to explain and defend your conclusion.”  That’s the basic business of science, and a big difference from undergraduate experience.  In that sense, you’re not a ‘student’ any more, you’re a practicing scientist, Junior Grade, and you’re apprenticing both to your supervisor and to the advanced members in the group, such as postdocs.

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Last update : 2015 June

©RSMarjoribanks 2015