 Hi everybody. My name is Valerie Sloan. I work at NCAR, National Center for Atmospheric Research. And I work, my background is in Arctic and Alpine glacial history and geology. And now I work really in higher education, supporting people like yourselves in sort of, you know, becoming more prepared for the world, for the workforce in grad school. And let's see. And I'm, so I'm running, I'm hosting the series that is on this summer with a lot of help. And one of those people is Blake. And so Blake is going to be leading this particular workshop. And he does a great job. So I'll just hand it over to you, Blake. Awesome. Thanks for the introduction, Val. Hi, guys. I'm Blake. It's really nice to meet you. Sorry. Let me jump up here before we begin. So I guess a little bit about me. I'm a graduate student at the University of Hawaii. I'm going to be starting my third year of my PhD this fall. And today I'm going to be talking to you all about how to get into graduate school. And just to show of hands, I'm assuming most of you because you're here are interested in graduate school. But would you mind putting a reaction if you are thinking about it, if you're thinking about applying? Just like a thumbs up reaction or something. Awesome. Okay. This is great. And hopefully this will give you some information to help you start thinking about the process. And of course, I'm always available if you guys want to email me afterwards and chat about it. Let me know. And I'm happy to get the ball rolling for you all. So all right, let's get started. So this is a presentation I did with one of my fellow PhD students, Alexis Kazaris. So I just wanted to give her some credit as well. Okay. So what is graduate school in the natural sciences? So graduate school is essentially training to become an expert in a field or a discipline. You're contributing new information to that field, usually through publishing some papers or doing a research project. And it's considered more of an apprenticeship than it is traditional schooling like you would have in undergrad. So most of you will be doing an independent research project, a thesis or a dissertation in graduate school. That entails a lot of different things. It involves reading scientific literature, designing and executing a research project, writing proposals and writing grants and actually conducting those experimental studies, lab work and field work. There's a lot of data analysis, interpretation. There's a lot of coding involved. You'll generally generate these publications. You'll give a thesis defense, which is like an actual presentation where the public is usually involved and your professors are involved. And then you'll present to the public sometimes as well. You take a lot of classes, usually depending on your program. Those classes will vary in the number and intensity. And lastly, there's a lot of teaching, mentoring, education and outreach involved in being a graduate student. All right. So I just want to kind of get the chat going, get the conversation started. What are some things that you think you should consider before applying to graduate school? And feel free to type in the chat or unmute. Either works. What are some things you should consider before applying? Step in the mouth. That is a great one. Future career goals. Yeah. Yeah. What job do you want to have? Do you even need a graduate degree to go for that? Uh-huh. Uh-huh. Masters or PhD. Fantastic. Absolutely. Your research interests. Yeah. Absolutely. This is something you're going to be studying for multiple years. You want to make sure that it's something that's going to be interesting to you throughout. Uh-huh. How much time it takes. That's a great one. Uh-huh. Yeah, we'll talk about the timing of different degrees like masters and PhD. Yeah. What kind of lab group you want to work with? That's huge. You want to make sure you have a good fit with the advisor and all of the other graduate students because that's your lab family for the next few years. Yeah. What's the culture of that group? Okay. Awesome. So something that was brought up in the chat. What kind of degree can you get? You can get a master's or a PhD when you go to graduate school. The difference is that a master's is usually two to three years for a research project and a PhD is usually five to seven years. And sometimes you can do a professional master's that will generally be like one year and sometimes there's not a research component to those professional masters. When it comes to classes, the master's degrees and the PhD students take similar degrees at least at my university. It can change at different universities, but for us we take about eight to ten graduate level courses and this number will vary depending on what program you're applying to. For a PhD, you take something called a comprehensive exam. I'll be taking mine this fall, but basically it's just a review of all of your coursework and you have a bunch of professors that sit there and they basically give you like an oral exam and they basically just grill you and make sure that you can talk your way through all of the core material before you move on to candidacy. Masters don't usually have the comprehensive exam. And then of course, finally you'll put out a product and for masters you're writing and defending a thesis. I'm in the oceanography department and in oceanography your thesis is usually one or two peer reviewed papers and then for PhD you write and defend a dissertation and that's going to be often three or more peer reviewed papers and they have a common theme. Okay, so something that we want to talk about and just kind of let you all be aware of is graduate school is not for everyone and that's okay, but if you think you want to go I think it's definitely worth a shot, but here's some things to consider. What's your ideal profession and what are the minimum qualifications required? Do you want to be a professor, a research scientist? Do you want to work in industry, private sector, the government? Kind of start looking around at the different jobs that are available. You can look on there's like Glassdoor, there's a couple other sites out there that will post job descriptions and you can take a look at what the minimum qualification is for that and if you see a job you like and it only requires a master's then go for it and you can always extend into a PhD once you're in grad school if you want to. So what could grad school do for you? There's different skills you can get, connections, the degree itself, but there's a lot of different reasons you might want to go to grad school and those are all benefits. What excites you? Someone mentioned this in the chat. What's your passion for science? Do you have a passion for learning, exploring knowledge gaps? That's all going to be really important to carry you through your graduate degree and are you ready to do an independent research project? Since you all are in RU's I'm guessing you have a little bit of research experience, but if you haven't had a bunch of research experience and you don't feel ready to do an entire research project on your own then maybe a master's might be a good place to start for you. And this is a big one. Do you tolerate or even like scientific reading and writing? That's a lot of what you'll be doing in graduate school and so you got to make sure that you have an interest in that and that you like it or at least tolerate it. And someone mentioned this in the chat as well. Is the salary of 20k or to around 37k doable for you and for how long? Because for the PhD that's five to seven years so that's something to keep in mind is this isn't a huge pay stub right here. So can you do that for a long amount of time? All right, so how do you start applying for the graduate school process? The application process at least in earth, biological and environmental sciences is a little bit different than like it is for undergrad. In undergrad you're generally just submitting an application and you'll get reviewed and you'll know if you got accepted or not. In graduate school you're specifically applying to work with one faculty member or a couple and you're not just applying to the school in general. Your admission absolutely depends on fit with the lab and funding and it depends on the salary right here. So the reason it depends on funding is you get paid to go to graduate school and if your professor has a grant that can pay you that's going to determine whether they admit you or not. They don't have funding you're not getting the salary and then it's it's difficult to get in but there are ways around that. There's a couple different kinds of funding that you can get through the school or through your advisor. You can get a research assistantship which is working on a faculty grant usually on your dissertation project. You can get a graduate assistantship and that might be working on another faculty member's grant it's usually different from your dissertation project but it will still pay your salary. There's teaching assistantships so that would be where you're teaching a class generally and that will pay for your