If you want to be a professional biologist (or any professional scientist) you will probably need to get one or more graduate degrees. (There are exceptions to this, but your career possibilities will be more limited.) This complicates matters in some respects and simplifies it in others. Let me mostly focus on ways it simplifies matters.
Going to grad school will give you the chance to move someplace for a few years before eventually moving on to yet someplace else. This is great for a few reasons. You get a chance to see what it’s like to move—maybe it won’t be as bad as you think. You defer making a more permanent decision until you’re older and have more experience. You (maybe) get to see another part of the country for some perspective on where you live now. Even if you wind up not liking the place you go very much, it’ll still have been a good experience for these reasons.
If your parents are remotely reasonable, they have to be more ok with you moving away for solid career-related reasons than they would be with you moving away for more nebulous lifestyle-related reasons. (Although from this and your other thread, it sounds like your parents might actually not be remotely reasonable at all.)
However, if you get some admission offers from grad programs, they might pay your travel expenses to go there and check out the programs. Furthermore, most good science PhD programs will fully fund your studies and living expenses, so saving up a bunch of money before moving isn’t really an issue. Having this kind of financial freedom will enable you to defy your parents’ ridiculousness about this. (You won’t be living high on the hog by any means, but you’ll have enough to get by.)
If you can get good advice from your college professors about which grad programs would be a good match for your interests and aptitudes, this will usefully constrict your options and help you overcome the paralysis of choice. While ultimately you may want to be more discriminating about where you move for the long run, see my first bullet point for why it would probably be good to just get that first move under your belt.
I’m not a scientist, so I may be underestimating the possibilities for interesting, fulfilling employment in the sciences without a graduate degree—others can correct me if this is the case. But I think I’ve given some reasons why you might want to consider grad school even if I’m wrong in that respect.
Oops! Somehow I managed to forget to respond to these a year ago!
Thanks for the advice! I’ve taken steps—like exploring my interests in the sciences in an attempt to figure out what specifically do I want to research- and plan to figure out which professors in which colleges are doing that kind of research.
Good science PhD programs ….fund your studies and living expenses.
-Do you know the general requirements to get that kind of funding? I’m certain I’ll need it. I’ve researched it and have found varying and sometimes contradictory information.
Sounds like you have some good, concrete ideas about how to proceed. Contacting professors whose work interests you, to ask about graduate study in their departments and/or labs, is certainly a necessary step.
Throughout academia, we have a rule of thumb: do not ever, ever, spend any of your own money or go into debt for a PhD. That means that any place at which you should give the slightest consideration to doing graduate work should offer you a full waiver of tuition, plus a modest income (“stipend”) and health insurance, for the duration of a reasonable period of study. The rationale for this rule of thumb is twofold: First, the expected financial returns to a PhD simply aren’t such that you can afford to risk having tens of thousands of dollars (or more) of debt to repay. Second, a university’s willingness to spend their money to fully fund you serves as a useful indicator that they think you have real potential for success.
When you correspond with scientists with whom you might want to study, they should be able to tell you roughly how funding works in their departments. It’s not the same at every university or for every student. Possible sources for funding are basically: (1) You working as a researcher in someone’s lab, supported by the university and/or by grants won by the lab’s PI; (2) you working as a teacher or teaching assistant; (3) fellowship support provided by the university (i.e. they just give you money); (4) outside grants or fellowships you win yourself. The normal case for scientists is that your funding mostly comes from (1), but among scientists of my acquaintance there has been a healthy mixture of all four, and nearly all graduate students in science will at some point get funding from more than one of those sources. However, what they should be able to tell you before you even apply is how many years of funding are guaranteed by the university, whether funding is usually available beyond the guaranteed years, and what the typical funding package consists of (as I said earlier, it should at a minimum contain a full tuition waiver, health insurance, and a modest stipend for living expenses suitable to the area you’d be living in).
That’s pretty much all I can tell you about the funding of graduate study in the sciences, since my entire academic life has been spent on the arts and humanities side, which handles graduate funding somewhat differently. The people you should be leaning on for advice are professors at your own undergraduate institution—particularly younger ones, since they will have gone through this more recently—and other knowledgeable scientists. They should be able to separate your academic and scientific potential from your lack of practical know-how and help guide you through the process of application, from identifying places to apply all the way to deciding which of your admission/funding offers to accept, if you get that far. They will have a lot more to tell you than I possibly can about what questions you should be asking of potential grad schools at all stages of the process.
