Mentoring on Monday...

...wherein we talk about that most peculiar species, the student.  The topic for a while is going to be grad school.  The specific topic for today will be, finding one.

Quite simply, if you want to be a practicing biologist in this day and age, you will almost certainly need to go to grad school.  There are exceptions - I know some very good, very successful biologists who stopped at the baccalaureate level.  They're few and far between and, almost without fail, they've only been able to actually DO biology after years of grunt-work.  It's just too competitive out there for a student to have any realistic expectation of finding a job in the field without a Masters or Ph.D.

So, let's start with the premise that you've decided you want to go to graduate school in biology.  What strategy will allow you to be successful?  While, admittedly, there's sometimes a lot of luck involved, I think the following protocol will stand you in good stead.

Start early.  Once you've made the decision that you want to be a biologist, begin to narrow down your options.  What is it about biology that fascinates you?  Read, watch videos, talk to your professors.  How do you want to spend your days when the preparation is finished?  What do you want to be when you grow up?  Describe the adult, hard-working you, and describe him/her fully.

Once you've identified the biologist you want to be, find others that are actually doing that now.  This is an important part of the process, and may have a lot to do with where you spend the next few years.  So, put some effort into it.  For example, let's say I've decided that I want to work with the ecology of squid (a particularly sexy choice).  How do I build an opportunity to pursue this in graduate school.  That's going to involve a little searching, and there are a couple of strategies.  The best, and most direct, is to find researchers that are actually doing what you want to do.  Get into the literature and see who's publishing in that area.  I like to use Google Scholar, and do an "Advanced Scholar Search".  This allows you to create a finely tuned search for particular topics with delimiting variables.  For example, I might enter into the search window "cephalopod ecology", and I might limit the search to papers published between 2008 and 2011.  When I conduct this search, I get a return of some 3,700 papers, sorted by how well they match my search.  I'm typically able to read the abstract for any of them, and (on our campus at least) the full-text of those to which our University library has a subscription  I find, for example, an article in Reviews in Fish Biology and Fisheries written by Gretta Pecl and George Jackson examining potential climate change effects on inshore squid species.  Unfortunately, when I examine the paper, I find that Drs. Pecl and Jackson are both at the University of Tasmania - probably not an ideal option for our typical Small Southern student.  However, a little further down the page, I find a 2008 Ecology paper by Rui Rosa, Heidi Dierssen, Liliana Gonzalez, and Brad Seibel looking at diversity patterns of cephalopods in the Atlantic.  On inspection, I find that Dr. Dierssen is in the Department of Marine Science at the University of Connecticut while Dr. Seibel in the Biology Department at the University of Rhode Island.  A quick check of web pages reveals to me that Dr. Seibel is an associate professor whose lab specializes on the physiology of animals in extreme environments, while Dr. Dierssen is an assistant professor at Connecticut where she heads up the Coastal Ocean Laboratory for Optics and Remote Sensing.  She also has an interest in biogeographical distributions of marine organisms, which is probably her interest in the cephalopod work.  So, I now have the names, addresses, and email contacts for two people who are actually involved in research in the area that interests me.  The ball is rolling.

I should say that, for many students, there are geographic or financial limitations on where they can go to grad school.  If that's the case, you may need to define your interest in more general terms.  Let's say, "ecology of marine invertebrates."  Now, go to the departmental pages for the schools in your state/region.  Look at the faculty interests, and find out who matches best with you.  The fit may not be as perfect, but at least you can find someone near you who's doing work that is potentially interesting.

Next Tuesday - making contact.