Department resources
Classes
Just like with any degree, you will need to complete a certain number of courses each semester. And most likely you will have choices. All of your choices should be up in the department's website. If they are not, feel free to contact the program coordinator for your degree. Suggestions to choose classes:
- Choose classes that you are interested in, because motivation is key to get good grades.
- Choose classes that will challenge you and teach you new concepts. The idea is to broaden your training.
- Choose classes that have amazing professors. If you have the option, speak to older students that have taken that class and ask for their opinion.
Ethic courses
To become a great scientist, you need to know the ethics of science; what’s right and what’s wrong. Most likely your graduate program will require you to take an ethics course before you can graduate, but if you want to do that sooner rather than later, or if you want to expand on the ethics training that the department is offering you, check out ethics courses on campus. Maybe the Office of Research or maybe the Graduate Student Associations offer ethics courses that are free to you. In these courses they will teach you what constitute ethical scientific decisions involving plagiarism and conducting research, publishing research, and relationships with coworkers.
Diversity, equity, inclusion
An important part of living in communion with those around you, and an important part of being a professional scientist, collaborator and teacher is being able to respect everyone around you by who they are. Institutions typically are already aware of the benefits of having a diverse pool of students, faculty and staff, which means that hopefully your department will be rich in diversity; people from different countries, ethnicities, genders, religions and opinions. Such mixtures bring richness of ideas, creativity and open-mindedness to a workplace. This means that you have to be polite, nice, respectful and inclusive in your behavior around others, even if they are different from what you are used to. If you don’t know how to do this, or if you want to get better at it or learn more, your institution most likely has online resources dedicated to “Diversity and Inclusion”. If you can’t find them online, ask your administrative contact in your department.
Faculty committee
During the first year you will form a committee comprised of 3-5 faculty members that will evaluate your progress throughout your PhD journey.
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1. How to choose your committee:
- Talk with your advisor about what you're thinking and what they may be thinking for choices.
- Choose faculty members that are in your same field of study, so they know your research.
- Choose diversity: males, females, younger, older, and diverse in science (for example a statistician, a biologist, a chemist...)
- Read their bio and their publications, to become familiarized with their work, and to know if their research complements yours and if their expertise can help you.
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2. Once you have chosen a few candidates:
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- Send them an email.
- In this email, say that you're looking to assemble a committee, briefly explain what you do and why you think they would be a good fit, and ask if they would be willing to meet.
- Meet in person with each candidate. Prepare a short presentation with slides describing your research topic. Add in a slide that links your work to theirs or to their expertise, so the future committee member can see how they would be able to serve a purpose in your committee.
- In this meeting, assess their character. You will have to like them and they like you, so get a feeling for that in this meeting. In other words, see if you "click".
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3. Making your decision and forming your committee:
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- After you've met with the candidates, talked to your advisor about what you think of each of them, and made your decision on who you would like to be in your committee, then you have to make it formal. Ask your advisor or department what the official protocol is, it may be that you need to send an emai, it may be that you and every committee member fills out a form.
- Once you have your committee, you will be responsible for scheduling them in person at least twice in your PhD journey: once for your qualifying exams and at the end to give your final defense.
- Other than the in-person meetings, you may also be required to send a periodic email to your entire committee providing an update on where you are. Ask your department or advisor if that's what you're supposed to do.
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4. How does your committee serve you:
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- They advise you during your PhD. What move to make next. If you're ready to graduate. What classes to take or teach. Those are some examples of where your committee can help.
- They help you in specific research questions. If you have a problem you're stuck on, or a scientific problem you don't know how to solve, ask the committee member who is an expert in that field.
- They are a source of letters of recommendation. If you're applying for a fellowship or grant, or if you're gradauting and applying for a job, don't hesitate in asking them for a letter in your behalf.
- Depending on what relationship you have with your committee, you may also be able to go to them for personal advice.