tuition and for your salary. And lastly if if your advisor doesn't have funding you can always get external funding in the form of a student fellowship. And there's a lot out there I'm happy to talk more about that a little bit later but the big ones are the NSFGRP. If you're in the marine science field Noah Nancy Foster is huge. American Meteorological Society has a few fellowships. There's the Fulbright Fellowship and then the Hertz Fellowship and there's there's a bunch more out there. Noah and Sea Grant are a great place to look. Yeah I wanted to add on when you're looking at the grad school salary also look at the cost of living in that place because they don't match necessarily and it's not it's not even across the country so in some places that are pretty reasonable to live they have sometimes a higher stipend just because of other reasons sometimes in expensive places like Hawaii they may not have such a high stipend there's no rule that goes across all of the universities and so that's something to consider as well as do you want to live in that location. Thanks absolutely yeah thank you for the contribution and the other thing is a lot of these fellowships they'll pay you at the higher end of the scale so they're definitely worth applying for and they're great professional development opportunities as well. Okay so where do you begin if you want to go to graduate school it's this giant process and there's a lot of things that happen behind closed doors that we're going to try to open a little bit for you today. So when you start you generally need to have an idea of what you want to study when you're reaching out to professors you want to have a general idea of the research topics that you're interested in because you're going to be studying those things for two to three or five to seven years and the professors want to see that you're serious about that. Some professors expect that you come in with research questions in mind but others expect that you just come in with a general research topic that you're interested in but either way here's some tips to start thinking about your research project. So again just in the chat or feel free to unmute if you'd like to say it out loud. How might you go about trying to pick a research topic for your graduate research project? This is a tough one you might have a lot of ideas floating around but how do you narrow in on that one topic that you really want to explore? Does anyone have any ideas? And you can write it in the chat if you don't want to speak up. Yeah use a previous undergrad capstone or thesis project for inspiration absolutely. With any project you do you're never going to fully resolve it there's always going to be more questions that come up and those are great topics you can explore in graduate school if you're really interested in that undergrad project. It's a great one Elizabeth. A topic that has enough data to be studied but that is not too common you know that it's like common knowledge. Yeah uh-huh um sorry if I misheard you but I think you said if there's data already available for that that project there's tons of data out there that's just waiting to be analyzed and professors are often looking for students that can just get in there and analyze it so that's great yeah like utilizing what's available already. I think he also meant look for the questions that are new that are not answered I'm not sure if that's right. Oh yes absolutely yeah and that comes in the form of you know literature research and everything talking to people and figuring out where those knowledge gaps are yeah totally targeting those questions that are unanswered. Allie said search for scientific papers related to your general field of study and see what more specific topics come up absolutely that's a huge one. Okay cool so we have this little diagram for you about picking your research topic and first things first is to think about the topics that you find interesting. So what broad research topics do you find interesting? Think back to undergrad lectures that you found interesting. Are there any unanswered questions from your undergrad research that you'd like to continue? Elizabeth nailed that one. Have you read any papers that you thought were interesting? That one was Allie's suggestion. So these are good places to start. Where did you get that spark of passion that just really interested you and something could be something that you'd be interested in studying further. Okay once you've kind of honed in on at least a broad topic you've maybe read some papers you can also think about methods that you're interested in pursuing. So what research methods are you interested in? Do you like field work versus lab work versus computer work and you know the general truth is that you'll be doing all of these things in graduate school but there's definitely degrees and programs that you'll be doing one more than the other and it's really important to be honest with yourself. Which do you enjoy and which do you avoid? I think a lot of students will do like remote sensing work they'll do a lot of coding and modeling and that's a very computer work habit and a lot of students really love that. There's other programs where you could be you know scuba diving every day and doing coral reef transects and and that's where you're gathering the most of your data and there's less of a lab work component and of course computer work is going to be involved with making graphs and visualizing data and everything. So be honest with yourself and try to balance all of those different components. Another thing to consider is what methods do you have experience with already and what methods would you like to learn more about? I just want to say that in graduate school you have so much opportunity to explore any different kind of method that you want and I'll just give a personal anecdote. When I was in undergrad I did some molecular barcoding work so I had a lot of DNA work experience and then I am using that to study food webs and so when I applied to graduate school I really wanted to incorporate that and there was a whole field to study food webs that I wasn't even aware of which is using stable isotopes. That terrified me I had never read a paper about stable isotopes it was it was very intimidating but my advisors kind of introduced me to that and helped me get papers and read through that and now I do a ton of isotope work as well. So don't be intimidated by these new these new methods that are coming out and you know really just sink in and try to learn them and explore them. So you don't have to just go with the things that you already have experience with. Okay. I have a question. Sometimes like I know that I went to a internship in Flagstaff and it just depends what the lab has to like what kind of instrument they have in their in their room and their in their lab and what you can work with. It just depends too so so pretty much you kind of have to just like how I'm going to how you're going to do your research and what kind of instrument they have the equipment they have. Yeah that's a great point and you can you can definitely send samples to external labs for processing as well but that's a great thing to consider is if you want the hands-on experience let's say for me with the isotope work there is an isotope lab at the university I'm at that I get to work with but that's a great point if there's not an isotope lab you know maybe you can send your samples off but are you getting that same hands-on experience that's another great thing to consider as well. Okay all right so once you have that general idea for yourself of what you want to study and maybe the methods that you want to go into to get there this is where you can start looking into the literature and start figuring out what opportunities are available. So looking into the literature is really important and I would recommend that you look for more recent papers rather than something that came out in 1980 or 1990 look for the papers that have come out in the last 10 years and that'll give you an idea of what the big topics are that are being discussed in the fields currently. It's really important to consider what's already been done and what hasn't you might have a lot of great ideas and some have already been done and some haven't been done to completion and that you can kind of work your way into. So look to be inspired in new directions as you read are there questions that you're going through and you go huh that's interesting they looked at this but not this component of it and that's a great way to start thinking about projects you can do. When you're reading these papers write down questions as you go for me even for me even still when I read research papers it takes me probably a good three or four times reading through to actually kind of grasp what's going on there. So don't be afraid to ask questions and get like write down questions that you want clarification on and ideas for future research questions to explore and the next bit of this is kind of talking to your advisors about these papers and talking to the authors and