Inexperienced students might have the idea that research is hard. What they might not know: once you’ve started, it is even HARDER that you thought before you started.

Let’s examine one reason why students underestimate the difficulty of graduate-level research.

Scientific research papers are presented in a linear manner:

Congratulations, your research has produced a quality result, and your advisor wants you to publish it!  Now it’s time to write the paper… but where do you even start?

If you can read my title, you are into publishing. If not, you are in need of this post. IMHO[1], familiarizing yourself with acronyms from your field is not a bad idea. You want to be calm and confident when you saw an email subject starting with a TOC[5]. In addition, your level of comfortableness to refer to IRBs[2] in your daily conversation may indicate your likelihood of becoming a PI[3] for a grant or a member of KFC[4] some day.

In grad school things are never quite what you expect, and they can change... rapidly.

 Advising

The girl walked in the lab. She had something in her mind, obviously. Her eyes browsed through several colleagues minding only their experiments. Finally her eyes stayed on a person. No one noticed the girl walked in--except him.

"Hey...I think we need to talk," she said.

"Yes?" He answered, looking into her eyes, wondering what her next word would be.

"You know, I have given it a lot of thoughts for the past week..."

"Um..." He listened, with full attention.

It's time to get started in research.

Yes, I mean you, and I mean now.  Because the truth is, whether you're a third year student who just passed your comps, or a first year who has enjoyed all of one month of graduate school so far, research is ultimately going to be the lifeblood of your graduate education (well, at least if you're going for a PhD).  If you're already involved in research here at Iowa, great, but if you're not, this entry is for you.

"Did you get straight A's when you were in graduate school?" I asked a prof.

This is a question drifting in my head since I received my first B on the transcript. I have been telling myself: As long as my faculty also had B's when they were in grad school, there lies hope and I should stop worrying and move on.

At least it was my wishful thinking.

"We don't care about your grades," the prof said, like he had rehearsed the answer to my question many times.

A computer scientist can name more than a dozen algorithms to systematically arrange elements in a list. Sorting, a practice that we've all been doing since we were kids, is in fact quite computationally challenging; as the number of elements grows, the complexity grows exponentially. Introductory computer science classes often discuss sorting algorithms to hint at an array of core algorithm concepts. It was not until I had my first algorithm class that I realized how poor I actually was at sorting things out.

I didn't attend any conferences during my first few years in graduate school so I never thought about where to get funding, however, as I moved into my later years, I joined the Graduate Student Senate (GSS) and learned that travel funding opportunities actually exist. What are these? These are opportunities to apply for funding available to grads to help cover the cost of attending a professional conference if your advisor can not cover this (sometimes very costly) expense. I thought this would be one of the most appropriate topics to blog about first.