Letters to My Grad-Student Self: A Blog about the Research Experience

Well, it’s time: I’m finally taking a step into the world of blogging. While I've thrown this idea around at various times in the past, it was my recent completion of grad school, in addition to conversations with students over the years, which ultimately pushed the project forward. I also set up this professional website last month, and the template I used had space for a “research blog.” How convenient!

This blog will discuss insights from various aspects of the research experience, and the first series will focus specifically on lessons that I’ve learned from graduate school. These ideas have been years in development, but this is the first time I’ll be compiling them in one place to share with others. Since the graduate school experience is still very recent for me, I want to write these thoughts down now while they’re relatively fresh in my mind.

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A little background on why I’m starting this blog…

After seven years, I finally completed my PhD in geology this spring, and am now working on a post-doctoral fellowship. While seven years is certainly not a world record for “longest PhD duration,” such a timeline was unfathomable to me when I started my program in the fall of 2012. Looking back, however, I can see that all of the “detours” and “delays” taught me more about research than I ever could have learned if my project was straightforward (I think many would agree that this principle applies to life in general).

The spring quarter of my first year of grad school was one of the most intense stages of my program. I had been thrust fully into grad school life, and was scrambling to write a proposal and prepare for my first committee meeting while still trying to understand what I was supposed to do. As I struggled to process all of these challenges, I simultaneously remember thinking that I was the only one who was having trouble like this; whenever I would express frustration about various issues, people would say, “Yep, that’s grad school.”

And I found myself asking, “What is grad school?”

I subsequently realized that I was, in fact, not the only one who felt this way.

Over time, I gained confidence as I began to learn important lessons that would shape the foundation of my graduate experience and development as a scientist. It is my plan to share these stories in future blog posts. But as I learned about various facets of the graduate school experience, I remember thinking that these insights could have helped me while I dealt with challenges as a newer student. I told myself that one day I would write a book on grad school, and it would be titled, What is grad school? I’ve since abandoned the name, and have decided to start with this blog instead of a book, but the goal is the same.

My intent for the blog is to be a source of encouragement for researchers and current graduate students (especially those in the early stages of their programs), and to share some of the most important lessons I’ve learned from my research experience. Therefore, I’m titling this first series, Letters to My Grad-Student Self: A Blog About The Research Experience. I do not plan to format the posts like actual “letters,” but the idea is that they will be notes which would have been helpful to me in grad school, particularly during the initial years of my program. The blog may eventually include other miscellaneous thoughts/posts about geology or research-related topics; it’s my first time blogging, so we’ll see how it goes.

Anyway, this initial post ended up being longer than I planned (like my PhD program :). But I hope that – if you’ve read this far – the insights shared in this and future posts will be encouraging and helpful to you.