and really trying to get those questions answered so you get a better idea of the paper and the research. All right so as you're doing that talk to your current mentors and advisors discuss and ask for feedback on your ideas on the papers you're reading on the questions you have and absolutely ask for more papers to read there's always going to be another paper that you weren't aware of that someone can can point in your direction and that can often really help with your development of your project ideas and you know I'm assuming most of you have current mentors and advisors since you're in REU programs and you're working with people that can can fill that role but if you don't have any current mentors ask your professors that teach your classes that you have you feel you have a good connection with or you can ask us and we're happy to connect you with different scientists and teachers and professors that we know in different fields as well. Okay so now you've kind of got this idea of your research topic you're maybe starting to pigeonhole where exactly you want what exactly you want to do and this is the most important part of this graduate school application process is start building a network with those that do the work that you want to get involved in. So how do you do that? This is really intimidating but start building your research network by looking into the people that are doing the research that's being done currently. There's a lot of ways to do that as you're reading papers take note of the authors what institutions they're at you can google them and usually they'll have like a lab web page that you can read through. You can look at the collaborators they've worked with so lab pages are great researchers at organizations like USGS or NOAA or all of these other great research organizations they'll generally have staff profiles of what they're interested in. You can find CVs online you can look at ResearchGate, LinkedIn, Science Twitter is huge people will repost opportunities they have for graduate school all the time so see if those professors or researchers have a Science Twitter and that way you can start getting an idea of who the players are in the field and once you have a good idea of that start reaching out and talk to these scientists about one of their papers so this is the best thing that I think you can do is read a paper from a scientist you want to talk to send them an email can be a cold email and just say hey you know I'm so-and-so I'm really interested in going to graduate school I read your paper on this I thought it was really interesting and I had some questions would you have maybe 20 minutes to chat with me sometime in the next couple weeks and I will say that most people are very willing to talk to early career scientists and to give you their perspective on their journey to graduate school and also if you read their paper it shows them that you did your homework and you know who they are and you're becoming prepared with really great questions. I would say when you're reaching out to these scientists maybe start with graduate students and staff researchers at like NOAA, USGS those kinds of organizations save professors and potential advisors for last because I will say you will grow so much and learn so much as you're talking to these people and when you talk to the professors you want to be your your best potential. So this is this is a great thing to do just start talking to people and you know bounce your ideas off of them and say hey I'm really interested in this I think that you know this could be a potential avenue to go down and they'll give you feedback on your ideas and it's really formative and really great. So lastly tell them you want to go to graduate school they love to talk about their journey and yours as well so talk to them about the research topics you find interesting talk about their experience applying to graduate school any tips they have any advice. All right just continuing this thought I think this is the most important question that you can ask all of these scientists that you're talking to. Find out what the knowledge gaps are by asking if you've had unlimited time and funding what's the next research question that you'd explore. These people will give you a project because they have so many ideas and they just don't have the time or money to do it and they would love for a graduate student to follow up and make that idea come to completion and people will be very honest and these are where you can get a lot of the ideas for a graduate project is from those researchers. The last thing that you should ask these people when you're talking to them is do you know any other scientists or faculty in the field to reach out to because there's going to be people you're not even aware of from google searches and oftentimes they can email introduce you to the next person and they're a lot more likely to respond if someone they work with and know and trust says hey I just met this really cool student would you mind talking to them about x y and z that's a great way to get some responses so I know it's scary but cold email these people and if you happen if your advisor happens to have a connection with them you can ask for an email introduction as well so ask those current advisors and mentors to introduce you to contacts in the field okay how are you guys doing just a little pulse check can you give me a reaction in the chat for how you're feeling about grad school and the process of starting okay got some applause that's good thumbs up awesome this is it's a scary and long process but hopefully we can like break it down and make it accessible for you all um does anyone have any questions before we move on okay cool so let's do another interactive oh sorry I see something in the chat oh no questions cool all right so let's do another just kind of open-ended question what are some things that you think you should consider when you're seeking a potential research advisor oh ali absolutely I will be providing you my email and I have some other resources I can send you as well all right so what are some things we should consider about a potential advisor anyone anyone dealer okay got some in the chat okay their vision for their research and how they run their labs that's a huge one absolutely huge do you want someone who is really invested in their students and works hands on with them or do you want someone who's kind of more of a figurehead and is a leading expert in the field but is is very hands off that's a great one to consider if they have funding or space for a new student absolutely I remember when I was applying there was one lab that had it was 12 graduate students in it so if you're thinking about that are you going to be getting the individual time that you want or need from the advisor and a lot of students in that lab said that there was a great lab culture and they all help each other but it's really hard to get time with the advisor so that's not necessarily good or bad but it is something to consider for what you want um yeah how large their lab is absolutely absolutely um something also to consider is is what stage in their career they're at if you have a young faculty person they're often really hungry for research and they just want to get involved and really help you out a lot and sometimes if you have an older faculty member that's maybe on their way to retirement sometimes they're they're less successful or less um yeah I guess less available so those are things to consider obviously there's exceptions to that uh location's huge yeah where do you want to where do you want to go for these couple of years that you'll be doing graduate school um Val says you can also pose a kind of question in a cold email like I read your paper on x that was interesting I have been wondering how you decided to use the threshold or criteria of x y and z uh without a question mark to indicate you don't expect an answer it shows you're paying close attention to the paper yes I guess this goes back to reaching out to the um building your network and starting to reach out to scientists sorry okay late oh no no no no worries it's great advice okay so how do you find the right lab slash potential advisor and we touched on some of these things um but definitely something you should do is investigate recommendations from the scientists and talk to um people will generally be very honest about their experience working with certain people so listen to red flags if they come up if they um if they have certain things to say but oftentimes it'll be very very positive and very supportive um explore the university websites and faculty pages and lab pages that you can find a list of their previous and current graduate students um graduate students will be very brutally honest about how it is working with with that advisor um and I wouldn't be nervous about asking they're not going to go like report back to the advisor that so-and-so asked this um so they'll be very honest um you can also look at uh like rate my professor pages um that often has to do with how they are as a teacher maybe not