It’s that time again when I have to take an important decision – choosing my thesis advisor/lab. Its funny that each time I have to make an important decision, I feel like I just cannot afford to make a wrong choice here. Though in the past, I have made some wrong choices at times, I could work my way through them and it never felt like all things would come to an end. However, choosing an advisor is a totally different issue on all levels. If I went wrong here, things could be brutal and all that I had to do to come this far could just come crashing down.
The more I think about it, the more I realize that this is one decision which will decide so many other things in my career in science. This is my 3rd and last rotation and though I am glad I was able to eliminate one of the three pretty easily, choosing between the two remaining still seems a daunting task. These days almost every day ends with me adding more and more things in the pros and cons lists in my head and thinking so hard to the extent that I’m really drained out of energy. However, it did give me a good chance to think about what are the things that I really need - to be able to do some good and important science.
Freedom – I join a lab, I pick a problem a statement that I find really interesting and try to answer it in the best way possible. I realized it’s very important for me that I am the person designing my research with my advisor and not have somebody else do it for me where I just end up doing what someone else proposed. It should be like my story, my very first story in science :)
Support – More than half the things you do tend to not work in biology. Then begins the troubleshooting and I should mention that though the joy of discovering what went wrong and fixing it and getting working assays is truly satisfying, it does take time to nail down the culprit. It is this time when you probably need the most support from your peers in the lab and your advisor – when things refuse to work. You need people who could throw at you many more possibilities why the assay is not working and through all this, your advisor giving you a helping hand.
People – I have come to believe that it’s a huge resource to have a set of motivated people around you to bounce ideas off. I’ve been a part of several labs in the past and I’ve seen lab meetings where people just listen to the speaker’s work, ask a few questions and leave and meetings where the others in the lab actually make a good effort to see how the speaker’s project can be made better – what would be another cool thing that can be done at this point, what would that one big idea be to claim your hypothesis convincingly. The synergy is amazing – everybody trying to make each other’s project better and better. Oh well, I am glad I was able to sample such labs as well.
There could be several other things that someone else in my stage could come up with but I figured to me the most important things would be the freedom and the support; maybe I could compromise for the 3rd factor but definitely not the first two. Another few weeks and I’d have this choice made. And that would mark my first success in grad school :)
