Things you wish you would have known your undergraduate Freshman year (Physics)...

Graduate School
1

<p>Hey everyone.</p>

<p>I have mixed feelings about CC. I hate it but it has taught me so much.</p>

<p>Anyways,</p>

<p>I got into MIT last month and I'm interested in becoming a successful physics researcher. I know that to enter the academia you need a Ph.D. so i was wondering if you guys (those of you who know the "system") have any tips, recommendations or pointers.</p>

<p>I've never done research but i will start looking for opportunities in my first semester, even if it means "cleaning dishes" for a while.</p>

<p>by the way, i come from a disadvantaged background (URM, first generation, low income, immigrant, etc.) so some of the things that are obvious for you might not be as obvious to me. Please keep this in mind. (my mother didn't know what MIT was)</p>

<p>--------------------->>>>What do YOU wish you would have known as a freshman of college??????<<<<---------------------</p>

<p>(the question can be answered as a physics major, MIT undergraduate, graduate school aspirant, graduate school student, college professor, etc. i am most concerned with getting into a strong graduate program)</p>

<p>please refrain from using personal stories (I'm in XYC college with a #.# GPA, what are my chances?), unless they help illustrate your point</p>

<p>-a million thanks!</p>

2

<p>First thing you should know is that you may think you know what you want to do, but you will probably change your mind. Some people know right away, but it isn’t necessarily common. So don’t box yourself into one path right away, don’t stack your schedule in one direction your first semester or even your first year.</p>

<p>So to make a list of things I wish I knew:

  1. Balancing work and pleasure- if you aren’t also having fun you will become depressed and get no work done. Go out and party with friends. If you focus all week studying then it is mandatory to go out during the weekend with your friends at least once. Find a girlfriend/boyfriend. College is an experience, don’t ruin it by doing too much work or too much play.
  2. Don’t screw yourself with your schedule, plan ahead. Look at what you need to graduate then spread out your hard classes. Don’t take all your gen eds and end up having to take all upper level classes in your major later on. I’m a math major and I love math, but that doesn’t mean I want to take 5 math classes at the same time. Problem sets can take hours and hours to complete, I don’t want to even think about what it would be like to try to complete 5 per week or two.
  3. Make your first semester easy. Don’t take all lab science and math classes.
  4. Go in and see your professors, ask for their advice and guidance. Chat them up, you’ll need them for recs.</p>
3

<p>awesome. thanks.</p>

<p>Well the only reason i want to start planning right now is because i expect people at MIT to be way ahead of me academically. Speeding up for two or three years might just jump start my physics career and have positive ripple effects throughout the rest of my life.</p>

<p>what is your opinion about getting the Humanities requirements done as fast as possible? is there any benefit to this? (being able to take grad. physics senior year, and such?)</p>

<p>what are the benefits of working in p-set groups? In HS i work alone on my problem sets because i find that people (even those who are going to ivy schools) slow me down.</p>

<p>what do you think is the best way to expose yourself to different fields? such as learning to differentiate mechanical engineering vs. theoretical physics vs. experimental physics vs. chemistry and what skills each requires.</p>

<p>is there any benefit to doing a math/physics double major or a physics with a minor in math for grad school in experimental physics? what about for theoretical physics?</p>

<p>sorry if i’m getting a little ahead of myself. I’ve been successful in HS because i have always planned ahead.</p>

4

<p>remember, things might not always go your way in college… but i agree it’s good to plan ahead… not too far ahead tho… and be OPEN to different things… if you find out that you like econ more than physics… don’t be too reluctant about dropping physics… your first love might not be your true love</p>

5

<p>I’m a 2006 MIT grad (biology/brain and cog sci).

This is not really a good idea. You can take grad physics classes any time you want (even freshman year, if you’d really like to do so), and taking one humanities class per term is a good way to keep yourself sane. It’s tough to take four science classes in a term at MIT – it’s doable, but it’s tough. Taking a HASS per semester is a good thing.</p>

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You will probably not find that people at MIT slow you down, and the benefit to working in pset groups (other than the social interaction) is mostly that sometimes psets are too hard to do by yourself.</p>

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No cleaning dishes. :slight_smile: UROPs have real work to do.</p>

<p>I’m copying your thread to the MIT forum; pebbles, who’s a senior in the physics department, might be able to help you more than I can.</p>

6

<p>You don’t need to put quotes around washing dishes. That is exactly what you’ll do to prove your dedication to the lab for at least a couple of months. I question these programs that give undergrads with no research experience, independent projects. I feel that independent research should be reserved for people who have at least put in some time in the lab or have experience that would suggest they could be moderately successful at it.</p>

7

<p>to belevitt: well everyone starts somewhere. Washing dishes, i think, simply exposes you to the field of research.</p>

<p>Thank you so much everyone!</p>

<p>keep it coming :-)</p>

8

<p>Well, dear lord, there are intermediates between washing dishes and having an independent project.</p>

<p>I can’t think of anybody I knew at MIT who started off actually washing dishes, or making media, or whatever. The labs and centers pay people do that kind of thing, but that’s not a research job.</p>