Student handbook
When you join a department, one of the resources available to you is the student handbook. If the department doesn’t provide it to you, ask for it. Similarly, the institution may have a student handbook that you should check out. A student handbook is important to read because it contains information about your rights as a student, your obligations, how to behave, what are the expectations, what rules should you follow, what are the resources available, contact information, etc. When you are a new graduate student, knowing your department’s student handbook is especially important because it will provide some guidance for your graduate studies. For example, it is likely that you will have to be a teaching assistant at some point. The student handbook should detail if that’s the case, and when are you expected to teach. Also, you may or may not have any saying in what classes you’re going to teach, which should also say in the handbook. Another important piece of information will be when you’re expected to pass qualifying exams, what constitutes “pass” versus “failure”, if you would be able to get a second chance if you failed, etc. Finally, as the student handbook tends to be updated and it’s not written in stone, if you have suggestions to add or change, don’t hesitate in sharing them with the administration.
Relationships and professional conduct
It is important for you to realize that once you have been accepted into a PhD program, and more specifically, once you have been accepted into a professor’s group to do your dissertation research, you are an employee of the university and your immediate boss is the professor who mentors you. You are getting paid for your work.
Going into a PhD program is like signing a job contract, where your professor is your boss and you are the employee who will share office space with co-workers (you may share computers or benches at the lab, and your co-workers are the other students, post-doctoral researchers, and staff that the professor may have in their group).
Even if you see other graduate students who act more casually and less professionally with their boss and co-workers, that is dangerous behavior. The appropriate behavior is one where you are professional and you treat your boss like a superior. They are not your friend or someone you want to share drama or personal stories with (unless the personal stories are necessary to explain why you need to take several days off, for example).
You are not your own boss. You have to report to your boss in your working hours, what progress you’re making, and you have to get their permission if you want to take vacation.
Additionally, because you will be spending countless hours around your boss and co-workers, it is possible that you develop sentimental feelings for someone there. First off, those feelings can never be for your superiors or someone who is already married; that’s unprofessional, unethical and immoral. Don’t have a romantic relationship with your boss. If they are the ones making moves, insinuating or being unprofessional, report them. That may be sexual harassment. Nobody should be talking to you about your looks, your smell, your clothing (unless any of it is inappropriate and unprofessional and you have to change it).
Similarly, your private life should be kept mostly private, and the same for the private lives of others. Otherwise you are spreading gossip and drama, which is unprofessional. Conversations at the workplace should be professional and about work.
Of course, as professional relationships develop, personal ones (but not intimate ones) may too. In other words, you may become friends with those around you, and that is good and advisable. What’s not good is to have romantic relationships: never with your boss or superior, and better if not with a co-worker or peer at your same level (e.g. another graduate student or a post-doctoral researcher who is single). Those are not immoral, but they could make your professional life more difficult if the relationship went sour.
The best recipe for success during your PhD is to have a clear mind and a drama-free environment. Avoiding romantic relationships with co-workers (especially those in your same PhD lab or group) also shields you from potential future heart-breaks and unnecessary complications that can be very detrimental to your focus and progress.
Also, conduct yourself professionally; your boss is not your friend or your lover, and keep conversations in the workplace work-related to avoid drama and respect those around you. Finally, know what sexual harassment entails (your department and institution have rules on this that you can look up) so that if you are a victim or a bystander of potential sexual harrasment behaviors, you can report them.
Getting help
The department staff are there to help you. It is in the Department’s interest that you succeed, because then they succeed. When grad students successfully pass their qualifying exams, defend their dissertations, and get jobs after their PhD, the Department looks better and ranks better. Not only they will be more attractive to future students, but good faculty will want to come there, and they will also have better chances at getting Government funding. What does this mean for you? It means that you should not feel bad about asking for help, as long as you do it politely and in moderation. If you have questions or concerns, if you are confused about the first few months, if you feel overwhelmed, let your program coordinator know. This is typically the person who you were in touch with during recruitment, but it could also be a faculty member that they appointed to help guide new students. They will typically let you know. It’s a good idea for you to meet with this person if they offer to help, so that you share how its going for you and convey any concerns that you may have.