as a research advisor so take that with a grain of salt but if there's any big red flags in a rate my professor review that's a good thing to consider um okay so then how can you find more potential advisors explore lists of authors on papers we kind of talked about that a little bit already um but just start start figuring out who the players are in the field and then you can start thinking about the the PIs the research advisors that are doing that work okay so here's the fun part let's say you've done all that network building you have a good idea of what you want to study you know how you want to do it and you're ready to reach out to the advisor this is terrifying right like you're reaching out to someone who's a brand name in the field that is going to make or break whether you move on into graduate school and start your career so you want to make sure that that email to them is really really strong and I have an activity for us I want us to read a couple of different emails and I want you to tell me what's good about them and what's bad about them so maybe have that mulling in the back of your mind as we read this one okay you guys ready all right dear Dr. X I hope this email finds you well my name is X and I'm reaching out to you to inquire if you're accepting incoming advisees at the master's level for next year as a senior marine science major at X I'm applying to graduate programs this fall with an interest in the effects of anthropogenic impacts on marine ecosystems I find your work incredibly interesting and University of X's master's in ocean and earth sciences is my top choice for graduate school I'd like to work with you as an ad by Z throughout my master's degree I plan to apply for the Fulbright and I'm hoping that you would consider me as an ad by Z thank you for your time and consideration I look forward to your response all right for this one I'd love it if you all could unmute and like let me know what you're thinking let's start with the positives what did this student do well I think they did a great job like introducing themselves and it's very clear like who they are where they come from so if I was getting his email I would know if I even feel comfortable like continuing the conversation based on like my research and where I think that they might fit or might not sure yeah they mentioned their their major that's great they mentioned that they want to do a master's degree yeah they they mentioned their their interests at least um any other positives it seems like they're really excited about doing their master's degree at this specific institution okay uh-huh yeah okay cool let's move on to some areas of improvement because I think there's quite a few what do you all think about areas of improvement okay Ali said way too broad should probably specify a paper to you to show interest absolutely I find your work incredibly interesting did they even like if I'm the professor I don't even know that they know what I do I don't know that they read my papers I don't know if they know what our lab group does you absolutely want to say oh I read x y and z papers I'm really interested in x y and z topic that you explored and yeah like that is all great stuff to include so yeah it was a little bit broad any other areas of improvement how about this research topic the effects of anthropogenic impacts on marine ecosystems what could that mean that could mean anything you could be studying plastic pollution you could be studying sound pollution you could be studying climate change ocean acidification you could be studying any number of things so that is really really broad this is where when you're talking to that research network that you're building of those grad students and other researchers they're going to help you own in on an idea or topic that you really want to study and it's okay if this is your start your start statement is that you want to investigate effects of anthropogenic impacts on marine ecosystems that's great but you definitely want to hone in a little bit and make sure it's tailored to that advisor that you're applying to um I have a question yeah go for it and just basically how you balance uh knowing what you want to study uh for example you mentioned it was too broad but not be too specific that you're like oh I want to study I don't know ants on their Antarctic has something very very specific that don't leave a room for the professor once another thing you know you can't do that yeah that is a fabulous question okay so I'll give you just like a personal anecdote with this one so I I knew that I was interested in food webs that's what I wanted to study and that was my broad broad topic and then I kind of was thinking about what interests me and I'm really into predators like I like the top predators and because I'm an ocean person I was like okay let's go sharks let's go tuna let's go like all these big predatory fish and so I kind of started going down that rabbit hole and there's not a lot of people who study top predators but there are a lot of people who study food webs and are really interested in the ecological questions around that so my advice for that is stick to the the like big picture with a couple ideas of little projects you could do but maybe don't go down into like I want to study ants and I want to study their interaction with this one specific thing because you might not find an advisor that's that's really interested in that one thing so think about the big questions that you want to answer and then little projects for how you could address that and those could be the different chapters of your thesis for example or your dissertation is that helpful yes okay awesome great question um Ali has in the chat I think the whole email is a little too forward uh is it common is it common practice to get to know the potential advisor before telling them you want to work with them that's a good question yeah I mean this is kind of your first point of contact so I think it's good to show that you're interested and after this generally they'll respond and say hey do you have 30 minutes for a facetime or like a zoom or whatever and then you'll kind of start to suss that out and build that relationship after but I think it's okay to say hey I'm really interested in this work I've like looked into your papers it seems like our research interests align and I'd love to meet and talk to you so I think it's okay to be somewhat forward because you are you are making a request um Elizabeth said I feel like this email should request to set up a meeting not directly asked to be an advisor absolutely yeah the last sentence should be do you have 30 minutes to set up a zoom call um and so we can meet in chat okay awesome job you guys this is great let's look on to the next one okay sorry this one's a bit long but here we go Dear Dr. X I hope this email finds you well my name is X and I'm reaching out to you at this time to inquire if you are accepting incoming advisees at the master's level for next year as a senior marine science major and statistics minor at X as well as a very goldwater scholar with extensive marine science undergraduate research experience I'm applying to graduate programs this fall with an interest in exploring anthropogenic impacts on deep-sea ecosystems as well as the process of how to use research results to influence policy I've been referred to your lab by Dr. X in the X lab at X where I've been performing research for the past two years and in doing so have become incredibly interested in your work determining baselines for dial vertical migration and seeing how patterns may change as a result of deep-sea mining I'd like to work with you as an advisee throughout my master's degree should I attend X and I'm currently in the process of applying for NOAA's Nancy Foster program as a way to fund that degree I have outlined an idea for a project below and would love to meet you sometime in the near future would you have 30 minutes or so to meet with me sometime in the next couple weeks here's a sample project idea I have project will establish a baseline of dial vertical migration in the Papa Hanamuku Kea national marine monument here in Hawaii and one for a location in the clarion clarion clipper clarion clipperton zone to use as a comparison these baselines will be established to find a possible after effect of deep-sea mining when mining begins use this as a baseline to see if mining within the CCZ is also affecting the national monument is there a spillover effect spatial transition of organisms away from the mining areas sediment plumes reaching the monument base project question what are the patterns of dial vertical migration within the Papa Hanamuku Kea national monument and the clarion clipperton zone and do they differ in addition I have a attached microculem vitae for your review thank you for your time and consideration and I look forward to your response all right what y'all think let's start with the positives it's more specific and has the hope to action to have a reunion absolutely yeah it's super specific it's asking for the results the impacts of deep-sea