Blogs / Cosmic Variance

After wading through a mile-high stack of applications for an open faculty position at UW a few years ago, I compiled a list of tips for postdocs hoping to make the transition to the faculty level. I’m therefore barging into Sean’s Unsolicited Advice series with advice for the later stages, completely screwing up his numerical order in the process (sorry Sean!). This advice is undoubtedly biased towards those applying to research oriented universities, rather than to smaller liberal arts colleges with a stronger emphasis on teaching. I also am in a pure astronomy department, and can’t say for sure whether the physicists have some more involved series of secret handshakes and passwords that they use to evaluate candidates. You’ll therefore have to cherry pick the advice as needed. Hopefully others can weigh in on comments to bring a different perspective. Let’s begin!

Read the job description!

Very rarely do departments conduct truly open searches. Instead, they are usually trying to fill some current need in their department, whether it’s finding someone to teach a particular graduate course, to expand into a new research direction, or to build strength in a specific subfield. They will usually try to make this clear in the advertisement. If you do not fit the description, you need to explicitly address that fact in your application (usually in the cover letter, but also in your research statement as well). For example “Although my past research has been focused primarily on predicting the gravitational radiation signatures of colliding black holes, it has a natural outgrowth into the generic physics of compact objects” or “While I’m known for my work on galactic dynamics, I have published several papers on barium abundances in K-giants.” It’s OK to apply for jobs for which you are not a perfect fit, as long as you explain why you think they should still take a look at you. Also don’t self-select out if you’re not a perfect match to the ad. Like the lottery, you can’t win if you don’t play.

Remember that it’s a job, not a prize.

Many postdoctoral positions are “prize fellowships” that go to the applicant with the most scientific promise and/or the strongest record. Faculty positions are different. They are jobs. There is work involved, and the department is looking to bring in someone who can do that work. They are not passing out an award to you for being smart. If there will be teaching involved, you need to discuss your teaching record and philosophy explicitly. What graduate courses could you teach? Would you be comfortable teaching large introductory courses? Do you think you’ll be a good mentor for students? If there are large department projects underway (i.e. new facilities or initiatives), discuss the role you will play in shepherding those projects.

Understand the institution.

It’s remarkable how many applications we get that clearly have no understanding of our institution. They don’t know who’s on the faculty, what research is done here, or what facilities we have. If you’re applying to a small liberal arts teaching college, you shouldn’t be discussing how you look forward to working with grad students. If your work absolutely requires the world’s largest telescopes, and you’re applying to a place that doesn’t have one, you had better explain why you think that will be just fine with you. Otherwise, you look unserious about the position, which makes you look immature, and unready for the larger responsibilities of being a faculty member. Departments love to hire grownups!

Don’t write more than a 3-4 page research statement.

Why? Because I’m reading 99 other applications and have better things to do then read a 20 page review article. And don’t try to dodge this advice by using a tiny font. I will not be fooled, and will instead be annoyed.

Look to the future.

Unless you’ve applied to a place with a poor record of tenuring assistant professors, you may be at the institution for decades, and they’re going to want to know what you’re thinking about doing in the next five years. More of the same? Branching into new directions? Switching wavelength regimes? We’re not after a detailed plan for the next six months, but a brief general discussion of where you think your research is heading.

Know your weakness, and fix it.

If you’re not getting on short lists after a few years of trying, there’s a reason. Find out what that reason is, and fix it before the next round of applications are due. You need to take a cold hard critical assessment of yourself as a scientist and colleague. Compare your record to those of the people who are getting on the short lists. Are you not publishing enough? If not, then stop traveling or writing proposals and write something up instead. Are your papers not getting cited (hint: you’re working on stuff that people find uninteresting)? If not, then you need to work on something that will actively shape the larger scientific discussion, rather than working on something that is decades ahead of its time, that will get scooped by someone else who has better data and works faster than you, or that just cleans up a few details of little general interest. Alternatively, if you haven’t been traveling at all, you need to go give some good talks at major meetings and drum up some interest. Do you have a larger vision? If not, you need to step back from your little piece of the puzzle and figure out what the big problem is you’re trying to address, and then reassess if you’re taking the right step to answer it — avoiding the old chestnut that “when all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail”. Do you communicate well? If responses to your talks seem lukewarm, you need to learn how to give more engaging informative talks. Practice them in front of grad students. Practice them in front of someone who you trust to give you the truth. Which brings us to…

Give good talks.

