Graaad school

[quartzpebble]

I am in the middle of considering what I actually want to be doing for the next N years, and gah. I am afraid that my choices are pretty much (a) do interesting work and work my ass off, no really, and (b) do more physical and less chemical science, which ime is not as enjoyable, and maybe have more reasonable work hours. I don't know how to set

Comments

[zixi]

Wow. I really have never had a grad advisor who was so specific about working hours/days/vacations.

I wish I had something more useful to say than "good luck!"

[quartzpebble]

Good to know! It sounds like he has an idea about what he wants out of students and would rather that they know it specifically. On the one hand, I'll take clear over passive aggressive any day. On the other, Steph commented that this sounds like crunch time for game development, all the time. I plan to talk with students.

[zixi]

Well, I haven't had an advisor like that - but I've tended to have more hands-off advisors where so long as you do the work and are at the meetings you are supposed to attend, they don't really care what your exact hours are (I mean, if they never ever see you it becomes a problem...)

And, yeah, clear expectations are very good.

I think most of the time I've heard of advisors with very strict time-in-lab ideas, they've been in organic chemistry, for what it's worth.

[quartzpebble]

Argh, why do I like o-chem so much? This is why I didn't apply to work in a synthetic lab from the start, because organic chemists are generally neither about the work environment nor the people skills!

[zwilichkl]

I don't have anything useful to say (other than I think it's a good sign that the other prof is upfront about his expectations, and you should talk to the other students to figure out if those are really his expectations or just what he thinks they are). The un-useful thing I have to say is that I read "physics-inflected" as "physics-infected." You know that physics. Always infecting things.