Biomedical and Life Sciences Graduate School Guide

I am currently a graduate student in biomedical sciences nearing the end of my PhD training and looking back over my 5+ years I have made a number of mistakes. I've had to deal with a significant amount of misinformation and just plain bad advice. In order to prevent you from going through the same headaches as I've had to deal with I've prepared this article. At least this way you can't say 'no one warned me.' My experiences are in biomedical sciences so it is to those people that this information is targeted, however I do believe that almost any grad student, regardless of where they are in their training, can take something away from my experiences.

Before Applying
Don't fill out any grad school applications until you can produce concrete answers to the following questions. Going to grad school because you aren't sure what you really want to do is a bad idea. So is going to grad school in the hopes that you can delay your entry into the real world. Going to grad school without being aware of the rest of your options is, you guessed it, a bad idea. Grad school is a long and painful journey so you better have some idea why you're doing it. Now, onto the questions.

• Why do you want to go? Fundamentally, this may be the single most important question here. Grad school is a huge time commitment (5+ years normally, 4 years at the minimum), so you'd better have a good idea why you want to go. Think about it. Think real hard about it, then proceed in reading the rest of this article. Its OK, I'll wait for you.

• What do you want to do when you finish grad school? This question is almost as important as the last. Hopefully, as you were considering the answer to the previous question, you answered this one as well. If not, now is the time to figure out what you want to do once you've gotten your nice shiny PhD. Don't wait until you're almost finished with your PhD to start considering your career options.