Anyone who is personally known to someone on the committee has a real leg up. “Oh yeah, I saw her give a great talk in Victoria!” goes a long way to getting your application an extra look. The flip side is that you really can’t afford to give a bad talk at this stage of your career. If all someone remembers is that they fell asleep during your talk, it’s not going to help you. Since teaching is an essential part of being a faculty member, bad talks will kill you. Don’t write your talk the night before, no matter how much other stuff you have to do. If you have been lacking opportunities to give talks (i.e. you’re not being invited to give colloquia, and keep getting assigned posters at conferences), get some help from any senior person you see as a mentor (and also re-evaluate your research choices and your speaking skills!).

Don’t neglect the cover letter.

The cover letter is the opportunity to frame your role in the department. Who do you see yourself working with? What big projects/facilities at the department interest you? What can you offer the department to make it a better institution?

Make your CV easy to interpret.

Separate refereed and unrefereed papers. Put your name in bold-face in all author lists. Include the titles of your papers. A nice layout and scrupulous avoidance of typos keep you from looking sloppy.

If you don’t get the job, sometimes it’s not you.

Sometimes there is absolutely nothing you could have done to get a particular job, short of having an entire personality/interest transplant. Sometimes a department needs a big scientific presence to shake things up, and if you’re a more careful deep thinker, you’re just not going to fit the mold. Sometimes they need a generous mentoring presence, and if you’re an energetic mover on the national scene, you’re not going to get the job. Sometimes they really really really really need someone to work on star formation, and you don’t. You may be demographically wrong — too fresh out of grad school, or too senior for a greying department. So, don’t take it too personally if you don’t get a specific position. However, don’t use this fact as too much of an excuse if you never get on short lists, and instead go back to the advice above.

Decide if you really want a faculty job in the first place.

Being a faculty member is not the only way to be a scientist. There are many jobs out there that don’t require worrying through another 6 years of uncertainty, dealing with hordes of sometimes mathematically illiterate 18-year olds, struggling for grants and putting up with the psychoses of other faculty. Take a good hard look at Rate Your Students first and decide if this is really for you. Just because being a faculty member seems like the obvious next step, it isn’t always the best step for you. Don’t be afraid to send out a round of “real world” applications at the same time and see what alternate paths are available.

UPDATE: Doug Natelson weighs in in the comments with a link to a parallel physics-oriented post on his blog.

Past installments of Unsolicited Advice dealt with such mechanical topics as how to choose an undergraduate school or graduate school, or how to get into graduate school. (Hell if I know how to get into undergraduate schools.) Now we step fearlessly into somewhat more treacherous territory: how to be a good graduate student. As always, this is one idiosyncratic viewpoint, and others should be offered in the comments.

It’s treacherous, of course, because there is certainly no right way to go about being a good graduate student. Once upon a time, as part of my ongoing campaign to discredit the notion of make-or-break general exams, I had the physics department at Chicago do a survey of their faculty, asking them to give a subjective rating of all the Ph.D. students who had graduated in the last five years (and with whose work they were familiar). We then plotted the resulting scores against how well they did on the candidacy exam. Result: there was a small handful of students who completely dominated on the exam, and were pretty much recognized as excellent physicists, clustered in the corner. Other than that, a complete scatterplot — there was no correlation between test scores and success in physics (among this highly-selected sample). But if you plotted candidacy-exam scores against incoming physics GRE scores, it was almost a perfect correlation. There are some students who are the kind who are really good at physics in an exam-type environment, and who have the ability to carry through that talent to actually doing research. But there are others who struggle with the tests, yet nevertheless are great physicists. And vice-versa: you can be a crappy physicist, whether or not you do well at the GRE’s and general exams.

The point being, there are many ways to be a successful physicist, and a corresponding number of ways to be a successful grad student. So the first piece of advice, possibly too vague to be useful, is: Look to maximize your talents. Typically, your first year or two in grad school you have some flexibility. You’re taking classes (this is written from an American perspective, sorry), and possibly also doing research, but you haven’t necessarily been tied down to a final choice of thesis advisor, or even research field, or even theory vs. experiment. This would be a good time to be honest with yourself — what are you really good at? You might have had your heart set on building the next great particle accelerator ever since you deconstructed your parents’ stereo when you were twelve, but when someone puts a soldering iron in your hand you just can’t seem to stop breaking things. But you did get a perfect score on the GRE. Well, maybe it’s time to face the music and switch to string theory.

