1.Actively seek out information about PHD programme

Depending on your undergraduate institution,
there may be more or less support to guide you
in selecting a PhD program – but there is
generally much less than when you applied to
college.
On the website of my physics department, I
found a page written by one of my professors,
which listed graduate school options in physics
and engineering along with resources to consult.
As far as I know, my career center did not send
out much information about PhD programs. Only
after applying to programs did I find out that my
undergraduate website had a link providing
general information applicable to most PhD
programs. This is the kind of information that is
available all over the Internet.
So don't wait for your career center or
department to lay out a plan for you. Actively
seek it out from your career center counselors,
your professors, the Internet — and especially
from alumni from your department who are in or
graduated from your desired PhD program. First-
hand experiences will almost always trump the
knowledge you get second-hand.

2. A PhD program is not simply a continuation
of your undergraduate program.
Many students don't internalize this idea until
they have jumped head-first into a PhD program.
The goal is not to complete an assigned set of
courses as in an undergraduate program, but to
develop significant and original research in your
area of expertise. You will have required courses
to take, especially if you do not have a master's
degree yet, but these are designed merely to
compliment your research and provide a broad
and deep knowledge base to support you in your
research endeavors.
At the end of your PhD program, you will be
judged on your research, not on how well you
did in your courses. Grades are not critical as
long as you maintain the minimum GPA
requirement, and you should not spend too
much time on courses at the expense of research
projects. Graduate courses tend to be designed
to allow you to take away what you will find
useful to your research more than to drill a rigid
set of facts and techniques into your brain.

3. Take a break between your undergraduate
education and a PhD program.
You are beginning your senior year of college,
and your classmates are asking you if you are
applying to graduate school. You think to
yourself, "Well, I like studying this topic and the
associated research, and I am going to need a
PhD if I want to be a professor or do
independent research, so I might as well get it
done as soon as possible." But are you certain
about the type of research you want to do? Do
you know where you want to live for the next
five years? Are you prepared to stay in an
academic environment for nine years straight?
Many people burn out or end up trudging
through their PhD program without a thought
about what lies outside of or beyond it. A break
of a year or two or even more may be necessary
to gain perspective. If all you know is an
academic environment, how can you compare it
to anything else? Many people take a job for five
or more years before going back to get their PhD.
It is true though that the longer you stay out of
school, the harder it is to go back to an
academic environment with lower pay and a lack
of set work hours. A one-year break will give you
six months or so after graduation before PhD
applications are due. A two-year gap might be
ideal to provide time to identify your priorities in
life and explore different areas of research
without having school work or a thesis competing
for your attention.
Getting research experience outside of a degree
program can help focus your interests and give
you a leg up on the competition when you
finally decide to apply. It can also help you
determine whether you will enjoy full-time
research or if you might prefer an alternative
career path that still incorporates science, for
example, in policy, consulting or business — or a
hybrid research job that combines scientific and
non-scientific skills.
I will be forever grateful that I chose to do
research in a non-academic environment for a
year between my undergraduate and PhD
programs. It gave me the chance to get a feel for
doing nothing but research for a full year.
Working at the Johns Hopkins University Applied
Physics Laboratory in the Space Division, I was
the manager of an optics lab, performing
spectroscopic experiments on rocks and minerals
placed in a vacuum chamber. While my boss
determined the overall experimental design, I
was able to make my own suggestions for
experiments and use my own discretion in how
to perform them. I presented this research at
two national conferences as well — a first for
me. I was also able to learn about other
research being performed there, determine
which projects excited me the most, and thus
narrow down my criteria for a PhD program.

