On Getting Drunk on Someone Else’s Dollar
February 1st, 2008 by excimerIt is upon us.
Recruitment season, that is.
Graduate student recruitment season is that lovely time of year when graduate schools with nice climates get to show off how awesome their nice climates are while Illinois decides to welcome prospective students with “freezing rain,” an unholy concoction of rain and below-freezing temperatures that turns any object, especially cars, into blocks of ice. There is also a lot of alcohol, which does not distinguish it from any other time of year for graduate students. What does distinguish it from other times of the year, however, is the sheer level of enthusiasm among the grad students, which stems partly from veiled threats from professors, and mostly from free alcohol.
I have it on good authority that most CBC readers are either currently graduate students or people who have already been in graduate school. This post will bore and annoy you- please react accordingly. For those of you about to start on your graduate recruitment weekends, we salute you. Here are some tips:
1. Don’t be a tool. Before leaving on these recruitment weekends, take a long, hard look at yourself in the mirror and ask yourself: “Am I a complete tool?” If the answer is “yes,” do not go to the recruiment weekend. Proceed directly to medical school. You’ll make more money as a doctor anyway. You fucking tool.
2. Come with questions. Lots and lots of questions. I mean, it’s good to be inquisitive and to investigate everything- good and bad- about the schools you’re looking into. But keep in mind people are going to ask you “Do you have any other questions?” about 11 million times in the course of your visit. Try to come with 11,000,001 questions. They don’t have to be related to anything school-wise, or relevant to anything. “How is your panini?” Is a good conversation-starter when there are no paninis in the vicinity.
3. There are two kinds of people in graduate school. Those who actively participate in graduate recruitment and those who don’t. Talk to both of them. The latter are usually pissed-off sixth years who don’t give a fuck about you, their stupid research, and oh by the way their bosses are self-centered assholes who don’t want me to graduate and I just wanna get the fuck out of here, and by the way don’t come here. If a group you’re interested in has more than one of this guy, don’t join that group. If you do, six years from now, that guy will be you.
4. Just get tipsy. Yes, there will be alcohol. And you probably will drink it. Go ahead, imbibe. But grad students have a knack for gossip and perfect memories for embarassing situations, so if you do anything stupid, people will remember. Trust me. And for god’s sake, don’t hook up with anyone.
5. You don’t go to grad school to TA. Find out how long people have to TA in groups you’re interested in joining. TAing might be fun the first few semesters, but when your boss is breathing down your neck for results, the last thing you’re going to be interested in is teaching. Find out how much funding groups have- it will have a significant effect on your graduate career. Vote Democrat- they like to fund the sciences more.
5. Your gut is a good indicator. If you visit a place that kinda creeps you out, don’t discount it. There’s probably something wrong with that place. Ritual sacrifices are expected and should be enjoyed; several ritual blood sacrifices of animals for the ancient Incan god of alchemy for the season of fertility is a bad omen (true story).
5. It’s only five years out of your life. Where you go to grad school and what you accomplish there will determine what you do for the rest of your life. That’s a lot more important than living somewhere cosmopolitan. Yes, even gold can come out of a cesspool, but that doesn’t mean it didn’t pass through someone’s butt first. [1]
Okay, dumb post. If you want boring, real advice, Mitch put something up.
And for the visually inclined, here is a picture of my cat. He just had all his teeth taken out last week. =( But he’s much better now! [2] EDIT: He needed to be lolcatted. Badly.
[1] That was pretty deep, I know.
[2] Have you ever had to pill a cat? Even when they don’t have teeth, it’s pretty fucking awful.
My only goal for any recruitment is to drink as much as I can until I can no longer stand. I’ve become quite proficient.
Yes, the only real requirement for graduate students during recruitment is to get annihilated.
Why did you have to make your kitty into trailer trash?
to brighten his mood – let him lose in the towel drawer. If you have no catnip weed, bring him some valeric acid from the lab (or a little live hamster).
Group open houses work like job interviews. Celebrate after you got in the group you wanted, not during the interview. But hang around to the end – the group members become more sincere and talkative as they turn progressively plastered.
Also ask how many grad students in their group dropped out without a PhD.
I heard that Wender was at one time pushing his students hard to finish the taxol synthesis before everybody else. When his group was not first to make the molecule, he did not blame himself – and as a result his students at the time got bitter and were privately discouraging new students at the open house against joining their group
Senior Undergrad here,
I guess I’ll assemble a notebook of questions to ask beforehand and right down everything when I start visiting.
Speaking of I will be at UI for the March 7-9 visitation weekend. I’ll have to hunt you down excimer. That way I can say I’ve met both members of CBC.
Woo! Email me later. excimer at coronene dot com
I just heard back from UIUC too.
Does it make me weird that I’d rather live in a place with a climate like that than somewhere “nice”?
There are plenty of places with similar climates that aren’t in the middle of nowhere. *rimshot*
Hey! We have a Target.