But I’m burying the lede here. 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. Check the arxiv in the morning to look for interesting papers. Go to colloquia and seminars, even if you don’t understand them — nobody really understands them, and it’s the best way to get a feeling for what those things are that you should be working toward understanding. Talk to people! Knock on professors’ doors (or, more politely, email them to make an appointment), and chat with them about what they are doing and what you might like to be doing. Even better, talk to senior grad students and — best of all — postdocs! They have more time than professors, and have a better understanding of the situation you are in right now. (When it comes time to apply for postdocs yourself, you’re going to need three letters of recommendation from scientists who know you and your work very well. If you can only think of one or two people who might qualify, you’ve badly mismanaged your time in grad school.) Come up with ideas! A good advisor will set you on a productive path for your first research projects, but that’s no reason why you shouldn’t also be trying to come up with good ideas yourself; at some point that’s going to be your job, after all. And when it comes to the nitty-gritty of actually doing research, whether it’s theory or experiment, don’t expect anyone to hold your hand at every step — use your brain to try to figure out what should be done next. At some point you will sit back and realize that it’s kind of fun. And then it will dawn on you that you’ve passed the threshold toward which you’ve been progressing for quite a number of years — you’re an honest-to-goodness scientist.

We can’t pretend, of course, that being a scientist is just a matter of willpower; you do have to learn some stuff. One of the eternal grad-school dilemmas is how many courses you should take, vs. how quickly you should just devote yourself to doing research. I’m going to have to be wishy-washy here, as there is no right answer, although it’s certainly possible to go too far in either direction. If you dive into doing research without having a proper grounding in coursework, you can end up being an expert in the one particular hyper-specialized thing that you are researching, but be left with a rather fuzzy grasp of all the rest of physics. Not only does a situation like that doom you to a lifetime of sitting in on talks that you don’t understand, but it might prevent you from making crucial connections that would actually be useful in your own work. But contrariwise, it’s certainly possible to spend too much of your time taking classes. Classwork is what you have trained to be good at, and in some ways it’s a comforting environment. But it’s ultimately not the point of why you are in grad school. Likewise, sometimes you will really want to learn some particular subject, but your department doesn’t offer a course in it. Here’s where you should figure out that it’s your responsibility to teach it to yourself. Especially these days, when there are not only five good textbooks but countless reviews on every subject available online, there’s no excuse for waiting for a teacher to come along — see the previous paragraph.

Even once you get past courses and are unambiguously doing research, a similar dilemma presents itself — calculating vs. contemplating. (That would be the theorist’s version of the dilemma, anyway; experimenters are invited to suggest alliterative formulations of “tinkering vs. collecting data.”) Being a scientist is a back-and-forth process, between on the one hand looking at the big picture, learning the basics, thinking deeply, coming up with new ideas, and on the other hand digging into the details, getting your hands dirty, and actually coming up with some tangible results. Science depends on both, although many people are happier on one side than the other. Despite what was said earlier about finding your strengths, here’s a situation where you should make an extra effort to compensate for your weaknesses. You might be someone who loves doing calculations, producing page after page of equations, or file after file of simulation output. But if they don’t add up to an interesting result, people aren’t going to care that much. Or you might have deep and creative ideas about the nature of space and time or high-temperature superconductivity. But if you can’t wrestle those ideas down to some specific calculations, your colleagues aren’t going to be all that impressed. Sometimes, remember, the best ideas actually come about because you are simply fooling around with some calculations for their own sake.

All of this has been necessarily vague, in accordance with the fact that there are many good ways to be a successful grad student. But at the end, the goal (for most people) is pretty concrete: to land a good postdoc. Do keep that in mind. So, no matter what your individual approach to success is, here is the eyes-on-the-prize advice: Be the kind of grad student that people would like to hire as a postdoc. What kind of student is that? Well, just ask yourself what you would be looking for, if you had a pile of promising postdoc applications in front of you. Some people are lucky enough to get general-purpose fellowships that are based simply on their genius; so if the genius thing is working for you, great. More postdocs are hired by some particular person or group, to perform some fairly well-defined kind of research. What those people are looking for is a postdoc who will contribute to their group, whether by being an awesome individual researcher, or by being a useful collaborator. So, be that person. While you’re in grad school, establish a track record of productivity by writing papers. Even better, write good papers — write about things that other people are interested in. What is it about your research or skill set that makes you useful to people hiring postdocs? Become the world’s expert in some hot topic, or the master of some novel technique, along with establishing your broad-based competence. A good postdoc is expected to enliven a research group by being plugged into all the latest good stuff going on in the field, bubbling with new ideas and the energy and know-how to turn those ideas into tangible results. That should be you.