Journal club and seminar
Almost every department has a weekly journal club and/or seminar. These are events where all students and faculty come together to hear about what others in the department are doing. Then, on a separate weekly event, there will most likely also be a seminar to hear about the research from an outsider. An hour a week each; two hours a week in total.
You will be expected to attend each of these events, even if they are technically not mandatory. Don't expect all faculty to be there every time, but even if your mentor doesn't attend, you have to, because the few faculty that do go every time are paying attention of who goes and who doesn't. And because they want good attendance, chances are that attendance is mandatory and recorded in a sign up sheet.
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More than attending, you should be paying attention to the speaker and thinking about questions to ask at the end of the talk. Asking questions puts you on the map, so that the rest of the department knows who you are, and it also shows that you are a thinker and a colleague because you are engaged in questions. And if the questions are helpful to the speaker, then that speaker will also be thankful because you helped advance their research.
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Finally, there will be the day when you too have you go in front of the entire department and talk about your research. It's a nerve-wracking day for any student, which is why when you are in the audience you have to be empathetic and put yourself on the speaker's shoes and your questions and comments should all be constructive instead of destructive.
Networking and socializing
Science is a collaborative world. As scientists, we advance research when we work together. Collaborative researchers grow their science faster and have more resulting publications and contacts for when they graduate.
You are not meant to go through your PhD alone, and your department doesn't want you to retract and hide in the lab; they want you to be present, seen, and participating in events.
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Most likely there will be department happy hours (when they go to a bar after work), or gatherings of other nature. You should attend these regularly. Your experiments can wait for an hour. You don't have to eat, drink or spend money; just being there and talking to people is a great way of networking.
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Networking, when you introduce yourself to different people and build your network of connections, is super important. Humans are social animals that thrive from conversation, laughter and fellowship. Interacting with others builds friendship, may derive research ideas you hadn't thought of, and can open doors for you in the future that you had never thought of (for example, employment, grants, and other opportunities).
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To build relationships, start with your student peers in your department. Every one in your year is new, likely doesn't know anyone, and welcomes friendship. Reach out to them instead of waiting for them to reach out to you, and organize a weekly lunch or one other hour per week that forces you to get together with your peers.
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If you are the extrover type, gather the email of every student in your cohort, create an email group or text group, and email/text the entire group organizing a get-together every friday evening (or weekend) at a bar or somewhere else where everyone can meet up and spend a couple of hours destressing from the week. If you start this routine immediately, when you don't have that much work and are not expected that much from the department because you're "just" a first year student, then the routine will be in place and it will be easier for people to make a habit of coming together.
Program coordinator
A program coordinator is like a secreatary for the department or the research group. Is a person who coordinates events, grants, schedules, trips, and more. This is a person you can go to for general advice and help of the non-scientific nature, because the department chair or the principal investigator are too busy. Examples of things the program coordinator is responsible for are scheduling lab meeting, organizing trips of the scientific nature (e.g. retreats, scientic conferences), budgeting and keeping tabs of finances, ordering supplies, submitting grants, keeping everyone's information up to date, etc.
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For any of these things, or anything else you can think of that is not direct scientific advice, don't hesitate to reach out to the program coordinator for help.
Vendor shows
One of the arguably best days in a graduate student's life is when there is a vendor show in your building. This is when a vendor of scientific equipment comes to try to advertise their products to the labs and make sales. And to entice people and get a bigger crowd, they usually have free food. This can be candy, snacks, or a full meal (like salads and sandwiches). This is free food! But they won't give it away so easily, you may be required to provide your email address, fill a questionnaire, or something similar. But you don't have to buy anything and there are no commitments. The best strategy is to see if the lab technician(s) in your lab or neighboring labs are interested in seeing some products and if they are going to the vendor show, you can tag along and get that free food.