In Defense of Graduate School

It is the beginning of April here at ASU. The flowers are blooming, the temperatures are rising, the finals of the NCAA tournament are just finished, baseball is in full swing, and the semester is beginning to wind down. For most of us, that's a good thing, but above the crack of the bats and buzzing of the bees, if you listen closely (or happen to work in the life sciences buildings or Biodesign), you will hear the blood curdling screams of PhD candidates and masters students in the final death throes of writing and defending their theses and dissertations. It's an exciting time for those of us who are in the first few years of our respective programs, a frustrating time for those who should be graduating and aren't due to the fickle nature of research, and a very stressful time for those who are about to be leaving the safe yet sometimes sadistic world of graduate school.

Grad school is an interesting concept, especially for those of us in the sciences. Unlike our law and medicine friends, we get paid to go to school. The pay is completely inversely related to the amount of work that we do and the money that we bring to the University, but that's the price we pay for our freedom. We're caught in a beautiful limbo between the crazy days of our undergraduate youth and the rigid schedule of a "real job." We're proud to be grad students. In the hierarchy of the university setting, we are the soldiers in the trenches, getting our hands dirty to advance science. We take ideas from our PIs and use them to design experiments, and then execute the experiments, figure out why they didn't work, redesign them so they do work, write the papers, rewrite the papers after critique from the PIs, and ultimately make sure that research moves forward. We're not the PIs sitting in offices writing grant applications and attending conferences, we're not the publish or perish post-docs who work like slaves with no vacation, and we're not the undergrads washing dishes and filling tip boxes. But we're also not out in industry, joining the rat race of assembly line results and inflexible protocols. We're the backbone of the academic world and as such, we've got the freedom to explore, design, dream, create and discover. We are the ones who are actually in the lab, working to cure cancer, develop a vaccine against HIV, discover new species in the rainforests, design alternatives to petroleum, and ultimately provide solutions to many of today's problems.

Part of the beauty of grad school is that we don't work 9-5. Every day presents a new challenge, always something new to discover or work through, so our schedules are dependant on the project's timeline. Sometimes we work 12 hour days to complete a single analysis, and sometime we take a half a day off to go hiking while our cultures grow to the correct OD. We work how ever long it takes to get the job done, and then we play in much the same manner that we work. In addition to being researchers, we are climbers, mountain bikers, triathletes, kayakers, backpackers, ultimate players, artists, photographers, and entrepreneurs. In the unique environment of the graduate system, we are given the time to pursue our passions both in and outside of our chosen career. As a result, most of the grad students I know are also some of the most intelligent, interesting and well rounded people that I know.

I was always told that your undergraduate years were the best of your life, but if that's true, then graduate school comes a pretty close second. I'm at a great point in my graduate career - just a few months past my first committee meeting and just getting my program of study approved. I've been in the system long enough to learn the ropes but not yet long enough to get weighed down the monstrosity of the task that lies in front of me. I'm very happy where I am right now in my research, so it caught me off guard when I was offered a job a few weeks ago. A real job: one that pays more than free pizza from the Lab Stores vendor shows and cookies during seminars. It was weird, thinking about what is supposed to come next. So many of my friends right now are glued to their computers, organizing the last 4 or 5 years of their lives into 100 pages and summarizing it in a title of 50 or less characters. And then in the coming weeks, they'll defend, start breathing again, celebrate, and then....

Then what? It's been the main topic of conversation for the last few weeks in the Life Sciences Tower. Some of my friends are going into industry, others are staying safe in academia on the post-doc track to becoming professors, and then some are getting out of research altogether and are going to be focusing on their new children or just as helpless new companies. No matter what comes next, we will all leave with science progressed a bit further, a broad array of advanced skills ranging from statisical analysis to public speaking, and millions of memories of some of the best years of our lives so far.