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Showing posts from April, 2021

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...

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...