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Three Ways that Faculty Life is Similar to Graduate Student Life

 In last week's post, I described seven ways that my experience as a faculty member is different from when I was a graduate student.  While the two are different in various ways, they are also similar in a few. Thus, I present three ways that my current professional life as a faculty member is similar to my previous professional life as a graduate student. 1. Both require hard work, grit, tenacity, and resilience. Graduate school required a lot of hard work; no surprises there!  There were courses to take, research rotations to complete, classes to TA, research projects to work on, comprehensive exams to pass, and the thesis/dissertation projects to propose, execute, and defend.  Anyone who has been through graduate school knows that successful completion of any one of these items requires hard work, grit, and tenacity.  It takes time and dedication to learn the content knowledge from the didactic years of graduate school, so that that it can be applied to the m...
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Seven Ways that Faculty Life Differs from Graduate Student Life

 A few months ago, I gave a virtual presentation to a group of fellow scientists about my journey into academia.  Since most of the folks attending my presentation were graduate students with a few of them contemplating careers in academia, I decided to include a few slides about how faculty life differs from graduate student life, at least from my own experience.  Thus, I present seven ways that my current professional life as a faculty member is different than my previous professional life as a graduate student. 1. Increased salary and benefits as a faculty member. This is probably the most obvious difference between a full-time academic faculty job and graduate student status.  I do not pull in a six-figure salary, but I do have a solid income with benefits like health insurance.  For that, I am thankful.  In the spirit of fully disclosure though, I will say that I did receive a merit fellowship, stipend, and benefits as a graduate student, as did my hus...
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How my Graduate School Experience Prepared Me for a Career in Academia

 In my last post, I described the five major reasons why I chose to pursue a career in academia.  I knew that I wanted to pursue this career path when I entered graduate school, and fortunately, my graduate program was structured with the goal of producing well-rounded graduates who would be competitive in the academic job market.  Graduate school was rigorous and challenging, and while it wasn't always pleasant, it has shaped me into the academic professional that I am today.  Below, I describe six major ways that my graduate school experience gave me solid preparation for a career in academia.   1.  Teaching experience Part of my graduate student stipend came from working as a TA, and all of us graduate students were required to accumulate a certain number of teaching experiences before we graduated.  Since I realized early in my PhD experience that I wanted to pursue a career in academia where teaching was the primary focus, I strove to get as ...
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Five Reasons Why I Chose to Pursue a Career in Academia

  When I entered graduate school in the Fall of 2006, I knew that I wanted to earn my masters and PhD degrees and then pursue a career as an academic faculty member.   Over the course of the 6.5 years that I was in graduate school (2 years to complete my masters degree and 4.5 years to complete my PhD), my goals and ambitions for what type of faculty position I wanted to pursue evolved and changed.   By the time I started the PhD phase of graduate school, I had decided that I wanted to pursue a faculty position where teaching was the primary focus.   After I graduated with my PhD in 2012, I spent about 2.5 years teaching as an adjunct faculty member, during which time I gained invaluable experience teaching a wide array of courses in the Exercise Sciences (my area of expertise).   In 2015, my professional goal became as reality when I earned a tenure track faculty position at Elon University, a mid-sized liberal arts university in Elon, NC.   Even better, m...
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How I experienced the Five Stages of Grief while completing my PhD Dissertation

When I was nearing the end of my dissertation data collection in April of 2012, I felt like I had been running a marathon that just wouldn’t end.  To add a layer of complexity to the situation, I was also 9 months pregnant with my second daughter and my older daughter was just shy of 3 years old.   Needless to say, home life and PhD life were something else indeed!   But getting back to the marathon analogy, I remember that my dissertation experience, particularly the data collection phase, left me feeling like I was constantly hitting “the wall.”   There came the point where I knew I had just a few more subjects from whom to collect data, but I was so mentally, physically, intellectually, and emotionally tired.   My dissertation data collection was very time intensive, both with regard to the time it took to collect data from the subjects themselves, but also the time I had to spend afterwards processing blood samples, running biomarker assays, and analyzing th...
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Picking your Graduate School Mentor Wisely

The contents of this post come from an earlier post that I wrote in 2012 for another blog, shortly after I completed my PhD.  However, I believe this content is still relevant today. My former lab director from my graduate school days used to say that the 3 most important rules of graduate school are to, "Pick your advisor well; Pick your advisor well; Pick your advisor well."  Nowadays, I would add a few more rules to this list.  However, I agree with him that picking your advisor well is rather crucial.  After all, this is the person that you will be working for and working with for the next several years of your life.  Your interactions within them will likely leave a lasting impression on you.  They will likely shape who you become as a professional, both in terms of the type of professional environment you gravitate towards after you finish your degree, as well as your ideas of what constitutes healthy professionalism and mentorship. I am now at the po...
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