A few other notes:
If you’re noticing conflicting information about how graduate funding works, it’s probably just because different departments handle it differently. When in doubt, refer to the rule of thumb above. It’s ok for departments to achieve full funding of graduate students in different ways, but not ok for them to fund some students but not others, or to admit you without making it clear how funding will work.
You could also be getting conflicting information from people with experience in different branches of science. Psychology, molecular bio, evolutionary bio, experimental physics—to pick a few—all have their own characteristic ways of approaching graduate study, collaboration, funding, etc. So it’s best to get advice from people as near as possible to your own interests.
Some science departments admit graduate students to the overall program and then let them later choose which lab to affiliate with. Others admit you with the up-front understanding that you will be working in a particular lab. Find out how it works at the places you apply to.
When weighing offers of graduate admission, try to get some data on outcomes for students in the program, such as job placement, time to degree, and success at winning grants (especially if grants are relied upon for graduate funding). Also, talk to current students in the program, who can tell you whether the program does well by its students, or alternatively makes life tough for them, e.g. by screwing them out of funding.
A really serious round of graduate applications does cost some money. In your comments you often seem concerned about that. Unfortunately with a total lack of support from your parents you’ll probably need to have a few hundred bucks in reserve for costs associated with applying, and another few hundred bucks for moving to the area where your new school is located. If you aren’t prepared to live off-campus in an apartment, which carries logistical headaches that you seem quite daunted by, all large research universities have on-campus graduate dorms, so you really would not need to do anything except drive there with your personal belongings packed into a car. Anyway, save up a little money.
A lot of these concerns are a ways down the road for you, though. You’ll probably find that getting funding is easier than you might think at graduate programs you really want to get into. The best thing you can do as an undergrad is make yourself an un-ignorable candidate for graduate admission. Study like crazy, get high test scores (super important, don’t let anyone tell you otherwise—this is true even in the humanities), find some ways to take initiative, and if possible form some good relationships with faculty at your college.
Good luck! Do try to get a mentor at your college, it’s a much more reliable source of personalized information than pseudonymous musicologists you met on the internet. There are also books and online forums for people who want to do graduate study in the sciences, although I can’t personally recommend any by name.
If you want to be a professional biologist (or any professional scientist) you will probably need to get one or more graduate degrees. (There are exceptions to this, but your career possibilities will be more limited.) This complicates matters in some respects and simplifies it in others. Let me mostly focus on ways it simplifies matters.
Going to grad school will give you the chance to move someplace for a few years before eventually moving on to yet someplace else. This is great for a few reasons. You get a chance to see what it’s like to move—maybe it won’t be as bad as you think. You defer making a more permanent decision until you’re older and have more experience. You (maybe) get to see another part of the country for some perspective on where you live now. Even if you wind up not liking the place you go very much, it’ll still have been a good experience for these reasons.
If your parents are remotely reasonable, they have to be more ok with you moving away for solid career-related reasons than they would be with you moving away for more nebulous lifestyle-related reasons. (Although from this and your other thread, it sounds like your parents might actually not be remotely reasonable at all.)
However, if you get some admission offers from grad programs, they might pay your travel expenses to go there and check out the programs. Furthermore, most good science PhD programs will fully fund your studies and living expenses, so saving up a bunch of money before moving isn’t really an issue. Having this kind of financial freedom will enable you to defy your parents’ ridiculousness about this. (You won’t be living high on the hog by any means, but you’ll have enough to get by.)
If you can get good advice from your college professors about which grad programs would be a good match for your interests and aptitudes, this will usefully constrict your options and help you overcome the paralysis of choice. While ultimately you may want to be more discriminating about where you move for the long run, see my first bullet point for why it would probably be good to just get that first move under your belt.
I’m not a scientist, so I may be underestimating the possibilities for interesting, fulfilling employment in the sciences without a graduate degree—others can correct me if this is the case. But I think I’ve given some reasons why you might want to consider grad school even if I’m wrong in that respect.
Oops! Somehow I managed to forget to respond to these a year ago!
Thanks for the advice! I’ve taken steps—like exploring my interests in the sciences in an attempt to figure out what specifically do I want to research- and plan to figure out which professors in which colleges are doing that kind of research.
-Do you know the general requirements to get that kind of funding? I’m certain I’ll need it. I’ve researched it and have found varying and sometimes contradictory information.
