TRANSCRIPT
“I think the important thing in particular today is a mentor. I think many people confuse (because they want to follow a career, and that's particularly true of the States, and they think that career should be successful) short-term success with long-term success. I think long-term success comes with the ability to learn to do science, and that cannot be achieved in the short-term.
In a way, a Ph.D. is a bit like an apprenticeship. A friend of mine here in the department, when he addresses the graduate students, always reminds them of that. In an apprenticeship you don't have to produce things, you just have to learn to do things. What you have to look for is someone that can actually teach you, not somebody that is going to ask you, demand of you, a final product.
That's not easy. I think the American system has a good thing that I think is being borrowed here now in the UK, which is a system of rotations, because it does allow you to explore different environments. But I think you have to have a sixth sense that allows you to sense whether the place is a caring one. And I don't mean caring in the personal sense, I mean caring in the intellectual sense. I think if you're a growing scientist you want a place that nurtures that curiosity that we were talking about before. And a place that really allows you to develop as what you want. I think many people what they seek is the short-term, which is that kind of stardom.”
-Alfonso Martinez Arias, Ph.D.
Professor of Genetics, University of Cambridge
“Talk to the people in the lab, not only to the PI, and ask them if they are happy in the lab. Supervising graduates is something I learned recently... I mean I'm very happy with my graduate students, they are really great students, but they are all different, so you really have to supervise every graduate student differently: some need more freedom, some need close guidance.
The lab shouldn't be too big I guess for a graduate student. That would be my recommendation. If you go to a lab with forty post-docs it's unlikely that you will meet your supervisor more than twice a year. I think he might not even know your name by the end of the first year. Smaller groups for graduate students I think work better because, especially in the first year, you need pretty close supervision, or at least somebody you can really go to when you have a problem, when you encounter some problems, technical problems, personal problems, whatever. There are lots of problems facing you as a graduate student. But otherwise, I think the two things are key: that you get some freedom but you also get help when you need it.”
-Kristian Franze, Ph.D.
Principle Investigator, Department of Physiology, Development, and Neuroscience, University of Cambridge
“You need to be very supportive, but critical at the same time, I think. And that can be hard. If you see somebody who is so enthusiastic about something, and think, “Oh boy, I bet that's an artifact... did you do the control”… kind of thing, and then they do the control, like say they raised an antibody and it looks fantastic and you say, “Yeah but here's a cell that doesn't have that protein. If you still see the same wavelength pattern then it's got to be an artifact.” And maybe it is an artifact, and that's hard, but I think you have to do that as the mentor: be the one that suggests the controls that might take this wonderful result and show the student that it's actually not what it seemed to be. But on the other hand I think the student still deserves lots of praise for having produced the wonderful result in the first place. And maybe, maybe it is real, and that's great too. So, I think the combination of being supportive and being critical is probably what you need.”
-Margaret Scott Robinson, Ph.D.
Professor of Molecular Cell Biology, University of Cambridge
“What you need is a lab where the topic fits your interests, but where you feel that you have a little bit of leeway to explore. I think as a graduate student that's the most important thing. You are learning to work through the experiment of the Ph.D., but you are also exploring your curiosity. Slowly, later in life, the choices and the avenues are going to become very narrow. It's the only time in your life that you have to have fun. I'm absolutely convinced of that, that's what I tell the students here always.”
-Alfonso Martinez Arias, Ph.D.
Professor of Genetics, University of Cambridge
“You should have a lot of freedom. In my opinion, and I've built this up over a long time of teaching students and post-docs, they should be given as much freedom as they can take. For example, they should be given, in my opinion, as I was when I was a student, complete freedom to choose my own project, to do as I like, in an environment in which advice and help would be offered not only by the people in your own group, but by other people. And that you should go out and seek advice from wherever you'll get it. And that's the way to built an independent competence, and career.
It's very much against the current fashion, which is that you go to a big posh group, which seems to be very successful, and you go up and say to your mentor, tell me what to do, and basically quite often, tell me what to find. And that's not research. If you know what you're going to find it's not research.”
-Peter Lawrence, Ph.D.
Professor of Zoology, University of Cambridge
“One thing is to what extent you've got a certain degree of freedom in terms of control over your project. For me that would be the most important aspect: that you're not just told day to day roughly what you're to be... you're not going to be a slave. You want to be somebody who is actually running your project, having an input into the experimentation. So that, as far as I can see, would be a very important aspect.