(Certainly, not everyone will become a postdoc, nor should they. One of my best students didn’t even apply for postdocs, after he determined it just wasn’t for him. There are many other directions in which to steer your career after a successful time in grad school, and it pays to keep those possibilities in the back of your mind all along. But I’m not really the one to ask about them.)

To be more concrete yet: Be a finisher. After several years of grad school, what do you have to show for it? Write papers, do analyses, build equipment, finish experiments. Demonstrate beyond any doubt that you can take the project from beginning to end, not just sit around the coffee room and lob probing questions. Give talks! Have something to say, and be confident that other people want to hear it. I’ve actually heard some students say that they love science, but don’t like writing papers or giving talks. That’s like saying you love being a butcher, just aren’t very fond of cutting up animals. (Suggestions for more illuminating similes are welcome.) Writing papers and giving talks is the entire point of what you are doing. Be enthusiastic about it, and while you’re at it, be good at it. There are so many smart people out there who write impenetrable papers or give incomprehensible talks, one good way to distinguish yourself from the herd is to learn to communicate effectively. But it won’t help unless you have something tangible to communicate.

September has long been my favorite month of the year, as campuses come to life with the incoming students, many of them starting off on a new adventure of one sort or another. Go get ‘em, tiger.

Update: Many other people, of course, have offered advice on how to be a good grad student. If you know of any, mention them in the comments and I’ll link from here.

• Total Drek
• Marie desJardins

Believe me, I sympathize. You are in possession of a truly incredible breakthrough that offers the prospect of changing the very face of science as we know it, if not more. The only problem is, you’re coming at things from an unorthodox perspective. Maybe your findings don’t fit comfortably with people’s preconceived notions, or maybe you don’t have the elaborate academic credentials that established scientists take for granted. Perhaps you have been able to construct a machine that produces more energy than it consumes, using only common household implements; or maybe you’ve discovered a hidden pattern within the Fibonacci sequence that accurately predicts the weight that a top quark would experience on Ganymede, expressed in femtonewtons; or it might be that you’ve elaborated upon an alternative explanation for the evolution of life on Earth that augments natural selection by unspecified interventions from a vaguely-defined higher power. Whatever the specifics, the point is that certain kinds of breakthroughs just aren’t going to come from a hide-bound scholastic establishment; they require the fresh perspective and beginner’s mind that only an outsider genius (such as yourself) can bring to the table.

Yet, even though science is supposed to be about being open-minded, and there’s so much that we don’t understand about how the universe works, it’s still hard for outsiders to be taken seriously. Instead, you run up against stuffy attitudes like this:

If there are any new Einsteins out there with a correct theory of everything all LaTeXed up, they should feel quite willing to ask me for an endorsement for the arxiv; I’d be happy to bask in the reflected glory and earn a footnote in their triumphant autobiography. More likely, however, they will just send their paper to Physical Review, where it will be accepted and published, and they will become famous without my help.

If, on the other hand, there is anyone out there who thinks they are the next Einstein, but really they are just a crackpot, don’t bother; I get things like that all the time. Sadly, the real next-Einsteins only come along once per century, whereas the crackpots are far too common.

And that last part is sadly true. There is a numbers game that is working against you. You are not the only person from an alternative perspective who purports to have a dramatic new finding, and here you are asking established scientists to take time out from conventional research to sit down and examine your claims in detail. Of course, we know that you really do have a breakthrough in your hands, while those people are just crackpots. But how do you convince everyone else? All you want is a fair hearing.

Scientists can’t possibly pay equal attention to every conceivable hypothesis, they would literally never do anything else. Whether explicitly or not, they typically apply a Bayesian prior to the claims that are put before them. Purported breakthroughs are not all treated equally; if something runs up against their pre-existing notions of how the universe works, they are much less likely to pay it any attention. So what does it take for the truly important discoveries to get taken seriously?