mining on a specific thing dial vertical migration which is something a lot of animals do um so that's very specific it's a good one other positives what about that uh the funding thing the student had mentioned that they were applying for oops that oh my goodness oh okay sorry um the student had mentioned that they were applying for Noah's Nancy Foster so that's good they're mentioning that they're pursuing outside funding just in case this professor doesn't have funding um okay see a couple things in the chat they outlined yep funding and plan to pursue exactly thanks Elizabeth okay um what about some things to improve upon it's not concise enough yeah it kind of rambles a little bit right like even as you're reading it it's kind of wordy um professors get tons of these emails and you just want it short sweet to the point so I would say two to three paragraphs straight to the point um and yeah I yeah so it's a it's a bit long um okay little too broad says Emma okay yeah so I think the project goal section is kind of interesting I think it's okay to to say that you're interested in these big topics and then like you know impacts of deep-sea mining and then hone in a little bit on I'd like to look at changes in dial vertical migration patterns I think that's fine I think this section is a little bit a little bit too much in my personal opinion any other things that this student could improve upon and when you say too you think it's too much do you mean sort of going too far I guess I think it's a little unnecessary because I think they mentioned what they were interested in up here right um so for me this is like yeah it's a great idea it has a lot of extra detail but I don't think it's necessary I think that's something you could talk about with the professor once you actually meet them face to face and you can say hey like I have an idea for this project what do you what do you think but for the reach out email I think it's a bit much yeah I agree and it could come off as being sort of arrogant you know the professor thinking wow this person thinks they want to tell me what kind of research we should do and even if that's not the intention they could come across like that totally I have it's more of a question but it's the first couple of lines right is that too straightforward or is it due to be so you know so concise I have like put online writing that's a good question because I think sometimes if you like let's say we had this um we had this bit that's saying I'm reaching out to you and to inquire if you're accepting uh incoming advisees at the master's level let's say that was the last thing that the student had put the professor would have to get through multiple paragraphs before even realizing what the email's about so I think it's okay to upfront just say hey I'm a I'm a prospective graduate student um and I'm wondering if you're taking students next year for either masters and PhD I think that's that's okay um yeah I think it's very clear what the student is asking for I think they made a great case for why they should go to graduate school and it looks like they did their research on a couple different topics that person studies um they were recommended by a lab so that's interesting um the last thing that I wanted to say is a big positive for this is they attached a CV so you should absolutely attach your resume or your CV to this so that way if the professor's interested they can go and look through your different research experiences publications um if you have any um and all of that kind of stuff that you've been involved in so definitely include your CV as well as a question maybe yeah maybe just like getting to know your uh the professors what they really do so they'll know that you're sincere and you know just you're not just like wanted to hurry up and just throw all this um broad subject on him and just trying to like get him confused and what you really want to do you know absolutely yeah absolutely and make sure you know what they do like read a bunch of their papers and make sure that you actually are a good fit with their lab um look at their lab pages and see that um another thing uh when you're looking at their lab web pages sometimes there's a tab that says we're accepting new students or something along those lines and I even saw it in one it said um write to me in the headline your favorite color and say uh I'm a prospective graduate student so that professor was checking to make sure that they'd done their homework and like looked through the lab web page and made sure they were following directions so please do your due diligence because they'll just ignore if you if you didn't okay cool um when you guys are reaching out to potential advisors feel free to email me I'm happy to look over your your reach out emails we can give feedback we can kind of talk through that process so please feel free to reach out if you um if you want some help with that part of it um I see uh Valo in the chat it's a good idea uh to attach a piece of your work such as a poster presentation or a project uh also create an update your LinkedIn page it does get looked at you can upload a poster PDF to LinkedIn yeah great advice okay um so we kind of covered a lot of this I'll just go through this quick but tips for email emailing potential advisors introduce yourself and the ask that you're applying to graduate school mention your research interests and briefly any experience you may have relate that to their research interests and highlight overlaps mention their specific publications that you actually read because they might ask you about it later in your your phone call um list any funding opportunities that you're applying for ask if they're taking students and if they have time to meet attach your CV to the email and thank them for their time and no more than two and a half to three paragraphs total it should be concise short sweet to the point um your CV will detail a lot of the stuff you've done and you can talk to them later okay how do you guys feel about emailing professors do you have a good idea of what you should include okay Samad that's great thumbs up yes I wanted to ask if they respond the first time I would say that it's okay to send a second but maybe a third it's absolutely okay yep that was the last point but I forgot I had it here be persistent it's okay if they don't respond the first time they get tons of these emails and they are very very busy I'd say give it a week they don't respond after a week you can reply and say hi just checking in um you know my name is Blake uh click summary again I'm a graduate I'm a prospective graduate student really interested in this work um I'd love to chat with you if you have the time and that's okay it's not pushy it's just like a little reminder um and you can email even up to three times I'd say maybe after three just kind of give it up um I will say my friend one of my friends is in the physical oceanography department and she emailed her professor three times he ignored it the first time the second time and then the third time she responded and he responded back and said oh you really are serious about this okay let's have a phone call and we can we can talk through it so um don't get discouraged if they don't respond at first you can absolutely follow up okay cool let's move on to the next part so let's say you've done all this you've reached out to a faculty member and they've responded and they said yes I'd love to meet um what do you talk about in the first time that you're meeting with them um I just want to say it can be a casual conversation or it can be a full-blown interview so my my advisor the first time that I talked to him I thought we were just gonna like get to know each other and like talk about a research interest no it was a full-blown interview he was asking me like in like full on interview questions so let's go through what some of the things they could ask you are expect an interview prepare to be asked about yourself why do you want to go to graduate school what are your research interests what are your previous research experiences what work experience do you have if applicable um what are your long-term career goals be prepared for those questions and be prepared to talk about yourself so just answer those questions for yourself and have them prepared in your mind um secondly you are interviewing them they are not just interviewing you because you want to find out if this is a good fit so come prepared with questions if they say do you have any questions for me and you say no it's kind of showing them that you're not really that interested so these are some questions you can ask them about um how would you describe your advising style um what is your labs culture like um what are your expectations for your students um what is the school like what is uh what about the program do you want to know more about and uh other great things to ask or what's it like living in this location what's the cost of living there what's the lifestyle like um and this will really show that you're serious and you can ask a lot of these questions to the