9

<p>If your lab wants you to wash dishes/do menial tasks for a couple of months (ie, do only those things) to prove that you’re dedicated, it’s time to find a new lab.</p>

10

<p>I can’t believe you two. It was completely standard at UW for people to do this for the first couple months or so of their tenure in a lab. Nobody saw this as degrading, they were simply “undergrad duties” and were expected to be done by the undergrads in the lab. I think if you can’t see past putting in a small amount of menial labor, you may not make as a researcher.</p>

11

<p>I agree with Euler321. I have to always remind myself that this is my life, and I better be, for the most part, always enjoying everything, because otherwise it is not worth it. If you balance your life you will concentrate better, and you will study better. And the key thing is that ‘balance’ doesn’t mean having a negative impact on your grades. I find that for me, a very important thing is being active - year round, outside (gyms don’t cut it for me, but -12C + windchill morning runs, do!) - is key to my happiness. I often let this slide in favor of studying, or because I’m so sleep-deprived, but in the end, my concentration and my mood falls, and my studying is much worse. You shouldn’t be partying all the time, but I figure this is probably true for you to to some extent, I like what I’m learning a lot, and thus, I like studying. No, I don’t like a lot of my profs, or the lecture material per se sometimes, but in general, I really really enjoy what I’m learning about (how can the brain ever not be cool), so, I don’t have this temptation to slack majorly and party all the time… productivity, good grades, doing well, and learning just for the sake of learning, make me feel good. If that’s true for you, believe me, your grades wont suffer if you balance your academic life with whatever else makes you happy. </p>

<p>Obviously, don’t take to extremes. I mean, exams come, I’m studying 18 hours a day and I’m usually so stressed out I’m eating all of my meals in my study carrel in the library. But overall, enjoy it. Because there’s always going to be a lot of work, and always more goals to achieve, after undergrad, grad school, then the research and the pressure to churn-out as many papers as possible comes in, and getting grants, etc. But you got to (1) enjoy it and enjoy the stresses to some extent to but (2) have a life outside of it so that you don’t burn out and actually continue enjoying it. </p>

<p>With regard to research, at my university (Toronto) the kind of lab experience you have seems to vary very much from prof to prof. I never did any of the ‘dish-washing’ type of stuff but that’s because I came in as a second-year research student, vs. emailing them and asking to volunteer. So I started with running behavioural tests on mice and doing sectioning and cell counting on confocal microscopes, and by the end of the year i was doing stereotaxic surgery and running my own groups of animals from start to finish. Definitely go in and talk to profs. I think being in a lab (my lab is awesome) has also been one of the best things for me in undergrad. I really enjoy research (not sure how I can say this with the amount of boring stuff it comes with), but seeing the science and being able to stay excited about it and not be jaded by all the negatives is important. I think.</p>

12

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<p>This isn’t about a person’s character, if you don’t have to do it, why do it? I’ve also never heard of anyone who’s had to be “initiated” in that way. On the other hand, you do your own research and you clean up after yourself.</p>

13

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<p>All of the labs did this? Seriously? For MONTHS? How many hours per week? All you were allowed to do was wash glassware and stuff tip boxes, etc.? Which UW is this (Madison or Seattle?)?</p>

<p>I think it’s kind of silly to have such an “initiation” in place. Not everyone is ready to jump right into an independent project, but I think at the very least someone can assist a grad student or post-doc and then also do the menial duties a few hours per week, which is perfectly reasonable. But SOLELY doing menial tasks seems silly.</p>

14

<p>UW Madison. This was standard practice and while there were a few undergrads who lacked the dedication to make it work out, it was better that they did this before they had people relying on them. I don’t feel that this is silly at all. It wasn’t just initiation either; undergrad duties were shared by all undergrads in the lab and were expected to be done each week in addition to anything else you might be doing. I know that this is also the situation in the lab that my sister works at at University of colorado in Boulder. I guess those of you who didn’t have to do undergrad duties should consider yourself lucky.</p>

15

<p>I did/do undergrad duties, but I’m also working on a project, so most of my time is devoted to that. It just seems excessive to me. I think a better way to get someone acclimated to the environment would be to stick him/her on a small, low-impact project and see how that pans out–in addition to doing undergrad duties a few hours per week. I do work in a pretty small lab, though, so there’s not a lot of menial stuff to do.</p>

16

<p>I guess I just live on some sort of alternate planet – I never had any “undergrad duties”, and the undergrads in my thesis lab don’t have any duties. All of the researchers, undergrad and otherwise, make their own reagents, we employ a dishwasher to wash the dishes once a week, and the lab’s technicians aliquot antibodies and pour plates.</p>

<p>It’s not that I think that routine lab tasks are “beneath” undergrads, but they’re not things undergrads specifically do in my lab, any more than they’re things grad students specifically do in my lab. Undergrads in my lab are like grad students on training wheels.</p>

17

<p>It is great to hear that some schools have the budget to employ somebody specifically to wash dishes and pour plates and whatnot. I was blown away when I joined my current department and they had a person who picked up the biohazard waste bins and an autoclave service.</p>