Happily, we are here to help. It would be a shame if the correct theory to explain away dark matter or account for the origin of life were developed by someone without a conventional academic position, who didn’t really take a lot of science classes in college and didn’t have a great math background but was always interested in the big questions, only for that theory to be neglected because of some churlish prejudice. So we would like to present a simple checklist of things that alternative scientists should do in order to get taken seriously by the Man. And the good news is, it’s only three items! How hard can that be, really? True, each of the items might require a nontrivial amount of work to overcome. Hey, nobody ever said that being a lonely genius was easy.

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I have been reading with some interest the comments section of Sean’s recent post about blogging during the tenure process, and that of Rob Knop’s original post that prompted Sean’s observations. The specific topic of blogging while under scrutiny is something about which I think sensible guidelines are rather obvious – one may violate them at will, and such violations can make for wonderful voyeurism, but the consequences are clear and not necessarily unreasonable. However, what grabbed my interest most is the general sentiment that academia is broken and that the tenure process, and the requirements and guidelines that most institutions follow, are scandalously unjust. This also came up in another recent thread.

It is most certainly true that there are well-known examples in which the tenure process fails spectacularly – I know some of these extremely well. It is also true that some of the victims of failed tenure processes have blogged eloquently about the failings of the system, and, in general, I have no reason to doubt the facts in their individual cases. However, what one sees less often are descriptions of the well-executed tenure and promotion procedures that account for, in my experience, the vast, vast majority of cases.

Obviously, I cannot speak with authority or experience about all academic subjects, or absolutely all universities. However, I have spent a great deal of time at many different institutions, and have collaborators, colleagues and friends at an even larger number (I will generally not name institutions, for a reason.) Let me make it crystal clear in advance that I in no way wish to detract from the personal misery that many clearly talented people have described – I have close personal friends who have been or are in this boat. I merely think it might be useful to provide some balance.

So how is tenure supposed to work?
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In comments, JMG3Y asks, “Where should a smart science-oriented high school student with a breadth of interests go to college?” This deserves a much more careful answer, but time is precious, so consider this a rough draft of an answer, which people are welcome to amplify in the comments. (Past installments here and here. At some future date there will be an installment on “How to be a good graduate student.”)

In reality, colleges and universities are very different from each other, and each should be considered separately. Also in reality, any such institution is huge and multifaceted, and two people can have wildly divergent experiences at the same place. Furthermore, sticking again to reality, this is a question that depends mostly on the individual student, and for which there is no right answer. Being all that as it may, for purposes of exposition let’s lump the possibilities into four categories:

1. Liberal-Arts College (LAC), such as Swarthmore or Amherst.
2. Specialized Technical School (STS), such as MIT or Caltech.
3. Elite Private University (EPU), such as Harvard or Stanford.
4. Large State School (LSS), such as UCLA or Michigan.

These are fuzzy and incomplete categories, of course, but hopefully the ideas will come across clearly enough.

At an LAC or STS, you will be forced to learn a lot, like it or not. I’m a big fan of LAC’s; the professors are typically talented and dedicated to teaching, and students get invaluable up-close-and-personal time with the faculty. But for people who want to go to grad school, they face something of a disadvantage because the these schools typically won’t have graduate programs. That means (1) you can’t take any grad classes, and (2) you can’t buttonhole grad students about advice for the next step. I went to one, and received a great education, but keenly felt those disadvantages.

The STS’s are also great (I work at one now). Your fellow students will be interested in similar things, and the coursework will challenge you. There will be plenty of opportunities for research experience, rubbing elbows with grad students and postdocs doing work at the forefront of science. Both MIT and Caltech have a feeling at being at the center of the scientific universe. Of course, they generally won’t give you a broader academic experience, if that’s what you’re after. For me personally, one of the best parts of being an undergraduate was being exposed to ideas in the arts and humanities (and people, both faculty and students, in those areas) that I never would have experienced otherwise.

At an EPU or LSS, it’s generally much easier to slide by without stretching yourself, if that’s your thing; on the other hand, the resources are tremendous, and if you have the initiative to take advantage of them, you can have a great experience.

The best thing about an EPU is the other students. So much so, that at a place like Harvard it’s generally acknowledged that a large fraction of your education comes from extracurricular activities. You’ll meet people, in your field and out, who will be running the world a few years down the line. The professors will be great researchers who may or may not be interested in teaching; there will likely be some opportunities for research and individual contact, but not all that much.

