How to be a good graduate student

I'm a fourth year PhD student in engineering and I've got a couple thoughts Re: Fun Courses I'm surprised at all the people coming out against classes for fun. Unless they interfere with your other work or render you less productive than the lab's other graduate students, I say take the classes. I think it would speak well of you to most advisors that you wanted to break out of your discipline to learn something that interests you. I'm finished with my required courses and my advisor has been supportive of my taking one class a term that interests me. Sure graduate school should be treated like a job, but it doesn't have to be a soul-crushing one. Re: Advisor relationships In my experience, these tend to develop slowly over time. Some people hit it off right away (One first year grad in my program plays in a band with his advisor) but most relationships start off very official and unstiffen with time. As you make yourself useful to your professor, attend conferences together, and work on papers with both of your names on them, a relationship is built. Science is still on the master/apprentice system, and a young apprentice should be stiff and formal in the presence of the master, until you've built up something of a relationship and proved yourself useful. As I'm sure you know, choose your advisor carefully! This is the most important choice handed to you in graduate school, I'd say personality, scientific reputation, and area of research, are the things you should consider, and in that order. Re: General advice Once you have a research project, collect 60 of the best and most relevant references to your project and reread two of them a day. Keep cycling through them for a few months. This was useful for me in getting really grounded in my project.

About fun courses: This varies entirely by field. In some fields/departments, your faculty would see it as evidence of unseriousness. In some fields it would be seen as good. It is not the norm, in my experience -- most people have their hands full with the courses for their degree -- but I know a lot of people who have done one or two unrelated courses. Talk to upper years students in your department to see how it is viewed by your dept, to know whether you should keep it quiet or not.

I'm a 3rd year grad student working in Computational Biology (molecular modeling and simulations, specifically). So I figured I'd chime in on interdisciplinary topics specifically: -Connect with people in all aspects of your discipline. Make friends with professors and grad students (and even talented undergrads) in both CS and bio, as well as any other related field (chemistry for me). Every field has a different way of looking at problems, and you never know when you'll need help from someone. -Biologists don't know CS, and computer scientists don't know biology. Well not always, but assuming you can speak about both subjects well, remember your audience. Be able to explain CS and biological concepts from scratch, more or less, because you'll be doing so again and again. -Get experience working in the wet lab, if you don't already, as most computational biologists will work on the dry side. Experimentalists work differently, and you need to be able to speak the language. You also need to understand what various techniques can and cannot do. It's useful to keep a chart of techniques and their qualities too. -Scrounge computer time. More important if you're doing anything high-throughput or simulations, but somewhere someone's got a cluster that's sitting idle. Get in their good graces and offer to "stress test". Non-specific things: -Take the unrelated course. You don't have to tell anyone, or point it out, and its no one's business. -Do the grunt work. Beware the useless grunt work. -Thirding the taking time out for yourself. Don't flaunt it, but you need time to recharge your batteries. There's a point of diminishing returns where spending 12 hours a day in the lab doesn't get you a real 4 hours worth of work over spending 8 hours a day. -Winter sucks in Ithaca (I was there for undergrad), get outside and exercise regularly. It'll help a lot. -Don't be afraid to communicate directly with leaders in the field. You can call or email them about just about anything. They'll be surprised that someone is actually interested their tiny slice of the field.

Oh and please, if anyone has anything more to add, please feel free. I could do with all the advice I can get.

Thanks for all the great responses, everyone. Regarding the courses, I think I'll tread carefully as to what courses I'm taking but I will probably take at least one not completely related course every year. As many have said, this seems pretty common for grad students at Cornell. I also know how i important it is to take the teacher not the course. The prof who takes the Science Writing course is supposed to be an extremely good teacher. I am definitely taking personality into account while selecting my advisor. It's really important to me that my advisor be accessible, but also allows me to work at my own pace and doesn't continually monitor me. Also, at a party at his and his wife's house (also a professor) the talk turned to the recent movie Expelled and the Dawkins rap video. He hadn't seen it so a bunch of us trooped into his computer room to watch it. Much hilarity ensued and I thought, wow, I could really see my myself working with this advisor and these people for five years. The biggest issue for me is something that overhauser said -- letting go of the feeling that I need to get an A in every course. I need to learn to prioritize my research over my grade, since as mentioned, no one really seems to care what grades you got once you get your PhD.

Nthing the fun courses, depending on what they are. I was in a very statistics driven Ph.D. program but took quite a few policy-oriented courses on the side. Luckily, I was able to use those courses as my minor area but I probably would have taken the classes regardless.

You should absolutely take some courses just for fun, but only not-for-credit and not more than one a year or so. Also, wait until after you've chosen your lab, finished your comps-orals-whatever that makes you a PhD candidate and are into your thesis project. I took a fair amount of dance, which had nothing to do with my thesis but allowed me to use different parts of my brain, and a fair amount of coursework in physics, which was outside of my field and just for fun, but ended up helping me get the job I wanted in the end and has become an important part of what I now work on. Also (and this will make some people protest), don't worry about your grades. When you're applying for jobs later, academic or not, no-one will care about your GPA. They'll want to know what you've published (or in the famous words of my first rotation boss - 'anything more than a B- and you've spent too much time on it'.) So use this time to really get into what the different labs are doing and make sure you find a nice person to work for (very important) who is doing something you're interested in. Once you're working on your own project in a lab you like being in, a lot of the feeling of fecklessness should go away, as what you're then working on is yours.

I've been told that fun classes are appropriate to take sometime starting in your third year, once you've established your research schedule and finished your usual classes. I think this strongly depends on the advisor, though, so if it's important to you I'd be sure to ask other graduate students in the lab when you're considering signing on. You also may be able to swing it now if you really feel that you have the time, seeing as you've done so well at your required classes so far (congrats, by the way). Ask your committee members or your DGS, and do consider auditing or taking these classes S/U. I'm also a first-year grad student at Cornell, though, so take my advice lightly; I'm just figuring this out, too!

In most universities, I think you would appear unserious if you took a course that had little to do with your discipline. You're allowed to have a life of your own, but a class for credit is a big commitment. Maybe it's different at Cornell. If you do take such a class, you should remember the maxim I was taught as an undergrad: "take the teacher, not the class." Don't take a class on Women and Science unless you've talked to people who have had the instructor before and know that she is incredible. Basically, don't judge a course by its title.