Sounds like you have some good, concrete ideas about how to proceed. Contacting professors whose work interests you, to ask about graduate study in their departments and/or labs, is certainly a necessary step.
Throughout academia, we have a rule of thumb: do not ever, ever, spend any of your own money or go into debt for a PhD. That means that any place at which you should give the slightest consideration to doing graduate work should offer you a full waiver of tuition, plus a modest income (“stipend”) and health insurance, for the duration of a reasonable period of study. The rationale for this rule of thumb is twofold: First, the expected financial returns to a PhD simply aren’t such that you can afford to risk having tens of thousands of dollars (or more) of debt to repay. Second, a university’s willingness to spend their money to fully fund you serves as a useful indicator that they think you have real potential for success.
When you correspond with scientists with whom you might want to study, they should be able to tell you roughly how funding works in their departments. It’s not the same at every university or for every student. Possible sources for funding are basically: (1) You working as a researcher in someone’s lab, supported by the university and/or by grants won by the lab’s PI; (2) you working as a teacher or teaching assistant; (3) fellowship support provided by the university (i.e. they just give you money); (4) outside grants or fellowships you win yourself. The normal case for scientists is that your funding mostly comes from (1), but among scientists of my acquaintance there has been a healthy mixture of all four, and nearly all graduate students in science will at some point get funding from more than one of those sources. However, what they should be able to tell you before you even apply is how many years of funding are guaranteed by the university, whether funding is usually available beyond the guaranteed years, and what the typical funding package consists of (as I said earlier, it should at a minimum contain a full tuition waiver, health insurance, and a modest stipend for living expenses suitable to the area you’d be living in).
That’s pretty much all I can tell you about the funding of graduate study in the sciences, since my entire academic life has been spent on the arts and humanities side, which handles graduate funding somewhat differently. The people you should be leaning on for advice are professors at your own undergraduate institution—particularly younger ones, since they will have gone through this more recently—and other knowledgeable scientists. They should be able to separate your academic and scientific potential from your lack of practical know-how and help guide you through the process of application, from identifying places to apply all the way to deciding which of your admission/funding offers to accept, if you get that far. They will have a lot more to tell you than I possibly can about what questions you should be asking of potential grad schools at all stages of the process.
A few other notes:
If you’re noticing conflicting information about how graduate funding works, it’s probably just because different departments handle it differently. When in doubt, refer to the rule of thumb above. It’s ok for departments to achieve full funding of graduate students in different ways, but not ok for them to fund some students but not others, or to admit you without making it clear how funding will work.
You could also be getting conflicting information from people with experience in different branches of science. Psychology, molecular bio, evolutionary bio, experimental physics—to pick a few—all have their own characteristic ways of approaching graduate study, collaboration, funding, etc. So it’s best to get advice from people as near as possible to your own interests.
Some science departments admit graduate students to the overall program and then let them later choose which lab to affiliate with. Others admit you with the up-front understanding that you will be working in a particular lab. Find out how it works at the places you apply to.
When weighing offers of graduate admission, try to get some data on outcomes for students in the program, such as job placement, time to degree, and success at winning grants (especially if grants are relied upon for graduate funding). Also, talk to current students in the program, who can tell you whether the program does well by its students, or alternatively makes life tough for them, e.g. by screwing them out of funding.
A really serious round of graduate applications does cost some money. In your comments you often seem concerned about that. Unfortunately with a total lack of support from your parents you’ll probably need to have a few hundred bucks in reserve for costs associated with applying, and another few hundred bucks for moving to the area where your new school is located. If you aren’t prepared to live off-campus in an apartment, which carries logistical headaches that you seem quite daunted by, all large research universities have on-campus graduate dorms, so you really would not need to do anything except drive there with your personal belongings packed into a car. Anyway, save up a little money.
A lot of these concerns are a ways down the road for you, though. You’ll probably find that getting funding is easier than you might think at graduate programs you really want to get into. The best thing you can do as an undergrad is make yourself an un-ignorable candidate for graduate admission. Study like crazy, get high test scores (super important, don’t let anyone tell you otherwise—this is true even in the humanities), find some ways to take initiative, and if possible form some good relationships with faculty at your college.
Good luck! Do try to get a mentor at your college, it’s a much more reliable source of personalized information than pseudonymous musicologists you met on the internet. There are also books and online forums for people who want to do graduate study in the sciences, although I can’t personally recommend any by name.
Thank you! This was well written and very helpful!
My pleasure, glad it seems useful.