An LSS will also have great resources, in terms of faculty and research opportunities. There might be more close contact with professors than at an EPU, but that’s quite a generalization. Your fellow students will be more of a mixed bag; some will be geniuses and future world-changers, while many will be there to tread water for four years to get a degree. Of all the choices, the education you get at a large state school will depend the most on your own initiative; the school will almost certainly have more to offer than you possibly have time to take advantage of, but nobody will force you to do any of it.

For the particular goal of advancing to grad school, there are certain specialized factors to keep in mind. Having grad students around to ask questions to is certainly helpful. The choice of undergrad advisor is also important, I suppose, but depends much more on individuals than on schools, so I don’t know what to say there. It’s important to get some research experience, but this can often be done off-campus at other places during the summer (see the NSF Research Experience for Undergraduates and similar programs). Getting good letters of recommendation is certainly helpful — for that, it’s less important where you are, and more important that people there know you well enough to write sensible letters. When it comes to actually applying to grad schools and making choices, it’s nice to get advice from people who know what they’re talking about; don’t be afraid to ask around.

Perhaps my own perspective on this kind of question is coming through clearly enough: wherever you go, your educational experience can vary wildly depending on how much you put into it. If you stick to what’s required, slide through with just enough work to get whatever GPA you’re aiming for, and spend the rest of your time playing video games, you’ll manage not to get much out of it no matter where you are. If you seek out new and challenging courses and activities, spend your summers doing research or interesting off-campus activities, and make an effort to talk individually to your best professors and hang out with other students who enjoy ideas, it will be an invaluable experience.

If you ask most 40-something professors what they would think of going back to school for four years, to do nothing but take interesting courses and discuss deep ideas with their friends, their eyes would light up with unvarnished pleasure at the prospect. Whatever you’re studying, college is a unique opportunity to stretch your mind; make the most of it.

In the course of a long life, you’re going to get asked to recommend a good book to read. What should you say? Of course a sensible answer depends on who is asking, but we don’t know that, so let’s limit ourselves to books that tickle our own fancies. And we can assume, given the high-powered sophistication of this here blog you’re reading, that The Da Vinci Code won’t be first on your list. In fact, let’s also assume that you wouldn’t suggest Pride and Prejudice or Ulysses, as the idea is to make suggestions that your interlocutor may not actually have heard of.

So here’s my list — five novels that haven’t ascended into the literary canon (and are unlikely to do so), yet had me gasping with delight or shuddering with (a pleasant kind of) horror. My own personal cutoff for being obscure enough to count as an interesting recommendation was “less well known than Flaubert’s Parrot,” which otherwise might have made the list.

1. The Debt to Pleasure, John Lanchester. This one is a favorite of various CV bloggers, as I recall. A wonderfully dark novel, structured loosely around a series of recipes. You won’t learn any new culinary tricks, but you’ll be drawn into the wicked plotting of Tarquin Winot as he spins his schemes with considerable savoir faire. The first book I recommend to people I think highly of.
2. Thus Was Adonis Murdered, Sarah Caudwell. The opposite of dark, although there is a murder, and a good deal of British tax law. Caudwell has written a mystery novel populated by barristers of supernatural wit and cleverness, resulting in one of the most consistently amusing books I’ve ever read.
3. The Wasp Factory, Iain Banks. Back to darkness. Banks is a prolific author, alternating between “straight” fiction and science fiction novels. This was his first, and it’s a masterpiece of twisted imagination. There’s a surprise ending, but the convoluted path by which you get there has a terrifying internal logic.
4. Love in a Dead Language, Lee Siegel. No, not that Lee Siegel. This one is a professor of religion at the University of Hawaii, who has written the best postmodern-pastiche novel I’ve come across. Structured loosely as a translation of the Kama Sutra, complete with puzzles and self-reference and fourth-wall breaking. Likely to be most appreciated by academics.
5. The Book of Revelation, Rupert Thomson. Picked up on a whim in an airport bookstore, this is a disturbing short novel about a ballet dancer who is kidnapped by a group of women and used for their sexual pleasure. The quick response is “that doesn’t sound so bad,” but the truth is that is very much is. This book is a thoughtful examination of deep issues of identity, freedom, and obsession.

I could confidently recommend any of them, with the understanding that my tastes are not exactly universal. Your mileage may vary.

