Excellent Advice for Prospective Grad Students

As prospective grad student myself, I read with great interest Sean’s post offering advice on how to be a good one.

If I had to concentrate on a single useful piece of advice for grad students, it would be: Take the initiative. The deep truth of grad school is that the transition from undergrad to grad is when you go from primarily being “a student” to primarily being “a scientist.” As a student, your primary responsibility was to do what your professors told you to. As a scientist, your primary responsibility is to do good science. Many students struggle in grad school, especially in the early years, because they are implicitly waiting to be told what to do. Don’t wait — try to figure out what you should be doing, and do it. (Full Post)

I’ve noticed that among the Postdocs hired by HAO, the ones that went on to make real names for themselves were the ones deeply engrossed in their work, knew the right questions to ask, and actually completed things. These were definitely self-motivated individuals and often served as catalysts for new areas of research not previously considered before at NCAR.

I also read Sean’s post about how to get into grad school. This post was of more immediate interest to me because I’m about to start submitting applications. I’m very concerned about the GRE’s, particularly the Physics GRE. It’s been a few years since I’ve graduated with my BA and reviewing and then being tested on my entire undergraduate physics education is more than a little daunting to me.

In response to the question, Are GRE scores important? Sean writes:

Yes. At least, in the following sense: while bad GRE’s won’t kill your chances, good GRE’s make it much easier to admit you. (We’re speaking of the Physics GRE, of course; the general tests are completely irrelevant.) It stands to reason: given two applicants from similar schools with similar grades and interests, there’s no reason for a department to choose the student with lower GRE scores. At the same time, you can certainly overcome sub-par GRE’s by being outstanding in other areas; this is particularly true for students who want to do experiment. I know at Chicago that we let in students with quite a range of scores. (Full Post)

I guess this is some comfort. I’m pretty sure I won’t score among the highest percentage when I take the test, if for no other reason than it’s been so long since I’ve been exposed to many physics concepts that lie outside my areas of expertise.

I disagree that the general GRE is completely irrelevant, that test provides a good indicator of a student’s ability to express themselves and communicate effectively. These are very important skills for a scientist, and I believe many departments look at them for indications of such skills.

The good news, at least for me, is that I have extensive research experience with my work at HAO and I’ve been co-author on many papers and first author on one.

Also in my favor is I want to be an experimentalist. I’ve written before about this, and Sean’s post supports me, we need more experimentalist, and not so many modelers and theoreticians:

Because a lot of undergrads haven’t been exposed to a wide range of physics research, a large number of them want to be Richard Feynman or Stephen Hawking or Ed Witten. Which is great, since we need more people like that. But even more, we need really good experimenters. Generally the ratio of applicants to available slots is appreciably larger for theorists than for experimenters, and schools do take this into account. Also, of course, the standards are a little different: GRE’s count more for prospective theorists, and research experience counts more for prospective experimenters. And let’s be honest: many schools will accept more prospective theorists than they can possible find advisors for, in the hopes of steering them into experiment once they arrive. (Full post)

See? We need more data, not more models.

I take some comfort from the idea that I’ll may be judged more on my experience than my test scores, although I’m still stressing about the tests.

I feel much more confident about my ability to do well with the General GRE, I’ll begin by taking that in a few weeks. I’ll let you know how it goes.

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