graduate students as well to figure out if this is a good fit for you okay so uh be be prepared for an interview okay so that's kind of the whole process in a nutshell do you all have any questions for me yeah Jalen hi can you hear me okay uh yeah I can hear you okay awesome um it's Jalen but also um it's okay can you go into kind of the nitty gritty of applying like when you apply did you have to do you know personal insight questions did you have to do three letters of black did you have to do a cv or a resume or both did you have to do a cover letter just like the actual like online portal type application process like can you go over like your experience with that and what you need to get in order before you even press send yeah no absolutely so the the application itself is going to depend on the school that you apply to essentially um so it could vary but uh yeah we definitely had letters of rec there was like a personal statement um I think that was kind of it but some some schools might ask for like a research statement where you have to kind of outline what your idea of your project is and hopefully your advisor would help you with that if they were serious about admitting you um for the personal statement there's a lot of things that go into a personal statement and we're actually going to have um a gfp workshop a little bit later where we're going to go through how to write a personal statement so if you would be interested in attending that we'll go into a lot more detail but um personal statement is a great place to say who you are why you're interested in science and why they should pick you over another student what's the unique perspective that you bring um you can talk about your previous research experiences um I would highlight the like the tools that you have built from those research experiences say like I I have these research skills um I know how to do this lab work um I presented at these conferences um I do this work with the community in terms of education and outreach like those are all things that you should include in the personal statement um did that answer your question I'm sorry if I missed a part of it no that was great um I have kind of a follow-up question so do you talk to I guess professors or potential p.i.s and all of that before you even apply to a school like let's say I want to go to MIT before I even look at the application I need to be talking to people getting research done because it's not the other way around you're shaking your head so I'm guessing it's like I should talk to people first you are absolutely correct um the best way that I can describe the graduate school application process this is going to sound dumb it's like dating um you are going to basically do some light online stalking maybe look at their Instagram and see if you you're interested um you're going to look at their lab page you're going to look at some of their publications and then when you reach out that's like the first contact email and they're going to look at you and say huh like okay I'm interested in this student and then you have your first date and you you meet online and you do the little the little interview and if everything goes well they'll say why don't you talk to my graduate students so now you're meeting the family right so you're you're talking to the graduate students and they might even invite you to a lab meeting and then at this point you should maybe be a little wary that they're probably seeing other people and you're probably seeing other people as well and you're you're talking to other professors they're talking to other students and then if it's serious they'll they'll probably ask you for a zoom call and they'll really um they'll really show you that they're committed and say hey I want you to apply to the program I think you'd be a great fit and that's when you should apply and submit your application if you do what you do in undergrad and just send an application to a bunch of different schools that is an excellent way to waste about five hundred dollars um so this this process is expensive it is time intensive it is hard but I hope that you all feel like you have a little bit of a support network we're happy to help you through this um but to answer your question yes please please please do that whole process talk to the professor before you apply um sorry I just want to say there are some exceptions my friend is in a biochemistry program and it's a little bit reversed she actually just submit an application and then when she got admitted they did like rotations to figure out who the advisor was after so it depends on the program but for most natural sciences it's it's this way that they do it but um yeah be aware that different schools do different things we're checking out right because that that can be the case where you apply to the department and then they decide together who want to do with funding too what funding is available absolutely yeah and I would say um maybe reach out to some graduate students maybe not even in the the lab that you want to apply to but maybe reach out to some graduate students at that school and ask them how the process was for them and that's the best way you can you can get an insight into that and ask them also just do they like this person to say are they a good advisor and you know if you want to keep an eye out for people that are trouble I mean not all these people are nice and or good advisors so it's important to avoid terrible advisors so do find out what you know from as he says from uh ideally grad students you can also kind of ask office staff they're not supposed to say much but they might you know they might say oh so and so is fabulous that kind of thing um but yeah it's it's uh and it's a big undertaking but you know in the end hopefully um you get the job that you'd really enjoy that's a little bit more complicated or in a good way than maybe without a degree like a master's degree so it's um it can be really worthwhile um but it's not an easy I think it's not an easy experience as as you've seen you know what the regards to like the pay and the cost of living and the effort and all of that the time I just want to mention about funding because Val just mentioned it um some schools I just want to say like the the University of California system uh they have money for TAs to bring in new students so even if the advisor doesn't have funding they'll say oh you can TA for the first couple of years but at for example at my school they don't offer TA shifts to um first-year incoming students so just ask you know it's a different situation at every at every place and the TA being did you maybe you said a teaching assistantship so for example teaching labs for you know what do you call them seminars right um yeah go for it oh yeah uh sorry you just had a question um when to do this like let's say I want to enter grad school fall of 2025 when should I start making the contact uh with professors and things like that that is an excellent question and I'm actually going to link you to something really quick okay um everyone please feel free to use this I'm going to drop this link in the chat um this is a google drive that I put together and it's almost like a step by step for how to get into graduate school and the very first document in there has a timeline um and that is a great thing to look at um but to answer your question just out loud um I would say July is a great time to start thinking about which you know we're coming up on start thinking about the graduate school process maybe start reaching out to some of the graduate students or researchers to talk and kind of build your ideas I would say reaching out to a professor that should happen probably like late August early September um October can kind of be pushing it so I would aim for September early September and then there are fellowships that have deadlines like the g rfp's deadline is like around October 20th so if you reach out earlier rather than later that's a great time to ask them for feedback on your personal statements on your research statements those kinds of things so I would shoot for like mid to probably mid August to mid September is a good time to shoot for for reaching out 2024 in your case yeah right yeah you would be reaching out in fall of 2023 to start graduate school in fall 2020 yeah basically a year before right right thanks yeah um and again with the whole funding thing we're gonna have another workshop on that I'd totally encourage you all to go it is so important if you have your own funding like when I reached out to advisors I got a bunch of no's and I think I got one yes before before funding and then I had applied to the g rfp I ended up somehow getting an award which is great and then that pays for my stipend for three years and it's literally a golden ticket to any school you want to go to that advisor will say yep I'm happy to have you because you're funding yourself the funding is the the main barrier to entry here so fellowships can really help with that speaking of which I also have I will show this in the fellowship workshop as well but this