Our first installment of unsolicited advice concerned the difficult question of how to get into graduate school; this one presumes that one has successfully leapt the hurdles of GRE’s and ornery admissions committees, and is faced with the perilous decision of which offer to accept. (If one has either one or zero offers, presumably the decision-making process is somewhat easier.) We will not, at the moment, be addressing whether you should be going to graduate school in the first place, or how to succeed once you get there.

This is a much more difficult task than the first installment. Not that it’s more difficult to decide where to go than to get into grad school in the first place; just that it’s much more difficult to give sensible advice about how to do it. When it comes to getting into grad schools, everyone agrees on the basic notions: good grades, test scores, letters, research experience. Choosing where to go, in contrast, is a highly personal decision, and what works for one person might be utterly irrelevant to someone else. Rather than being overly prescriptive, then, I thought it might be useful just to chat about some of the issues that come up. Ultimately, you’ll have to decide for yourself how to weigh the various factors.

• Why do you want to go to grad school in the first place? Sure, maybe you should have already given some thought to this question — but now is the time to get serious. Is your goal to become a professor or other professional researcher (which is typically assumed)? Or is it just to get a Ph.D., and then see what happens? Or is it simply to learn some science?

  As a general principle, the purpose of grad school is very different from that of your undergraduate college education. At least in the U.S., college serves multiple purposes: training in some concentration, to be sure, but also a broadly-based liberal education, as well as more general exposure to critical thinking, and crucially important social and personal aspects. Grad school is much more focused: it serves to train you how to be a working research scientist (or whatever, although I’ll be speaking as if it is science you’ll be studying, as that’s what I know best). In college it’s good to be a broad person and cast your net widely in the oceans of learning and experience. In grad school, however, there is a lot to be said for focusing as much as you can on the specific discipline in which you are specializing. Not that you should stop having broad interests, but it might make sense to sacrifice some of them temporarily to the goal of becoming an expert researcher.

  The reason for this is that, like it or not, you are entering a competition. Not necessarily grad school itself (where grading and suchlike are notoriously relaxed, although there may be competition for advisors and fellowships and such), but the ultimate job market. Most people who go to grad school want to get jobs as scientists, probably in academia. There are far fewer such jobs than there are grad students, so most people who get a Ph.D. will ultimately not succeed in becoming professors. And the other people who want those jobs are also very smart and dedicated. So, if you are serious about choosing this as your life’s path, it makes sense to really devote yourself to your craft during your grad school years, and give it your best shot. I personally think that the rigorous training provided by a Ph.D. is extremely useful and rewarding even if you don’t become a professor, but you should certainly enter the fray with open eyes.

  If becoming a professor is what you want to do, you should choose your school accordingly. At the same time, I’m a firm believer that your life doesn’t completely end just because you’re in grad school, nor that the process itself should be unpleasant. It should be extremely challenging, taking you to the limits of what you are capable of doing — but the days you spend in school are also days that you are alive, and you shouldn’t completely shut yourself away. That’s the difficult balance to strike. (Told you this wouldn’t be very helpful.)

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Your humble bloggers here at Cosmic Variance have spent quite a bit of accumulated time in academic and research settings — in fact, my guess is that none of us have spent an entire year away from such a setting since the age of about six or so. That’s a lot of accumulated wisdom right there, and it’s about time we started sharing it. Since it’s that time of year when applications are being sent off to graduate schools, I thought I would start off by letting everyone in on the secret to how to get accepted everywhere you apply. Of course I can only speak for physics/astronomy departments, but the basic lessons should be widely applicable.

So, here goes: have great grades, perfect GRE scores, significant research experience, and off-scale letters of recommendation. Any questions?

If, perhaps, it’s a bit too late to put that plan into action, here are some personal answers to questions that come up during the process. Co-bloggers (and anyone else) are free to chime in with their own take on these complicated issues. Keep in mind that every person is different, as is every grad school — in fact, specific schools might behave quite differently from year to year as different people serve on the admissions committee. Don’t sink your sense of self-worth into how you do on these applications; there’s a strong random component in the decisions, and there are a very large number of good schools where you can have a fun and successful graduate career.