4. Your current area of study does not dictate
what you have to study in graduate school.
You might be studying the function and
regulation of membrane proteins or doing a
computational analysis of the conductivity of
different battery designs, but that doesn't mean
your PhD project must revolve around similar
projects. The transition between college or
another research job to a PhD program is one of
the main transitions in your life when it is
perfectly acceptable to completely change
research areas.
If you are doing computation, you may want to
switch to lab-based work or vice versa. If you are
working in biology but have always had an
interest in photonics research, now is the time
to try it out. You may find that you love the
alternative research and devote your PhD to it,
you might hate it and fall back on your previous
area of study — or you may even discover a
unique topic that incorporates both subjects.
One of the best aspects of the PhD program is
that you can make the research your own.
Remember, the answer to the question "Why are
you doing this research?" should not be "Well,
because it's what I've been working on for the
past few years already."While my undergraduate
research was in atomic physics, I easily
transitioned into applied physics and materials
science for my PhD program and was able to
apply much of what I learned as an
undergraduate to my current research. If you are
moving from the sciences to a non-scientific field
such as social sciences or humanities, this advice
can still apply, though the transition is a bit
more difficult and more of a permanent
commitment.

5. Make sure the PhD program has a variety of
research options, and learn about as many
research groups as possible in your first year.
Even if you believe you are committed to one
research area, you may find that five years of
such work is not quite what you expected. As
such, you should find a PhD program where the
professors are not all working in the same
narrowly focused research area. Make sure there
are at least three professors working on an array
of topics you could imagine yourself working on.
In many graduate programs, you are supposed to
pick a research advisor before even starting. But
such arrangements often do not work out, and
you may be seeking a new advisor before you
know it. That's why many programs give students
one or two semesters to explore different
research areas before choosing a permanent
research advisor.
In your first year, you should explore the
research of a diverse set of groups. After touring
their labs, talking to the students, or sitting in
on group meetings, you may find that this group
is the right one for you.
In addition, consider the importance of who your
research advisor will be. This will be the person
you interact with regularly for five straight years
and who will have a crucial influence on your
research. Do you like their advising style? Does
their personality mesh with yours? Can you get
along? Of course, the research your advisor works
on is critical, but if you have large
disagreements at every meeting or do not get
helpful advice on how to proceed with your
research, you may not be able to succeed. At the
very least, you must be able to handle your
advisor's management of the lab and advising
style if you are going to be productive in your
work.
The Harvard program I enrolled in has professors
working on research spanning from
nanophotonics to energy materials and
biophysics, covering my wide range of interests.
By spending time in labs and offices informally
chatting with graduate students, I found an
advisor whose personality and research interests
meshed very well with me. Their genuine
enthusiasm for this advisor and their excitement
when talking about their research was the best
input I could have received.

6. Location is more important than you think
— but name recognition is not.
The first consideration in choosing a PhD
program should be, "Is there research at this
university that I am passionate about?" After all,
you will have to study this topic in detail for four
or more years. But when considering the
location of a university, your first thought should
not be, "I'm going to be in the lab all the time,
so what does it matter if I'm by the beach, in a
city, or in the middle of nowhere."
Contrary to popular belief, you will have a life
outside of the lab, and you will have to be able
to live with it for four or more years. Unlike
when you were an undergraduate, your social
and extracurricular life will revolve less around
the university community, so the environment of
the surrounding area is important. Do you need
a city atmosphere to be productive? Or is your
ideal location surrounded by forests and
mountains or by a beach? Is being close to your
family important? Imagine what it will be like
living in the area during the times you are not
doing research; consider what activities will you
do and how often will you want to visit family.
While many of the PhD programs that accepted
me had research that truly excited me, the only
place I could envision living for five or more
years was Boston, as the city I grew up near and
whose environment and culture I love, and to be
close to my family.
While location is more important than you think,
the reputation and prestige of the university is
not. In graduate school, the reputation of the
individual department you are joining — and
sometimes even the specific research group you
work in — are more important. There, you will
develop research collaborations and professional
connections that will be crucial during your
program and beyond. When searching for a job
after graduation, other scientists will look at your
specific department, the people you have worked
with and the research you have done.