But not a Wendy’s.
No Wendy’s?
Damn…Illinois sounds less appealing…
Yeah. The Wendy’s closed about a month after I moved here. I cried. Wept. Like a baby.
Meh, right now I’m in a town that has about 10,000 people. Middle of nowhere must be better than the outskirts of nowhere.
My yearly litany to cool prospectives: choose a department, not a single group.
My yearly litany to tool prospectives: Wow, you published a paper during undergrad! YR SO Awe–some!
What does your cat eat sans teeth? What can he eat?
he eats hard food. cats don’t chew their food much, and their gums can harden to the point where they can chew if they need to.
It’s been noted that one of my cats has not-so-good teeth, and both she and my other cat free feed. I didn’t know if she could still eat hard food without her teeth.
Vote Democrat
It is incompetent fascists, corporatists, and double-digit IQ christ-besotted jackasses against bleeding heart Liberals, welfare pimps, Enviro-whiners, feminazis, and Queer Nation. Like Hitler and Stalin, Republicans and Democrats are indistinguishable. Choose wisely.
I was outraged by $trillion institutional stupidities and corruptions of Big Government. A huge bite of everything I’ve earned was stolen at Federal gunpoint or outright burned to ashes. I was wrong and I admit it.
Free healthcare for everybody! No more wars! End poverty with Federal disbursements! SAVE THE ENVIRONMENT! End hydroelectric dams, fossil-fuel burning power plants, and nuclear reactors. Burn corn – but don’t farm it. Reduce US carbon dioxide emissions to 1800’s levels. Redirect NSF’s budget to Head Start. All colleges and universities must accept all applicants. The bottom 50% must be given full scholarships to compensate for past inequities.
I’m registering Democrat in 2009 and signing up for Welfare, food stamps, and Medicaid. Work hard, everybody! I’ve got insatiable appetites for every penny you earn, for every penny you are worth, and for every penny you can borrow. You owe me. WHERE IS YOUR COMPASSION? I want that, too.
Bush the Lesser reduced America to a giant sucking chest wound. Barak Obama is gonna put both his shoulders into CPR. Watch the blood spurt. I’ll vote for Obama twice. He’s perfect. Tomorrow belongs to me.
Ann Coulter endorses Hillary, and now Uncle Al is there to balance it by endorsing Barack.
Sweet.
Don’t mention that name. That name makes me angry. I want to break her in half.
C’mon she is a babe – a mantis babe
If that thing is a “she”…EXTENSIVE surgery must have been responsible.
are you talking about Ann, or Hillary? or both?
whenever I see Ann, it reminds the “Alien Ressurection”
Ripley: Does it grow?
Dr. Gediman: Yeah. Very rapidly.
Ripley: It’s a queen.
Dr. Gediman: How did you know that?
Ripley: She’ll breed. You’ll die.
I don’t really have anything against Hillary. FWIW, though, I like Obama more.
So something good did come out of Alien 4. Unless that’s where they actually figured out how to breed Ann C.
I like Hilary – she is my favorite comedian.
Great advice, which brought back disturbing memories that I thought I’d managed to bury. Oh well, at least I have beer-thirty to look forward to later today (my advice: when you’re done with grad school, be sure to end up working somewhere that has a good happy hour culture, if that sort of thing is important to you).
I’m having a hard time imagining a toothless cat.
Related advice: when you’re beginning grad school, be sure to end up working in a group with a good happy hour culture.
i have more advice: ask questions about the qualifying exams, the course requirements, and other things you don’t think you’ll care about. undergrads, you don’t really know what grad school is like, even if you think you do. get a lot of information from your hosts.
also, find out if the department is social or not. important.
yeah, serious bonus points for no cume exams either. Cumes suck.
I passed all 8 cumes on the first try – and my classmates did not.
It is great to be a show-off; you can confidently fake a partial knowledge on almost any unforeseen cume subject
Writing and grading cumes also sucks.
Ask how people choose groups – is there a department process for choosing/being chosen by groups, or is it up to the advisors to choose who they would like? What happens next (if there are too many people for the spots available, for example)? Are there rotations or something like them? Do the people in the research groups in which you’re interested have qualifications in common (research experience in industry, substantial undergrad work, etc.)? (I didn’t have enough research experience, and although I had lots of classroom knowledge, I was clueless/arrogant about how to get into research groups. This did not work so well for me.)
You might want to see what kinds of departmental interactions exist – do research groups (and their advisors) get along well, or not, and do people from different research groups interact well and/or regularly? Do people get along within research groups, do they form cliques, or are they atomized? Do people interact purely professionally, casually, or somewhere in between (or in some cases, like lawyers representing individuals in a cult multiple marriage/divorce/child support case)? Does the advisor work the group like the horse in Crime and Punishment, expect fixed research hours (five or six days a week? when he’s in lab?) , or not care much so long as you produce (enough) useful work? You might also want to see how bitter/angry/depressed the students you see around you are, because they aren’t going to get happier (yet).
