TRANSCRIPT
“It's a great career as long as you want to do it. But it's a tough career, it's hard work and it requires a lot of commitment and it's not particularly well paid, and it has quite an unstable career structure. So don't get into it unless you're really obsessed and you really want to do it; if you're really enthusiastic that would be my advice. So we do see students who have been through university and who kind of like being in Cambridge who think it would be cool to stay here and do a Ph.D. That's not the right way to approach it. You're starting into a highly competitive, quite tough career, and you're going to have to struggle at some point to make it to the top. So unless you're prepared to do that, don't try. But if you're that sort of person, if you really, really want to do science, if you really enjoy it if you really are prepared to put in the effort then it's a wonderful career and you'll make it and you'll have a wonderful time.”
-James Fawcett, Ph.D., M.D.
Head of Department and Professor of Clinical Neuroscience, University of Cambridge
“If you're not enthusiastic and you're not interested, forget it. It's not a job. It's something you do because you love it. And you've got to be enthusiastic because there are going to be hard times and you will need that to help drive you on. A passion, you've got to have a passion for it. And without that you've had it.”
-Sir Michael Berridge, Ph.D.
Emeritus Fellow of Cell Signaling, Babraham Institute
“I would do it. It's never going to be easy but it's never going to be easy in any profession. You know, you talk to people who go off and do law or medicine and they are working their tails off as well. But there is a freedom that you get with it that you don't get with most other disciplines; you can decide within certain constraints what it is you are going to work on, what it is you find interesting.”
-Colin Taylor, Ph.D.
Professor of Pharmacology, University of Cambridge
“The difficult thing is finding out what you want to do, and finding something original to do. As I said, try to find some big problem out there that you would like to solve. And it might be a pragmatic problem, it might be a problem like solving breast cancer or it might be a more theoretical problem like how do you deduce from genomic sequencing something of interest for a particular general purpose, things like that. You need to know what you're going to do.
And then having made that decision about what you'd like to work on, then you need to look at the publications of people working in that area and try to find somebody who looks good who you think you could work with, who's got a small group, and that you'd like to be a part of and then approach them directly. I think students often think that everybody they've heard of has millions of applications but if they do have lots many of them are unfocused; they don't actually mention or understand why they're writing to you and so they wouldn't say, "I've read your paper and I think this and this and this is interesting and what do you think of that?" They wouldn't engage in intellectual discourse with their mentor and I think it's a very good strategy to do that.”
-Peter Lawrence, Ph.D.
Professor of Zoology, University of Cambridge
“I get loads of emails. The great thing about being at Cambridge is you get lots of people who want to come here. You can pretty much tell from the first email. How generic is it, have they worked out how their interests and their past experience fit with the lab and with what you're excited by, and if they push some buttons in terms of things you're excited by at the moment and they've picked up on that just from reading your papers and clearly thought about the problem. You can tell a lot by that first email. It doesn't have to be long but if it's somebody who's clearly engaged with the things they've read that you've written recently then that shines through.”
-Chris Jiggins, Ph.D.
Professor of Evolutionary Biology, University of Cambridge
“Well we look for someone who's done well academically. We look carefully at the CV. Obviously we do want someone who's been able to score good marks throughout their school and through their university career. We like them to have done a good research project and to be able to talk about it, and obviously to be engaged in it, to see its significance. It may be a small project but they ought to have read around it and understand where it sits in the larger field. We want people who are engaged and interested. We don't want people who mope around the lab not being interested in what they're doing. We want people who are excited by it and want to do it. And have quite a lot of independence.”
-James Fawcett, Ph.D., M.D.
Head of Department and Professor of Clinical Neuroscience, University of Cambridge
“The passion has to be genuine interest and a genuine curiosity about what to do, the values have to be right. They should be critical, but not overly critical. You can't take everything at face value; just because something is published in Nature doesn't make it true (often it's kind of the opposite). Just being open minded as well, and willing to put the work in; you have to work hard, you have to be interested in working hard, or think hard. You could be extremely clever and then just do a few experiments, that would be great, but most of us just aren't like that.”
-Brian Hendrich, Ph.D.
Principle Investigator, Department of Biochemistry, University of Cambridge