• What do graduate school admissions committees look at?
  Everything. Keep in mind that, unlike being admitted to college (undergrad), at the grad school level the admissions are done by individual departments, with committees comprised of faculty members with different kinds of expertise, and often students as well. They’ll look at your whole application, and in my experience they really take the responsibility seriously, poring over a huge number of applications to make some hard decisions. Still, it’s well-known that careful examination of a thick file of papers is no substitute for five minutes of talking to someone, which schools usually don’t have the luxury of doing, so decisions are always somewhat fickle.
• Even my personal essay?
  Well, okay. I wouldn’t sweat the personal essay; in my experience it doesn’t have too much impact. Let’s put it this way: an incredibly good essay could help you, but a bad essay won’t do too much harm (unless it’s really bad). To a good approximation, all these essays sound alike after a while; it’s quite difficult to be original and inspiring in that format.
• Are GRE scores important?
  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.
• What about research experience?
  Research can be a big help, although it’s by no means absolutely necessary. These days it seems that more and more undergrads are doing research, to the point where it begins to look unusual when people haven’t done any. There is some danger that people think you must want to keep on doing the kind of research that you did as an undergrad, although I wouldn’t worry too much about that. Mostly it shows some initiative and passion for the field. It can be very difficult to do theoretical research as an undergrad, but that’s okay; even if you eventually want to be a string theorist, it’s still great experience to do some experimental work as an undergrad (in fact, perhaps it’s especially useful).
• How do I get good letters of recommendation?
  It’s more important to have letters from people who know you well than from people who are well-known themselves. One of the best side benefits of doing research is that you can get your supervisor (who hopefully has interacted with you quite a bit) to write letters for you. It’s really hard to write a good letter for a student who you only know because they took one class from you a year or two ago. Over the course of your undergrad career, you should find some way to strike up a personal relationship with one or more faculty members, if only to sit in their office now and then and ask some physics questions. Then they can write a much more personal and effective letter. Of course, if you are just a bad person who annoys everyone, it would be just as well to stay hidden. (Kidding!)
• Is it true that the standards are different for theorists and experimenters?
  Typically, yes, although it might be different from place to place. 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.
• So should I claim to be interested in experiment, even if I’m not?
  No. Think about it: given that schools already tend to accept more students who want to do theory than they can take care of, what are your chances of getting a good advisor if you sneak into a department under false pretenses and have to compete with others who came in with better preparation? It makes much more sense to go someplace where they really want you for who you are, and work hard to flourish once you get there.
• Do I need to know exactly what I will specialize in?
  Not really, although in certain circumstances it can help. Professors like to know that someone is interested in their own area of research, and might push a little harder to accept someone whose interest overlaps with their work; on the other hand, most people understand that you don’t know everything after three and a half years of being an undergraduate, and it can take time to choose a specialization. In particular, at most American physics departments (unlike other countries and some other disciplines), it is generally not expected that you need to know ahead of time who your advisor will be when you arrive, or which “group” you will work in.
• Should I contact faculty members individually if I’m interested in their research?
  That depends, mostly on whether the person you are contemplating contacting is desperate for more grad students, or is overwhelmed with too many requests as it is. In popular areas (ahem, like theoretical particle physics, string theory, and cosmology), there are generally more applicants than departments have advisors for. In that case, most people who receive random emails from undergraduates will just urge them to wait for the admissions process to take its course; remember that it’s a zero-sum game, and for everyone who gets in there’s someone else who doesn’t, and it would be a little unfair to penalize those applicants who didn’t contact faculty members personally. On the other hand, if you have reason to believe that someone you’re interested in working with is trying to get more students, or if you think your case is somehow unique and requires a bit of attention, feel free to email the appropriate faculty member with a polite inquiry. The worst that can happen is that you get a brush-off; I can’t imagine it would actually hurt your chances.
• Is my life over if I don’t get into my top grad school?
  Yes. Well, only if you let it be. The truth is, how you do in grad school and beyond (including how you do on the postdoc and faculty job market) depends much more on you than it does on where you go to school. In the next episode of “unsolicited advice,” we’ll think about how to actually choose where to go, including how to get the most out of visiting different schools.

Actually this episode was not completely unsolicited; thanks to Philip Tanedo for suggesting we share some of our invaluable insight. See, sometimes we really do listen.

If you are planning to take a telepherique/cable car to the top of a mountain, when you reach the top, be sure to check the departure time for the last car of the day. Otherwise, you must hike all the way down… Of course, this affords spectacular photo ops:

And the hike could be quite pleasant, if you had planned on it, and were not racing the imminent sunset.

Did I mention that you must hike ALL the way down?