Of course you want to make sure the place is properly funded now a days. And my feeling is you don't want to join a group that's too big. I think sometimes then your access to the senior persons is going to be limited, he's always going to be busy, whereas smaller groups are probably more manageable. And you're going to have more interactions and contacts. That would be my guiding principle really.”
-Sir Michael Berridge, Ph.D.
Emeritus Fellow of Cell Signaling, Babraham Institute
“Obviously work that's exciting to you, but also really high standards. I think a lot of people are so desperate to publish a good story that they'll sweep inconvenient results under the carpet. I think scientific fraud as such is, I hope, quite rare, but I think it's not uncommon to take the inconvenient results and say, let's ignore these because they don't support our story. Having said that, apparently Francis Crick, who left the LMB before I went there, always said that you can ignore one piece of data; if you have a story where like twelve pieces of data support it, and one that doesn't, then you can ignore the one, but if you've got a story with three pieces of data that support it and seven that don't, then you're just asking for trouble. And I'm afraid that there are labs where this kind of thing sometimes happens. Sometimes the most exciting papers turn out to be based on something that's not reproducible. So I think, if you can, try to find out about the high standards of the lab. And I think if people talk about their work... if they're too kind of, hyping it, I get suspicious. I think it's good if they inject notes of caution occasionally.”
-Margaret Scott Robinson, Ph.D.
Professor of Molecular Cell Biology, University of Cambridge
“I certainly would avoid completely labs where you can see that what people want is just to get the result: the highly competitive labs. I'm not sure that they are very good for the development of a person as a scientist.”
-Alfonso Martinez Arias, Ph.D.
Professor of Genetics, University of Cambridge
“Some people have five completely different projects going on in their lab; I don't know how they manage, but some of them do. They just have incredible brains that can deal with five totally different things at once. I can't. I sort of deal with one thing, but you can expand that one thing a bit, but not maybe something way over there, interesting though it might be if you had another life you could work on that too.”
-Margaret Scott Robinson, Ph.D.
Professor of Molecular Cell Biology, University of Cambridge
“Some people run a really tight ship in their lab. They know what they're interested in and if you want to come to that lab that's what you have to do. Everybody works on the same thing, different aspects of the same thing, and there's lots of synergy between different projects and it's very efficient.
I'm a disaster. I've always been... I'm interested in the evolution of developmental mechanisms, the evolution of pattern formation, how pattern formation works in a slightly theoretical sense, but if somebody comes to me and says, “I'm really interested in the first abdominal appendages of insects”, they can all too easily persuade me that that's a really interesting problem and I would like to have somebody in my lab studying it. I've got a little bit better at saying no to people who want to work on something quite different from what the lab works on, like Acoel Flatworms or something (we have dabbled in Acoel Flatworms, but we don't do it any more).
I've had a series of people who've come to me with their own interesting things, which relate to what I'm interested in, but they develop those projects. It's really interesting for me. I learn a huge amount. But it makes the lab less efficient, and sometimes more difficult to make it coherent, more difficult for people to feel they're working on the same problem. But I think the result is that there's a lot of people who've come through my lab and have gone off to start their own discipline or subfield or whatever, and I feel I gave them the opportunity to get the foot on the ladder.”
-Michael Acam, Ph.D.
Head of Department and Professor of Zoology, University of Cambridge
“Just because the lab publishes in Cell is not a good reason to choose a lab. I think you want a lab where the students really are looked after, which I think tends to be not the hugest labs; although, some huge labs, if they've got really excellent post-docs, can do well with students, but I think you end up not really seeing the PI that much. You see the post-doc, and that does depend on the quality of the post-doc, which is maybe not why you chose that lab in the first place.
I think the other thing is, in terms of publications as a student... you say, well look, this lab has got all these papers in fancy journals, but then if you divide it by the number of people there, you realize that some people aren't publishing anything; there are some that are publishing in lots of places, other that are publishing nowhere.”
-Margaret Scott Robinson, Ph.D.
Professor of Molecular Cell Biology, University of Cambridge
“You need to read papers and say... don't just say who's publishing in nature every week... say who's asking interesting questions. When you read a paper do you think, "Wow, that was really cool, I love how he or she did that," then that's the kind of person you want to train you. They are going to impart on you some joy of science and some curiosity and the power to ask the right question that's going to see you far.”
-Brian Hendrich, Ph.D.
Principle Investigator, Department of Biochemistry, University of Cambridge