Are there any activities shared between groups, either scientific or not (for example, some places have synthetic people from different groups get together to design paper syntheses for interesting molecules), or opportunities to meet people from other departments?
I was pretty oblivious when I visited grad schools, and I think I was actually sort of shocked when people went to a party and drank (of course, there was the small problem that that seemed like all there was to do there). You can wait to get unhinged – it probably doesn’t look good that you need to get that drunk before you come to grad school. I can’t imagine anyone hooking up with anyone else at one of those things – it just seems like bad karma, and it probably won’t help either of the participants. Of course, I didn’t really worry much about it when i went to places – there weren’t many women anyway most places (the department I went to had a 6:1 male:female ratio my year, with at least two or three married or pseudomarried). None of the interdepartmental relationships I saw worked very well at all, anyway.
for example, some places have synthetic people from different groups get together to design paper syntheses for interesting molecules
do synthesis groups really do this? I mean, collaborate? I always felt that, to synthesis groups, “collaborate” meant “lazy” and was to be avoided because working more is good. But I could be wrong. Or completely, 100% right.
Not for things they actually intend to make (Kishi and Evans were both making spongistatins and didn’t talk for example), and not on group scale (that I saw). MIT used to have monthly syntheses with organic students as a group – grad students in teams of four (randomly selected?) designed syntheses of molecules. At the time, MIT didn’t have many total synthesis people, and I think they chose recently discovered molecules so that people wouldn’t be likely to be actually working on them.
Yeah, “collaborate” should mean “You bastards know how to do something that I don’t” or “You bastards have a really neat machine or instrument that I want to use, and ‘collaborating’ is the price for admission”. Generally, there’s not that much need to collaborate with other people synthesizing stuff.
The role of a ‘paper synthesis’ is just as easily filled with what we called ‘mechanism monday’, where we worked out mechanisms for reactions in the lit, or, more realistically, hooted at and derided junior students’ attempts to do so. (Then, of course, we had to put up or face even more withering derision from the boss.)
Nothing builds confidence more than working your way through a tricky mechanism with labmates yelling “Sit down!”, “Ouch, ouch!”, ” What the fuck is wrong with you?” and “My eyes!”. It sure made seminars seem like a cakewalk. When I gave my exit, the computer the department supplied seized up in mid-PowerPoint, and I never broke a sweat.
Or…collaborate means “We’re all too busy for anything but synthesis, be our device minions kthx?”
There are no mechanism Mondays now, and there haven’t been any in at least the past year and a half or so. Too bad. Sounds like they might have been useful.
Well, the secret reason we had Mechanism Monday was that we had one person who was trying to flunk out of cumes. This person ultimately passed, and is raking in fistfulls of big pharma money, but it was a squeaker. I think they might have been one of those ‘test anxiety’ types, because they were completely on the ball otherwise.
Where I went to ndergrad had an intro seminar for the graduate students where they went through some of the mechanisms and reactions one might see in grad school. It seemed to work OK, but it wasn’t research and so nothing like it existed in graduate school.
Of course, you could have spent three years in graduate school and then had to retake cumes because your advisor moved. There’s some time you’ll never get back.
I fully endorse these pieces of advice. Especially #3. And #1
http://dx.doi.org/10.1039/b716803a – check out teh pictures
http://www.chemport.ru/newsimages/1201931294d0c3e.jpg
That’s in a roundbottom? Cool!!!
but don’t look too closely at the arrows in Fig. 6
wow, that’s pretty godawful.
I hope that mechanism was written up by the electrical engineer listed as a coauthor.
I wholeheartedly agree with #3, especially being that grad student who is really bitter about her former advisor’s shitty behavior and terrible management. My current group is fabulous, but that doesn’t change the godawful experience I had with advisor #1. Ask specifically if he or she has a reputation (especially useful for women, people of color, homos, and people with health or family concerns) or how well students are generally treated.
Also, my department is largely dysfunctional because we have too many tools at all levels. Everyone is too good to be genuine, and department activities are hokey as a result. The gossip wheel spins so fast I’m thinking of ways to harness that alternative energy. Ask about such things!
Oh crap on #4, last clause. Luckily, I think she was an undergrad.
Cursed green beer on “unofficial St. patricks Day”
I only wish I’d read this before last weekend when I started making visits.
To add a drunk mistake I made, never tell the school you’re visiting that it wasn’t your 1st choice – especially if they already know you were accepted to the school that is! I can say with fair confidence that turned me into a total tool asap.
Fortunately, I have a few more where I can NOT be a tool. And I regret that my schedule does not allow me to run into psi*psi even though we do have one weekend at the same location.
[...] for next weekend, I think, but thankfully I’m not among them.) Since Excimer posted a guide for prospectives a while back, I think I’m in a good position to put up a few tips for hosts and organizers. [...]