7. Those time management skills you
developed in college? Develop them further.
After surviving college, you may think you have
mastered the ability to squeeze in your
coursework, extracurricular activities and even
some sleep. In a PhD program, time
management reaches a whole new level. You will
not only have lectures to attend and homework
to do. You will have to make time for your
research, which will include spending extended
periods of time in the lab, analyzing data, and
scheduling time with other students to
collaborate on research.
Also, you will most likely have to teach for a
number of semesters, and you will want to
attend any seminar that may be related to your
research or that just peaks your interest. To top
it all off, you will still want to do many of those
extracurricular activities you did as an
undergraduate. While in the abstract, it may
seem simple enough to put this all into your
calendar and stay organized, you will find
quickly enough that the one hour you scheduled
for a task might take two or three hours, putting
you behind on everything else for the rest of the
day or forcing you to cut other planned events.
Be prepared for schedules to go awry, and be
willing to sacrifice certain activities. For some,
this might be sleep; for others, it might be an
extracurricular activity or a few seminars they
were hoping to attend. In short, don't panic
when things don't go according to plan;
anticipate possible delays and be ready to
adapt.

8. Expect to learn research skills on the fly –
or take advantage of the training your
department or career center offers.
This may be the first time you will have to write
fellowship or grant proposals, write scientific
papers, attend conferences, present your
research to others, or even peer-review scientific
manuscripts. From my experience, very few
college students or even PhD students receive
formal training on how to perform any of these
tasks. Usually people follow by example. But this
is not always easy and can be quite aggravating
sometimes. So seek out talks or interactive
programs offered by your department or career
center. The effort will be well worth it when you
realize you've become quite adept at quickly and
clearly explaining your research to others and at
outlining scientific papers and grant proposals.
Alternatively, ask a more experienced graduate
student or your advisor for advice on these
topics. In addition, be prepared for a learning
curve when learning all the procedures and
processes of the group you end up working in.
There may be many new protocols to master,
whether they involve synthesizing chemicals,
growing bacterial cells, or aligning mirrors on an
optical table. In addition, the group may use
programming languages or data analysis software
you are unfamiliar with.
Don't get discouraged but plan to spend extra
effort getting used to these procedures and
systems. After working with them regularly, they
will soon become second nature. When I first
started my job at Johns Hopkins, I felt
overwhelmed by all the intricacies of the
experiment and definitely made a few mistakes,
including breaking a number of optical elements.
But by the end of my year there, I had written
an updated protocol manual for the
modifications I had made to the experimental
procedures and was the "master" passing on my
knowledge to the next person taking the job.

9. There are no real breaks.
In a stereotypical "9-to-5" job, when the workday
is over or the weekend arrives, you can generally
forget about your work. And a vacation provides
an even longer respite. But in a PhD program,
your schedule becomes "whenever you find time
to get your work done." You might be in the lab
during regular work hours or you might be
working until 10 p.m. or later to finish an
experiment. And the only time you might have
available to analyze data might be at 1 a.m.
Expect to work during part of the weekend, too.
Graduate students do go on vacations but might
still have to do some data analysis or a literature
search while away.
As a PhD student, it might be hard to stop
thinking about the next step in an experiment or
that data sitting on your computer or that paper
you were meaning to start. While I imagine some
students can bifurcate their mind between
graduate school life and everything else, that's
quite hard for many of us to do. No matter what,
my research lies somewhere in the back of my
head. In short, your schedule is much more
flexible as a PhD student, but as a result, you
never truly take a break from your work.
While this may seem like a downer, remember
that you should have passion for the research
you work on (most of the time), so you should be
excited to think up new experiments or different
ways to consider that data you have collected.
Even when I'm lying in bed about to fall asleep,
I am sometimes ruminating about aspects of my
experiment I could modify or what information I
could do a literature search on to gain new
insights. A PhD program is quite the
commitment and rarely lives up to expectations –
but it is well worth the time and effort you will
spend for something that truly excites you.

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