is a guide for the g rfp I followed someone else's guide and it worked so hopefully this can help a lot of you and one tip is that and when you're applying to these big fellowships if you apply that they have requirements of writing statements and it might be like a personal statement or a research or interest statement that kind of thing and if you if you have to do that for for those scholarships it's actually a good kind of way to learn how to do it for applying to grad school because in graduate schools they often ask for these statements as well and in the scholarship workshop that Blake leads and will put on later in the summer he does a really great job of of coaching coaching you on how to write these statements yeah thanks pal um I see some questions in the chat I might move to to those if that's all right did anyone have anything they wanted to say out loud before we move on to the chat um you mentioned uh the funding uh workshop one would that be okay um Val can you uh consult the schedule I'm actually not I actually oh sorry I didn't I couldn't hear the question when is it is that oh yeah when is when is the fellowship workshop oh we haven't we haven't scheduled that actually oh okay we're yeah you're doing some more grad school ones first okay yeah no worries okay so we will send out that information yeah we'll send it out I've got if you you know registered to come here which I have your we have your email so I can send out the the schedule for that and also Blake is he's just an amazing mentor so if you were to write to him and say can we meet and look at my cd or something or talk about grad school he is that's his his passion and he is just such such a help with that thank you Val um that's very nice yeah please feel free to email me at any time we can totally set up a time to chat and go through it I love when we get to like talk one-on-one and you can tell me about like what research interests you have and then we can start kind of helping you go from there so please reach out if you uh if you would like to okay um I'm gonna go to the chat so Casey asked is it okay to reach out to two advisors from the same school yeah if you know for sure you want to go to a certain school and there's multiple advisors that you could see yourself fitting with totally reach out and see where it goes with each of them um I would say if it starts getting more serious and one of them thinks that they want to admit you maybe maybe start to pick which one you would want um but my advice with that is tailor your email to each of them say I read these papers for you and I read these papers for you don't just send them the same email um and yeah it's okay to have some similarities but they're gonna they're gonna know essentially at some point if you're talking to another professor in their department so you can do it um but yeah if you start to feel like you're gonna go with one over the other then um I think it's good to let them know okay um oh thank you Davina um okay next question from Emma um how soon should you start applying before you want to go okay yeah so the application process um I guess most of the deadlines are in December for the actual schools but I would start early start in like August September with this whole process and then the application is actually in December and you'll generally know if you got in by March or April okay um Allison great question how many professors should you reach out to here's what's tough this takes so much time to read people's papers to reach out to them to talk to their graduate students to do all of this stuff so I would recommend when you're starting make a list of maybe like 10 10 faculty members that you want to work with and then from there kind of start to weigh out okay which schools do I want to go to which programs look good and who's a good mentor and maybe you'll start to winnow out some of those those uh bottom ones in your in your personal ranking um from there like maybe top five are good ones to like reach out to but you can always keep those other ones uh to reach out to if the first top five don't respond or something like that so I would say like make your ranking and by the end of it you should apply to maybe like five schools it is expensive to apply so keep that in mind as well if you have the financial means then sure apply to a bunch I didn't so I applied to three um okay oh val said you make it sound terrifying I don't want to make it sound terrifying it was the dating analogy that oh gotcha no this is like a daunting process but we want to make sure that you you feel confident going into it and you feel supported going into it so don't don't be afraid but you can do it and it'll work out hopefully oh also if it doesn't work out the first time you can apply again like sometimes it just takes the right professor to get the right grant at the right time and maybe they'll say hey I don't have funding this year but next year I'm looking for a new student on this project so be open to things not going according to plan um also with that um I reached out to a bunch of researchers at NOAA when I was doing this whole process and um I was talking to one of them about the research and like I was like I want to go to graduate school and basically at the end of the conversation he was like oh so like when can you start and I was like what do you mean and he's like oh we have a position open that's doing this this and this it sounds like you're really interested in this topic like would you want to do it and I was like yeah like I'll fly for the job but I want to go to graduate school so I had a backup just from talking to someone so you never know what's going to happen keep your options open um okay Allie said can you go in some detail on your specific undergrad preparation um do you mean like a research experiences in undergrad or um would you mind clarifying that Allie oh yes and grades oh boy grades okay so uh in undergrad uh my like first I guess introduction to research was uh I worked in a bug lab which is like not even remotely close to what I do now but um that lab was awesome I basically like they had a project with a bunch of like it was frog stomachs and I was basically going through and pulling out different bugs from the frog stomachs and then the grad student would like sequence them and do his project but um the grad student told me that I could do my own senior thesis if I stuck with that for a year so then in junior year she kind of like taught us how to do all of the like the molecular stuff DNA extraction sequencing PCR all that good stuff and then my senior year I did a senior research project um it was by no means like a solid project but it was great experience trying to like get funding to go through all the lab work to write up the results like it was just great practice so that was one that I had and then um we had to study a broad program in Tahiti and when you go to Tahiti you spent three months designing and doing your own research project so I did a bunch of fish surveys in a marine protected area um and in a non-marine protected area and I compared them um and I really wanted to get that work published so I picked like a very very low impact journal that like this was again not a fancy project it was literally two months but um I got that published and that was awesome um and then my third research opportunity was I did an REU program so I was I have to say like I was very very fortunate to have people to help me through that process and I want to acknowledge that that is not the case for everyone so I am not by any means what you have to have to go to graduate school I would say your REU program is fantastic if you've done another research experience in your university that's great um but yeah just get involved with research where you can try to get publications post your presentations try to go to conferences all of that is going to be great experience for applying to graduate school but it is not necessary by any means um grades my grades were like okay like they varied depending on the class but again a professor really wants to see that you have the potential with the research they don't really care as much about the grades usually so um it's okay if you're not the strongest let's say with a couple different classes that you struggled with it's okay yeah Val yeah um in terms of the um applying now what was I gonna say I'm lost my mind I thought um oh well I'll have to come back to it I just lost it sorry no worries um did that answer your question Ali did you want um more clarification or anything okay great yeah it's it's less about the the academic record and more about do you have the drive and the passion and can they see that you've had maybe some experiences that indicate you're ready for this this uh next step of your career yeah Val it came back um so one thing is that with your current program that you're in an internship program of some kind of you know research this is something to really like blow up on your resume like make it big you can you can describe a lot about what you're doing you can even include if you're writing a resume for instance you can include some of the different things under different categories but for example um if it was like um technical skills or something like that and you put you put down um you know python took one course and used it in my research to analyze the incoming and outgoing radiation data from um and car models or solid data that model output um and so it's people generally I think undergraduates often don't they they underplay their experience in their resume and this research experience there's just a lot of different things that you can include like for example you're taking you're here at this workshop right this is considered a professional development workshop and so you you could put down on your resume professional development as a category and then include any of these seminars that you go to that are not like science content but they are about other things like diversity or anti-arrest or ethics or all of those so um if you're if you're um if you're our internship manager doesn't think to do this or your teachers whoever is instructing you on writing that ask them to help on the on a board for example help you know all of you like in your group how to write um how to write about your internship in the resume um and I made a web page about this and I don't know if it still applies and looked at in a while but it had the most views of any of the web pages that I had put up which was so it's like how to write how to include your internship in your in your research in your resume another thing is um think about projects projects are really interesting to grad schools and to employers because you know you're working maybe with a group you're having to analyze and think about the design of the project maybe you're writing about it maybe you're making plots you're you know working with different people doing fieldwork all of that kind of thing and so think about course projects that you have done like you know semester long project or something like that and then describe it as though it was you know it was a research experience so you could put a have a category of like research experiences that actually includes some projects that you've done in undergraduate um and then one last thought is um if if you have I guess you all have one more year at least in university if you if you want to get more in your case more research experience and you think you can handle the time and that really depends on what other things you have going on in your course load um you could you can um see if a professor at your school would be willing to have you work with them either on an independent study or a some of their research maybe crunching data for them for example or doing some lab work and maybe you get to work with their group you start to be invited to their weekly meeting and by the end of one just one semester it's you can put it down as research experience like you are a research assistant in this lab and because there are many many more students than there are internships like at least three times too many I mean relative to internships it's worth passing it on to friends as well like there are ways to get some experience now in that case you have to have the resources like maybe if you're working a job also you don't have the time that kind of thing and then you know hopefully they'll pay you if you can afford it and you can do it voluntarily if they can't pay you that it still gives you some experience to include in your application yeah okay thanks Val um I'm sorry uh huh oh no it's okay I was going to add one more idea sure okay so if you're not sure about you know what area to to study and investigate and in addition to the great tips that Blake gave you about you know looking at papers and classes that you enjoyed another another thing I like to do is can do this on indeed but also also just on the web you can let's say you put in keywords that might be a place you would consider living this is just sort of exploring ideas of like what kind of jobs you might want in the future let's say you put down you know Dallas and hurricanes and just then but instead of just clicking on the regular all button you click on the news button of the web browser and so what comes up with the news button is stories in the news and maybe you mess around with the keywords a little bit but or you might say like Boston environmental justice and then things come up and it's stories that you can read about and then read about who's doing it and you know that helps that can help um you've kind of explore a little bit because I think when we're in university it's easy to think mainly about what you're taught at school and not necessarily or what you're learning at school and not necessarily what is really your passion you know like if you want to do environmental justice pretty decent chance you didn't really get to do that if you're in the natural sciences and so take a look like let yourself explore beyond what any professor has ever talked about things that matter to you that's all I have awesome all right so Emma had another question in the chat which was how do you know if a program requires you to reach out to advisor first I would assume that that's the baseline is that you need to reach out um if you're talking to graduate students and they say no you just apply to the school and you do rotations then take that into account but I would assume for most programs that you need to reach out to the advisors that's generally how it goes and there's usually a grad um I don't know what they're called in the office like the front office of the department some kind of grad school person who you can ask as well or you know the main administrative assistant or whoever they'll tell you as well yep absolutely um Ali asked can you provide the link on how to write your internship in your resume webpage oh okay I looked for it Val we used to do that workshop of including the are you in the resume maybe we should bring that back maybe we should yeah yeah well we have one in a few weeks or a month that is um about cover letters resumes and that kind of thing and so we could we could include it there gotcha yeah I liked that one because we had all the students like uh tell us about their their project and then the things they learned and then we kind of like helped them get it into like a all right a little bullet like that was really fun I liked that one okay maybe we should bring that back okay anyway sorry sorry guys um does anyone else have any other questions about graduate school no I just wanted to say thank you uh uh Navo Technical University that's that's why I'm a student so sometimes you're lacking um mentors to share their experiences on like um grad school or you know just um try to use their their resources that's out there and so who are you gonna talk to and so I just have like a few mentors there that you know if it wasn't for him I won't be here today you know to where I'm going so so I want to reach out more to other mentors to be able to get more experiences and to learn so I just want to know thank you for providing you know all the the insights of you know your experiences so I just thankful thank you oh of course thank you so much yeah thanks for being here you all like this is this is great um and I hope that we can also be uh resources for you as well if if you're starting to go through this process and you have questions and and need any help please feel free to reach out Emma this is not actually the web page that that I made I I haven't found it yet but it's one that's similar so you can also look around as well um I'll take a look for it though and I can send out we can send out resources from today to your email yeah including the slides and then the links to the different google drives and stuff like that we can send that as well yeah we're so glad to have you it's so nice to have a small group actually where we can talk a little bit better um is any chance I could ask everybody to um open turn on their video so I could do a quick uh screenshot photo okay I'll do a partial oh there we go oh right okay smile oh there we go we got more people coming oh look two people in one room hi okay you ready Noah and Katie are you're not coming on oh there they are all right okay smile and wave and I'm gonna do one more um let's see we don't do this very often and not enough okay one more okay thank you um and then we can also send this to your um you know your re leaders and maybe to the nsf funders because it's fun for them to see like real human beings and not just read about reports and things anyway good for you coming to this it's the kind of thing you think oh I didn't I don't really have time for it but these things can really help make a difference and I think good for you hats off to you for coming and it was lovely to to meet you yeah if you all have any more questions my email I just put it in the chat feel free to reach out happy to chat whenever um so yeah thanks so much for coming and yeah if anyone wants to hang out hang out a little bit after and ask other questions you're totally welcome too bye everyone